Our Team - geograph

MAPA Team

Serhii Plokhii is Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, and Faculty Director for the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine program. He teaches courses and seminars on early modern and modern East European history that engage major problems in the history of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania. His research interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author of The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story (2016); The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), and most recently, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (New York, 2017).

Kostyantyn Bondarenko is IT Professional at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and Project Manager for the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine program. Since 2001, he has worked at the Institute to improve and expand its IT services by designing and developing websites, databases, and creating GIS maps and web applications. As the Project Manager for the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine program, Kostyantyn manages all technical and organizational aspects of the MAPA. He has worked on all modules of the MAPA program, presented MAPA projects at several conferences and is currently working on joint GIS projects between the Ukrainian Research Institute and its partners in the US and abroad.

Viktoriya Sereda is a GIS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (2016-2017). Her research focuses on urban sociology, memory studies, nationalism and identity studies. Viktoriya Sereda received her PhD in Sociology at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2006, and MSc by Research in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in 2001. Since 2015 she is an associate professor of sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Recently she co-organized and participated in sociological research projects "Region, nation, and beyond. An Interdisciplinary and transcultural reconceptualization of Ukraine", “Displaced cultural spaces: current Ukrainian refugees” (both based at the University of St.Gallen), and “Present Ukrainian refugees: main reasons, strategies of resettlement, difficulties of adaptation.” She is an author of a number of articles published in Ukrainian, Austrian, German, Hungarian, Polish and Russian academic journals. Her forthcoming publications include: “Shifts in national, regional and local memories and identities in post-Euromaidan Ukraine,” in Nationalities Papers (coming in 2017); “Ukrainian Past and Present: Legacies, Memory and Attitudes” (co-authored with A.Liebich and O.Myshlovska), in Ulrich Schmid, ed. Unity in Diversity: Region and Nation in Ukraine (Budapest: CEU Press, coming in 2017).

Associates

Nadiya V. Kravets was a GIS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (2013-2016) and a Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (2012-2016). Her research focuses on the politics of Ukraine and other post-soviet republics and on global energy politics. Forthcoming publications include: “The Politics of Sovereignty in Post-Imperial Ukraine-Russia Relations,” Journal of Law and Public Policy, 9 (1), 2015; Kravets, N., and Skalamera, M. “The Russian Federation’s Energy Influence and Diplomacy in the Caucasus and Central Asia,” in: P. Farah, ed. World Scientific Reference on Globalization in Eurasia and the Pacific Rim: Energy (Imperial College Press, 2015). She received her B.A. in International Relations at San Francisco State University in 2005, an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford in 2007, and a DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford (Department of Politics and International Relations, St. Antony’s College) in 2012.

Nataliia Levchuk is a Senior Researcher at the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She received her PhD in Demography from the Institute of Economics and the Institute of Demography and Social Studies. During 2008-2010 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Max Planck Research School for Demography in Rostock, Germany and in 2012-2013 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, working on The Great Famine project. Her forthcoming publications include: Rudnytskyi, O., Levchuk, N., Wolowyna, O., Shevchuk, P. and A. Kovbasuik, “Demography of a Man-made Human Catastrophe: the Case of Massive Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933,” Canadian Studies in Population (2015); Rudnytskyi, O., Levchuk N., Wolowyna O., and P. Shevchuk. “1932–33 Famine Losses in Ukraine within the Context of the Soviet Union,” in Curran, D., et al. (eds) Famines in European Economic History: The Last Great European Famines Reconsidered (Routledge, 2015).

Joseph Livesey worked as a Research Affiliate on MAPA's 'The Great Famine' project between 2011 and 2012, taking part in early demonstrations of the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine program design process in Cambridge, Toronto, and New York City in 2013. As an undergraduate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Joseph studied Ukrainian and spent a year abroad at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. A graduate of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, Joseph was awarded the 2007 Theodosius and Irene Senkowsky Prize for Demonstrated Achievement in Ukrainian Studies. Subsequently, as a master's student on the REECA Program at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Joseph concentrated on Soviet History, conducting archival research in Kyiv on the role of local officials during the famine in the 1930s. He is now in the process of completing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University.

Tom Mueller has been a geography professor at California University of Pennsylvania since 1999. He received his degrees at Towson University (BS), University of Connecticut (MA) and University of Illinois (Ph.D.). His interests include Geographic Information Systems (Computer Mapping), geography education and world regional geography. His goal is to apply spatial theory to the real world, particularly using GIS. It is essential that service learning be included in his geography courses. For example, students in his courses have completed real world projects for local police departments, Federal Emergency Management Agency, etc.. He has also taught numerous GIS workshops for members of the local community, professors at Cal U and other campuses and K – 12 community. He has built a successful geography research agenda through a variety of scholarly endeavors, including conference presentations, grants, technical reports, book reviews and publications in professional journals. Tom will continue creating Geographical Lessons using MAPA for High School and College students and also work on educational outreach of the MAPA resource.

Gennadi Pobereƶny is an associate at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, where he was the principal cartographer and chief designer of the Holodomor project for Digital Atlas of Ukraine (2010-2014). Presently, he is collaborating on two other Holodomor-related research projects: co-editing a volume of proceedings of a conference contextualizing the Holodomor and also co-authoring a book on the Soviet policies of genocide in Ukraine. Dr. Pobereƶny holds graduate degrees in sustainable systems, geography, political science, and global affairs, and has taught courses on the political and cultural geography of international relations as well as comparative politics of post-communist and post-colonial transitional societies of Eastern Europe. He is a graduate of Rutgers University and is currently a visiting professor of political science at Ukrainian Free University in Munich, Germany.

Christian Raffensperger is an associate professor at Wittenberg University. He obtained his B.A. from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His first book, released by Harvard University Press, won the Ohio Academy of History Publication Award in 2013 and is titled, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World, 988–1146. It deals with the relationship of Rus’ (the medieval kingdom that will become Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) to the rest of Europe. It specifically focuses on the dynastic marriages made between the ruling family of Rus’, the Volodimerovichi, and the other ruling families of Europe. These marriages formed a web of connections that tied Rus’ firmly into the fabric of Europe during this period. Those marital connections are the subject of his second book entitled, Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus' (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2016) which also provides a complete genealogy for the Volodimerovichi through the mid–twelfth century (this project has a parallel digital humanities component which can be viewed at genealogy.obdurodon.org). This project has generated recent interest, due to the political situation in modern Ukraine and Ties of Kinship was part of Dr. Raffensperger's editorial at the Washington Post, as well as the subject of an article by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.