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Professor, the Head of OHPA Alexander joined the Department of International Relations in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute at Florence (2013-2022), the University of Cambridge (2004-2013), and the European University at St Petersburg (1999-2004). Alexander defended his PhD in Russian cultural history in Helsinki (1998), and supervised more than 30 PhD students in Europe. His current interests are the political aspects of the Anthropocene, global decarbonization and security in Eastern Europe. In the past, he was also involved in memory studies, European intellectual history, empires and decolonization, and various aspects of Russian history. A Fellow of King's College Cambridge, Etkind was the Leader of Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia and Ukraine, a European research project (2010-13). He is the author of Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Westview Press 1996); Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Polity Press 2011); Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press 2013); Roads not Taken. An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt. (Pittsburgh University Press 2017); and Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press 2021). Alexander coedited Remembering Katyn (Polity 2012), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2013) and Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (Routledge 2017). His latest book, Russia against Modernity, was released by Polity in April 2023. |
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Post-doctoral Researcher Ayansina Ayanlade is a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations. Before joining the CEU, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and a researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria. He holds a PhD from King’s College London, University of London, UK, and a wide range of academic experience in Nigeria, Kenya, the USA, Norway, Austria, and the United Kingdom; and has worked at the highest levels of professional politics and policy. He has contributed to research in the areas of climate change impact assessment, adaptation options, and mitigation strategy studies in Africa. His research interest lies in many aspects of the Anthropocene, focusing on critical issues on climate change; understanding of observed climate change impacts, indigenous and local knowledge of climate change and the influence of both national and international climate change negotiations; and application of Remote Sensing and GIS to land-atmospheric interactions. |
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Post-doctoral Researcher Johanna Gautier Morin is a historian of capitalism and economic knowledge from a global and intersectional perspective and currently a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at CEU. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, as part of the ERC-funded research program ECOINT on the history of globalization and international economic thinking, and a Teaching Fellow in the Global History Lab program at Princeton University. She received her PhD in International History from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her book manuscript traces the global history of financial deregulation from a gender and postcolonial perspective in the 1970s and 1980s. She has published on the debt crisis, economic reforms, and the history of economic ideas in Algeria, Chile and Mexico. For the Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene (OHPA), she develops her new project on the critical history of international economic indicators. |
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Zenon Hanappi Research Assistant Zenon Hanappi is a Research Fellow at the Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene (OHPA) at Central European University and a PhD researcher in Strategic Organizational Communication at WU Vienna. His work explores the political and communicative dynamics of sustainable mobility transitions, with a particular focus on how democratic backsliding reshapes urban transport governance and societal narratives around automobility. Drawing on interdisciplinary training in International Relations and Cross-Disciplinary Strategies, his research combines political sociology, discourse analysis, and urban policy studies. He holds an MA from CEU and a BA from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. |
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Georg-Henri Kaup Post-doctoral Researcher Georg-Henri is a postdoctoral researcher at the OHPA, where he leads a project researching non-western oil-producing countries’ experience with the historical shift from production-centered to market-centered oil refining after WWII. Henri holds a BA in history from the University of Warwick and an MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge. He will defend his PhD thesis on Soviet economic history at the European University Institute in Florence in June 2025. |
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Akos Kocsany Akos Kocsany, currently the Project Coordinator for OHPA is a professional in higher education management, learning and development, project and event management. He has an extensive international experience of more than a decade in education, mainly in the fields of Executive MBA and US-EU study-abroad. Akos has also gained experience in the field of marketing, social media and content creation as being the creator of the visual concepts and the manager of the online presence of his former projects. Akos has a Bachelor's degree in Commerce & Marketing from Budapest Business School. |
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Ivan Nikolovski Teaching & Research Assistant van Nikolovski is a PhD candidate at Central European University's Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy, and International Relations. As an emerging scholar, Nikolovski has a versatile research agenda. His current project speaks at the intersection of international relations, memory studies, European studies, and discourse studies. Throughout his academic and professional career, he contributed to the literature and policymaking on EU enlargement, regional cooperation, and the influence of rival powers in the Western Balkans. His work encompasses over 30 academic and non-academic publications in the aforementioned fields. |
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Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Post-doctoral Researcher Dr. Tyanif Rico Rodríguez is a sociologist and geographer, currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene (OHPA) at Central European University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bielefeld University in the CALAS Lab "The Anthropocene as a Multiple Crisis: Latin American Perspectives," and an invited researcher in the project "Turning Land into Capital." She holds a PhD in Geography with honorable mention from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a master’s degree in agrarian social studies from FLACSO, Argentina, and another in social sciences from El Colegio de Michoacán. A feminist interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on multi-species, community-based care strategies amid socio-environmental conflict. Her work explores concepts of care, territoriality, and posthumanism, particularly in Latin American peasant contexts. |
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Post-doctoral Researcher Waleed K. Salem is an Egyptian scholar and journalist. His work focuses on authoritarianism, comparative judicial politics, and the politics of the Arab Gulf states. In his previous life as a journalist, Waleed, under pen-name Waleed Al-Shobakky, reported for years on developments in higher education and science policy in Arab Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar (where he lived for about seven years). The pieces that came out of that period were published in Nature, The New Atlantis, The Science and Development Network (SciDev.net), ScienceBusiness.com, and AlJazeera.net, among others. He hails from an ancient civilization that had a profound fascination with triangular structures. |
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Visiting Senior Research Fellow Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov is Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of International Relations of the Central European University (Austria) and Director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity (Austria). He holds a PhD from University College London (UK), and held visiting postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Northampton (UK), Institute for Human Sciences (Austria), New Europe College (Romania), Legatum Institute (UK), Uppsala University (Sweden), and Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Austria). Shekhovtsov is the author of the books New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies (2011), Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (2017), and Russian Political Warfare (2023). Shekhovtsov also published numerous op-eds in international media, and academic articles in Journal of Democracy, Russian Politics and Law, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, Patterns of Prejudice, and Osteuropa, among others. |
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Gustavo Andreao Research Fellow Gustavo is currently a Post-doc researcher at the Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene at the Central European University in Vienna (OHPA-CEU) and on the Center for Critical Imagination at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CCI-CEBRAP) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He currently studies Latin-American Petrostates as well as transition processes from carbon societies to low-carbon economics. Gustavo holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), a master's degree from the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), and a bachelor's degree in Economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), all Brazilian Universities. His research focuses on climate change mitigation and transition processes, particularly in developing and underdeveloped countries, especially Brazil. His research interests include public policies, such as energy policy and public finance. From a methodological standpoint, Gustavo utilizes institutional and evolutionary economics, as well as elements of complexity theory. His analyses often employ network analysis and computational simulations, such as agent-based models. |
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Research Fellow Matteo Mandelli is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for European Studies (CEE) of Sciences Po Paris, where he is working on a project titled “Democracy and Ecological Transformations” coordinated by Charlotte Halpern at the Sciences Po Institute for environmental transformations. This 22-months project is funded under the Open Society Hub for the Politics of the Anthropocene (OHPA), at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. It aims to deepen our understanding of the interconnections and tensions between ecology and democracy. Specifically, it focuses on mapping socio-environmental conflicts connected to the European Green Deal, both at the EU and national levels. He obtained his PhD in Political Studies from the University of Milan. His primary research interest has been the role of the welfare state in addressing the ecological crisis and the green transition, with particular attention to the distributive politics involved. |
