Team
Tatiana Vagramenko - Principal Investigator
Tatiana Vagramenko is Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork and Principal Investigator in the SFI-IRC Pathway-funded project “History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine”. She has held postdoctoral appointments at University of Barcelona in Spain, Imre Kertesz Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC where she served as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. In 2017-2019, she was Principal Investigator in the project “Religious Minorities in Ukraine from the Soviet Underground to the Euromaidan: Pathways to Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Enlarging Europe”, funded by the Irish Research Council. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University in 2014. Vagramenko’s research is focused on the history and memory of state repression and cultural opposition in Soviet Ukraine, based on in-depth reconsideration of recently opened Soviet-era secret police (former KGB) archives.
James Kapalo - Project Mentor
James Kapaló is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland and co-Director of the Marginalised and Endangered Worldviews Study Centre (MEWSC). In 2017-2021, he was Principal Investigator in the ERC-funded project “Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: ‘Hidden Galleries’ in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe”. He has an MA in Central and Eastern European Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), London and a PhD in the Study of Religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. He works ethnographically with communities, archives and museum collections to explore vernacular knowledge, religious practices and local memory. He is author of Text, Context and Performance: Gagauz Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity: Religious Dissent in the Russian and Romanian Borderlands (Routledge: London, 2019).
Julia Buyskykh - PhD Candidate
Julia Buyskykh is a historian (BA) and anthropologist (MA), co-founder of an NGO the Centre for Applied Anthropology in Kyiv, Ukraine. She received her candidate of sciences degree from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, held a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw (2015 – 2016), and had several research stays in Polish academic institutions (2014-2015, 2022). In 2017 she was a research fellow in the frame of “Prisma-Ukraїna – Research Network Eastern Europe” scheme, at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Germany. She spent the academic year of 2019-2020 at Pennsylvania State University as a Fulbright visiting scholar. She was a Sanctuary Fellow at the University College Cork, Ireland (September 2022 – February 2023). Her research interests include lived religion (Christianity) in Ukraine and Poland, inter-confessional relationships and ecumenical practices, pilgrimages, memory and border studies, Polish-Ukrainian shared history, ethics and empathy in qualitative research.
Dr Yulia Vlasenko - Research Assistant
Yuliia Vlasenko holds PhD in Law. She is Associate Professor of the Law Department, Educational and Scientific Institute of Law, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Member of the Bar Council of Kyiv region. In 2007-2009 Vlasenko was part of the Centre for Human Right Research in Ukraine at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. In 2022-2023, she held Sanctuary Fellowship at University College Cork (School of Law, College of Business and Law). Dr. Vlasenko plays a crucial role in the project due to her expertise in Ukraine's legal system, particularly in negotiating agreements amid the ongoing military conflict.