Description

After the end of the Cold War espionage seemed to be something belonging to the pages of spy novels and the arrest of a former Estonian defence official in 2008 came as a shock. Since then, 20 people have been convicted for spying for Russia (more than in any other NATO country) and two for China. Based on material available on these 22 cases, the lecture aims to provide some answers to the following questions: What kind of information are the intelligence services of autocratic countries interested in? What is their modus operandi and what type of individuals are recruited? How long have the spies been active before being caught? Why have there been so many convictions in Estonia and so few in other NATO countries?

Ivo Juurvee is Head of Security & Resilience Programme at the International Centre for Defense and Security, Tallinn, Estonia.Prior joining ICDS in 2017, Dr. Ivo Juurvee had been a practitioner in the field of security for more than 13 years. Amongst other positions in Estonian public service, he has been an adviser at the National Security and Defense Coordination Unit of the Estonian Government Office and the head of the Internal Security Institute of the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences. He has also taught security related topics at the University of Tartu, Estonian Military Academy, Estonian School of Diplomacy, Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine, NATO School (Oberammergau) and on the FRONTEX master’s program on border management.

Ivo’s professional and academic areas of interest are information warfare, intelligence services and other forms of hybrid conflict. He has worked as an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies and given a guest lecture in several universities, including Stanford and Georgetown. He holds a PhD degree in history from the University of Tartu (2013) and an MA from the Central European University, Budapest (2003).

Description

John Paul Kleiner, Senior Manager, University Relations at DAAD German Academic Exchange Service, will speak on Funding and Research Opportunities in Germany.

Christian Strowa, Head of Division Knowledge Exchange and Network, DAAD, will provide an overview of German Foreign Cultural and Education Policy after February 24, 2022.

The DAAD is the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers. Based in Bonn, Germany, the DAAD is part of Germany’s foreign cultural and educational policy (AKBP), which is often described as the “third pillar” of German foreign policy. Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, it has become necessary to question pre-conceived notions of what this third pillar can – and should – achieve.

Characterised as a “paradigm shift” or “fundamental turning point” (Zeitenwende) by German Chancellor Scholz, the Russian attack on Ukraine marked a rupture not only in German Foreign, Security and Defense Policy, but also in the field of AKBP. After looking at some concrete funding opportunities offered by the DAAD, this talk will focus on how the events of February 24th, 2022 affected academic exchange and scientific co-operation from a German (and European) point of view, taking a closer look at the German notion of science diplomacy and how it is being rethought in terms of a foreign cultural and education “Realpolitik”.

This event is funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, with the occupation of the Chornobyl nuclear site. Together with the attack a few days later on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe located near Zaporizhia, the war produced a nuclear crisis that the world has not experienced before: the nuclear facilities ended up in the middle of the armed conflict. In this lecture I will discuss the origins of the war in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, triggered among other things by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, and the security vacuum produced by 1994 Budapest Memorandum. I will provide an assessment of the current stage of the hostilities and the impact that the Russian continuing control over the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant can have on the outcome of the war and the prospects of the nuclear industry worldwide–the theme explored in my recent book Atoms and Ashes.

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A leading authority on Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe, he has published extensively on the international history of World War II and the Cold War. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations and the Ballie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (UK). His latest book, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters was released by W.W. Norton in May 2022.

Description

The Red Army Faction’s attack on the West-German state in the 1970s and 1980s still poses one of the most controversial issues in post-war German history. Its historical narratives have repeatedly been referred to and re-interpreted in political discourse and popular culture alike. However, this established, indeed canonized, story of German terrorism still looms large over the debates on terrorism in the 21st century. Thus, it will be argued in this talk, that recent terrorist threats from the radical right have been misinterpreted, and there are still common assumptions within German terrorism discourse that keep on evoking the ghosts of the pasts.

Hanno Balz is a historian of Modern German and European History at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

He received PhD at Bremen University and has taught at the Universities of Bremen and Lüneburg and had been an Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University (2013-2018).

He has been publishing extensively on the history of the “Red Army Faction” West-German militant group and the legal, intellectual, and political reverberations in West German society that came along with challenging the state. More broadly he works on European social movements from the 1960s to the 1980s as well as on the history of Nazi rule and the Shoah.

His current research concerns the origins of anti-Communism in Germany and history of the Colour Red and symbolism of the Red Flag.

Description

In her talk, Anu Realo will discuss her research on social trust within and across nations. Why certain societies are more trusting than others, how does trust influence behaviour, how have levels of social trust changed in Estonia and neighbouring countries over the past three decades.

Anu Realo (PhD) is a personality and cross-cultural psychologist. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tartu (Estonia). She is also the Past President of the European Association for Personality Psychology and a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea.

Anu’s research focuses on cultural and individual variation in personality traits, subjective well-being, values, and social capital; she has collaborated widely with researchers from across a range of disciplines and cultures. She is the principal investigator for the World Values Survey (WVS) in Estonia and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the WVS. Anu is active in public engagement work on topics relating to her research, her work has been extensively covered and cited by national and international news media

Description

Cécile Vidal is professor (directrice d’études) of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), Paris, France. She is a social historian of colonial empires, the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic worlds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In addition to the prize-winning Histoire de l’Amérique française (History of French America, 2003; 5th ed. 2019), co-authored with Gilles Havard, she is the author of the prize-winning Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (2019) and the editor or coeditor of ten collective volumes, including, most recently, Une histoire sociale du Nouveau Monde (A Social History of the New Word, 2021), and Les mondes de l’esclavage. Une histoire comparée (The Worlds of Slavery. A Comparatve History, 2021), co-edited with Paulin Ismard and Benedetta Rossi. She is currently working on a new research project on suicide, the slave trade, and slavery in the French and British Atlantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Description

The Russian invasion in Ukraine (in 2014 and 2022), and the ongoing hybrid warfare against the West made it blatantly clear that authoritarian foreign policy in general – and Russian foreign policy in particular – cannot be grasped with the concept of “soft power”. Russia used “authoritarian inflation”, skillfully puffing itself up to look more economically, politically, and militarily powerful than it actually is, exaggerating its role in other countries’ politics and public as well as in global affairs. But this is just one element of a broader toolkit that is, in contrast to classic soft power, aimed more at being feared than about being loved. This phenomenon fits a general trend among authoritarian superpowers who are increasingly using new instruments, including the most modern technology (through cyberattacks and sophisticated automated ways of disinformation), to undermine the trust and feeling of security of the citizens of other countries – and the behavior of their leaders. “Sharp power” typically involves efforts at censorship, coercion, disinformation, and the use of manipulation to sap the integrity of independent institutions. Throughout the course, we aim to reveal and analyze patterns, channels, and functions of economic, political, and informational sharp power influence using the works of leading scholars and experts in this field, as well as through case studies done in the group. The course will put a special emphasis on the Central Eastern European region, (post-socialist states that compose the “Eastern Flank” of Western Alliances, members of both EU and NATO) when analyzing patterns of sharp power. But at the same time, these techniques will be discussed in the broader context of economic and diplomatic relations on the bilateral and multilateral (EU, OSCE, NATO) levels. The course also aims to retrospectively analyze and critically evaluate the decisions of Western leaders towards Russia at crucial points to identify the obvious mistakes of foresight with the aim of drawing lessons from them

Description

A panel of experts will examine President Zelenskyy’s leadership style and how it has shaped Ukraine’s trajectory during the conflict.

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine is forthcoming, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020. She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016-2019.

Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University, Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She has published five books, including Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Broadcasting through Information Wars with Hromadske Radio (2016) Ukraine Twenty Years After Independence: Assessments, Perspectives, Challenges (co-edited with Giovanna Brogi, 2015), Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience (co-edited with Oxana Gaman-Golutvina, 2009), articles in various journals including The Russian Journal of Communication (2014), Demokratizatsiya (2014), and regularly provides media commentary. Her doctorate is from Oxford University and she researches mass media, memory, migration, and history.

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, University of Alberta and other Western scholarly institutions. Since 2013, he serves as Ukraine’s representative in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity in contemporary Ukraine, media and discourse studies, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Dr. Kulyk is the author of three books, the latest being Dyskurs ukraїnskykh medii: identychnosti, ideolohiї, vladni stosunky (The Ukrainian Media Discourse: Identities, Ideologies, Power Relations; Kyiv: Krytyka, 2010). He has also edited two collected volumes published in Ukraine and two special issues of Western academic journals.

Dr. Olga Onuch (DPhil Oxford 2010) is a Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Politics. She joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding posts at the University of Toronto (2010-2011), University of Oxford (2011-2014) and Harvard University (2013-2014). She is an Associate of Nuffield College (Oxford) and The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Onuch was also a Research Fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard) in 2017. Onuch’s comparative study of protest (elections, migration & identity) in Eastern Europe and Latin America has made her a leading expert in Ukrainian and Argentine politics specifically, but also in inter-regional comparative analysis. Her book “Mapping Mass Mobilizations” (2014, reviewed in Europe-Asia Studies), explores the processes leading up to mass protest engagement in Ukraine (2004) and Argentina (2001). She is the author of several scholarly articles (in Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, GeoPolitics among other journals), book chapters, and policy briefs. Her research regularly appears in leading media outlets (The Washington Post, The Times, The Guardian, BBC, ITV, Al Jazeera, AFP, among others). Onuch’s research on protest politics in Ukraine has resulted in her consulting policymakers in Canada, Ukraine, the UK and US. Her research received praise and awards placing her on the map as one of the foremost experts on protests and activism in Ukraine.

Jessica Pisano is an Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She writes and teaches about contemporary and twentieth century politics in Eastern Europe. Her work focuses on the enclosure of public resources, the constitution of material and social power, and political and social processes of dispossession. She asks how shifts in political economy affect people’s lives, and how those effects translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on archival sources as well as a variety of immersion-based methods, including participant-observation research. Professor Pisano is the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2022) and The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which received the Harvard University Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies in 2009. She is writing a history of property under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy on a single street in Eastern Europe between 1938 and 2014. Her series of articles on American impeachment and Ukrainian and Russian politics appeared in the online Washington Post.

Description

Speaker: Tassos Anastassiadis, Associate Professor of History & Phrixos B. Papachristidis Chair in Modern Greek Studies, McGill
University

Tassos Anastassiadis (Phd Sciences-Po Paris, agrégation of history) is an Associate Professor of History and the Phrixos Papachristidis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at McGill University since 2011. He teaches and researches Modern European and Greek history, with a focus on inter-confessional relations and the emergence of differentiated modernities in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 18th-20th c.as well as the role of antiquity in the European imaginary. His most recent book, La réforme orthodoxe: Église, État et société en Grèce à l’époque de la confessionnalisation post-ottomane (1833-1940) (Peeters-EFA, 2020) , won the FRQSC’s Prix Louise-Dandurand in 2022.

Facing the increasing penetration of western catholic and protestant missionaries in the Ottoman world after the Crimean war, but also challenged by a growing Russian presence in their plurisecular role of leader of the Rum, i.e. the Eastern christian orthodox, within the Ottoman empire, certain Greek-Orthodox clergymen decided to react during the last quarter of the 19th c. Their projet was three-fold. Envision a new, imperial, but post-ottoman, configuration for the Eastern Orthodox churches that would preserve the primacy of the Greek-orthodox despite the emergence of national churches and growing Russian influence; adapt their project to the new geopolitical developments of the Age of Empires; guarantee the survival of these churches by adopting « modern » ways of practising religion that would help them maintain the allegiance of their flock tempted by the voices of outside sirens. The network of these reformers rotating around an Athens-Constantinople (Istanbul) axis and active from Alexandria to Tbilissi, and from Jerusalem to Bitola, but also in the USA, will have a narrow window of opportunity on the aftermath of the Russian revolution and the end of WWI. Though it was finally not fully realized, it has left its indelible mark on the way religion is practised and politicized in Europe’s orthodox borderlands.

Sponsors: CERES, the HHF Chair in Modern Greek History at York University, and Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario.

Description

Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies presents

Dr. Virginia Aksan is Professor Emeritus at McMaster University. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on military history and trans-imperial intellectual encounters and the circulation of knowledge in the pre-modern Mediterrannean and Eurasia. Her publications include the books: The Ottomans, 1700-1923: an Empire Besieged (2022); Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870 (2007); An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783 (1995).

Description

Refusing to obey the law in order to show its injustice: this is the principle of civil disobedience as defined by Henry David Thoreau. The paradigm has regained strength over the past decade – even if it is sometimes seen as an outdated and inadequate form of political action and even a menace to democracy. Civil disobedience is based on a moral principle, self-reliance, which encourages the individual to refuse the accepted law by basing herself on her own conviction. Advocates of the civil disobedience paradigm see it as a way of renewing democracy by making feelings of injustice, inexpression, and dispossession public and visible. They express a need to democratize democracy itself.  

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-La Sorbonne, Senior Member of the Academic Institute of France, and Deputy Director of Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences (ISJPS, UMR 8103 CNRS Paris 1). She is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour (2014), a member of the Academia Europea, and a laureate of the French Academy’s annual prize awarding an author promoting new ethics (2022).   

Sandra Laugier is the author and editor of numerous books including: Le souci des autres (with P. Papermann, EHESS), Pourquoi désobéir en démocratie and Le Principe Démocratie (with A. Ogien, La Découverte), Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (The University of Chicago Press, 2013), Nos vies en séries (Climats, Flammarion, 2019), Le pouvoir des liens faibles (dir. with A. Gefen, CNRS Editions, 2020), Politics of the Ordinary: care, ethics, and forms of life (Peeters, Leuven, 2020), and Series-Philosophy (Exeter University Press, 2023). She also writes for a wider audience, notably as columnist for Libération since 2013.

Description

Russian invasion in 2014 caused an outburst of Ukrainian so-called war literature – novels, sketches, short stories, essays, diaries, and memoirs. Soldiers, veterans, volunteers, and witnesses wrote many of these books. In 2019 more than 200 books on the Ukrainian-Russian war were published, and now that number is much bigger. As translating took time, numerous works haven’t been translated into English yet. But the following books are available for English-speaking audiences: The Airport by Serhii Loiko (2015), Apricots of Donbas by Liuba Yakymchyk (2015), Ukrainian Diaries: Dispatches from the Kyiv by Andrii Kurkov (2015), Words from War: New Poems from Ukraine, edited by Oksana Maksymchyk and Max Rosochinsky (2017), The Orphanage by Serhii Zhadan (2017), Absolute Zero by Artem Chekh (2017), Grey Beez by Andrii Kurkov (2018), In Isolation by Stanislav Aseev (2018), Daughter by Tamara Horikha-Zernia (2019), etc.  In Russia, books about contemporary Ukrainian-Russian started appearing in 2009: Maksim Kalashnikov’s "Independent Ukraine. Collapse of the project" (2009), Fedor Berezin’s "War 2010. Ukrainian Front" (2009), Georgiy Savitskiy’s "The battlefield is Ukraine. Broken Trident" (2009), Fedor Berezin "War 2011" (Moscow, 2010).   These books described the full-scale military invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine that was supposed to happen in 2010-2011.

Mentioned novels are affordable and easily assessable, and they consist of numerous narratives that the Russian propaganda machine is using now. These books were presented and got awards in "Star Bridge," a war fantasy language festival held in Kharkiv from 1991 to 2014. The festival is supposed to connect two countries, but only books that are written in Russian can be nominated. And the jury is quite specific, for example, Kharkiv Academy of Internal Affairs. Nevertheless, due to the poor aesthetic quality, these books have never been translated into different languages and are fully oriented on internal use (for Russian speakers).   After the invasion in 2014, Russian media started spreading the word that great Russian writers predicted war in Ukraine. Mentioned novels have poor artistic qualities. Nevertheless, Russian media highlight that such literature expresses high truth contrary to more sophisticated works.   Analyzing these works, we might observe several narratives used by Russian media and authorities to justify war, war crimes, and acts ao terrorism. We may see how contemporary Russian writers continue the tradition of using literature for propaganda. Studies on the soviet novel as a tool for propaganda have already been conducted, for example, by Katerine Clark. But it is the first time we may discuss Russian propaganda during full-scale military invasions and get particular examples of how narratives impact people. And how literature and stories art can share the war experience and resist disinformation on practice.  

Maria Shuvalova is a literary critic and lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Fulbright Scholar (Harriman Institute, Columbia University in the city of New York, 2019–2020). Acquisition Editor at Academic Studies Press and co-founder and head of the non-governmental organization New Ukrainian Academic Community, whose latest projects were the publication of a book by Volodymyr Dibrova Taras Shevchenko: New Perspectives, an international conference The Female Artist as an Icon of National Modernization: The Phenomenon of Lesia Ukrainka in a Comparative Perspective (in Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of the Writer). Projects were implemented in cooperation with such organizations as the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, the Association of Hispanics of Ukraine, Shevchenko Scientific Society in America, and publishing house Bilka. The latest publication is “Nothing New in Mariia’s Story — It’s Just That Centuries-Old Ukrainian Resistance Got Its Voice”, The Ukrainian Quarterly 2, 2022, p. 37-41. When the war started, I and my family felt Kyiv. Since February 25 I was residing in Khmelnytsky district, Ukraine. In a month we returned to Kyiv.

Description

Three experts on Ukrainian identity will discuss the evolution of Ukrainian identity before and after the 2022 invasion.

Paul Robert Magocsi is professor of history and political science at the University of Toronto, where since 1980 he also holds the John Yaremko Chair of Ukrainian Studies. He completed his education at Rutgers University (B.A. 1966; M.A. 1967), Princeton University (M.A. 1969; Ph.D. 1972), and Harvard University (Society of Fellows 1976). He is a member of the Harvard University Society of Fellows (1976).

Dominique Arel is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He received his BA from the University of Montreal, his MA from McGill University and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Arel’s interests range from nationalism and language politics to politics of identity and the censuses. Arel co-edited Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (John Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Petro Kuzyk is an Assistant Professor (Dotsent) of the International Relations and Diplomatic Service Department at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He graduated from the Faculty of International Relations of the same University in 1999. During 1998-2001 he worked for the Verkhovna Rada Intern Program run by the U.S. Association of the Former Members of Congress and also was an Assistant to MP and an adviser to the Verkhovna Rada Inter-Parliamentary Relations Department in Kyiv. In 2002-2003 Petro Kuzyk completed MA course in Political Philosophy at the University of York (UK). Shortly afterwards he defended his Kandydat Nauk dissertation on nationalism in Eastern Europe in Lviv.

Description

This paper addresses a long-standing narrative of the origins of the Haitian Revolution, which locates one of the principal motivating factors of the breakdown of French colonial rule in a hardening of racial lines particularly after 1763 and in particular, a declining status of free people of colour.  In particular, historians have pointed to the growing propensity of colonial authorities to restrict manumission of slaves.  The recent discovery by the authors of the accounts of the disgraced colonial receiver-general, however, prompts a reevaluation of the conventional narrative, suggesting greater ambiguity of both colonial whites and French administrators towards free people of colour.  This paper affords the opportunity to reflect on the disjunctures between government policies and their practice.   

Nancy Christie is Visiting Research Professor at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, and Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Western Ontario.  She is the author of four major monographs, including most recently, THE FORMAL AND INFORMAL POLITICS OF BRITISH RULE IN POST-CONQUEST QUEBEC, 1760-1837:  A NORTHERN BASTILLE (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2020), and nine edited volumes, most recently, VOICES IN THE LEGAL ARCHIVES IN THE FRENCH COLONIAL WORLD:  ‘THE KING IS LISTENING’ (London & New York:  Routledge, 2021), which emerged from a conference which she organized.  Her work has received the highest scholarly distinctions, including the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association and the Harold Adams Innis Prize of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.  Michael Gauvreau is Professor of History at McMaster University.  He is an expert in the history of Canada and Québec, and his interests more recently have turned to the history of the pre-1789 French colonial world.  He is author of five major scholarly monographs and several collaborative editorial projects.  HIs books have received scholarly recognition, including the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historial Association and the Harold Adams Innis Prize of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada.

Description

This is an-inperson event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

Speaker bio:

Dessy Gavrilova is a Vienna-based Bulgarian cultural entrepreneur, curator, cultural consultant and playwright.  In Sofia, Gavrilova co-founded and directed The Red House Center for Culture and Debate. For decades, it was Bulgaria’s principal socio-cultural centre. Its innovative programming spanning socially engaged art, debates, public talks and lectures transformed Bulgaria’s public space. In Vienna, she founded the European Network of Houses for Debate “Time to Talk”, a network of cultural centers and initiatives that promote public debate and develop a culture of civic argumentation, aiming to inspire dialogue and understanding. In 2016, Gavrilova initiated and co-founded the Vienna Humanities Festival, an annual event that has already become emblematic for Austria’s capital. During the last week of September, the festival features more than 40 debates with leading international thinkers, as well as selected artistic work that raises socially relevant issues.Most recently Gavrilova has founded a Bulgarian literacy start-up that supports kids’ reading with comprehension and develops their functional literacy, media literacy, and civil and global competences.In her capacity as a consultant, Gavrilova has advised numerous international and national institutions, like the European Commission, The Council of Europe, The Open Society Foundations.Her play "Innocent Murders" was nominated Best Play of the Year (2015) by both Askeer and Ikar theatre prizes.  In 2011, she was listed as one of the 100 most influential women in Bulgaria.