In recent months, her research has focused on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, where she examines the urban planning and housing policies implemented by the Russian occupying administration, including the confiscation of housing property. Her work combines analysis of legal frameworks, mapping of the occupation, and the lived experiences of people displaced from these territories.

During her residency at the Center for Urban History, Guénola Inizan will continue her study of housing property seizures in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Through interviews, she will document the various forms of response and resistance that have emerged in reaction to these seizures. She will also dedicate part of her residence to analyzing archival and documentary materials concerning several cities currently under temporary occupation.

Olya is a member of Media, Infrastructure, Environment working group at Simon Fraser University and Transgressive Sounds and Atmospheres Research Network at Concordia University. She is also a Senior Fellow at Concordia’s Center for Sensory Studies. For her current project, she builds on collaborative work with Ukrainian curators, practitioners, and institutions, including Home of Sound (Dim  Zvuku) in Lviv.

During her short-term residency at the Center for Urban History, Olya will use every opportunity to connect with Ukrainian colleagues and institutions involved in studying and documenting Russia’s war in Ukraine. She will also have an Urban seminar on the epistemological significance of sonic witnessing, especially in the context of broader documentation efforts and knowledge-making practices through which Ukrainians have been articulating their lived experiences of war and terror and their pursuit of justice.

His thesis Leisure under Control? The Politicization of Popular Entertainment in the Multiethnic Cities of Warsaw, L’viv, and Poznan, 1890-1914 explores how attractions such as theaters, cinemas, or amusement parks shaped everyday life in the emerging cities of late imperial Eastern Europe. Situated within transimperial business and cultural networks, these urban spaces became arenas where entrepreneurs sought profit, local authorities enforced order, and nationalists fought for dominance. In cities marked by nationalization and modernization processes, popular entertainment emerged not merely as a pastime but as a stage where governance and belonging were performed. 

During his fellowship at the Center for Urban History, he will research periodical collections preserved in the city’s libraries to finalize his thesis.

He joined Open Society in 1988 and established more than 20 of the foundations in the Open Society Foundations network throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and South Asia. He also developed and led programs and organizations such as the Central Eurasia Project, Eurasianet, and Revenue Watch and led Open Society's work backing the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and other significant culture and arts programming. He previously was regional director of the Middle East North Africa and Southwest Asia and headed Open Society's work in the former Soviet Union. Richter was founding chairman of the Revenue Watch Institute, and served on the boards of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and the Open Government Partnership. He has written for The New York Times, the World Policy Journal, and other publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). 

The working title of his research project is "A Ukrainian Family Chronicle Through War and Resistance." His Research interests include memory studies, Holocaust studies, history of the UPA/OUN, war memorials, and Ukraine from the 1920s to the 1950s. The goals for Richter's residency at the Center for Urban History are to conduct interviews, to conduct research and organize future research activities, to study historiography and methodology, and hone his knowledge of the Ukrainian language. 

As a guest editor, he worked on a special thematic issue of the Ukraine Modern journal, The Holocaust in Ukraine: How the History of the Crime is (Un)Written. He is the author of the monograph 'Each to Their Own': The Socioeconomic Dimension of Ukrainian Nation-building in Interwar Poland (Rivne, 2018). Co-author of the monograph City of Memory — City of Oblivion: Palimpsests of the Memorial Landscape of Rivne (Rivne, 2019, co-authored with Maksym Hon and Natalia Ivchyk). He is the author of a series of publications on the history of the Holocaust in the cities and towns of western Volyn, The Life and Death of Jewish Communities. His most recent unpublished research, Cemetery Hill in the Caucasus: The History of the Space of Three Cemeteries Near Lytovska Street in Rivne, focuses on the history of the formation, evolution, and destruction of the space of three cemeteries in Rivne in the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

He organizes trainings, summer schools, roundtables, and academic conferences on memory studies and memory policy. Coordinator of educational and exhibition projects related to the memorialization and popularization of Holocaust history among the public. In particular, he is one of the initiators and coordinator of the exhibition project A Brief History of Violence: The Second World War and the Holocaust in Western Volyn (implemented by the NGO "After Silence" in 2023-2023). As part of the activities of the NGO "Center for the Study of Memory Policy and Public History 'Mnemonic'", he was one of the initiators and coordinators of the installation of memorial signs to the victims of Nazism in Rivne based on the "stumbling blocks" model and a memorial sign to the victims of the Rivne ghetto.

Research interests: Holocaust history, theory and practice of nationalism, politics of memory.

As part of her current research, she is studying the history of the Western Volyn ghettos (in particular, the political and economic aspects of ghettoization at the stages of creation, functioning, and destruction of the ghettos of Western Volyn). The geographical scope of the study roughly covers the territory of the Volyn Voivodeship in the interwar period (the territories of the present-day Rivne, Volyn, and northern Ternopil oblasts).

Following her previous research on community radio and its potential to challenge political apathy in Budapest, her practice operates on the intersection of sound studies and cultural musicology.

Ieva's wider practice involves cultural journalism, creative writing, curating, teaching, and various radio work. She is a recipient of the Lithuanian Art Criticism Awards, a member of The Independent Community Radio Network, a co-curator of a radio festival "Signals2Noise", and an occasional radio show host on various community radio stations in the region, such as Cashmere Radio in Berlin.

Her doctoral research focuses on the local characteristics of socially engaged art projects in Ukraine. She is interested in how myths, propaganda, and cultural representations have been constructed from positions of power to serve political
agendas and shape society's cultural imagination. Her thesis explores how artists working with socially engaged art practices reflect on and challenge dominant narratives about the Donbas and the Eastern Ukrainian landscape, and how they seek to redefine the region’s cultural imaginary by introducing new perspectives into the discussion.

At RCANE, her research primarily engages with the representation of the ecological crisis in contemporary art and with artistic reflections on the environmental impact of the war in Ukraine.

During her residency at the Center for Urban History, Kinga will use the Center's resources to work on her dissertation. She will research the depictions of the Eastern Ukrainian landscape in visual and narrative documentation from the beginning of industrialization through the Soviet period. She is particularly interested in urban transformation strategies and utopian project plans that sought to synthesize industrial and natural spaces in Ukraine. She also plans to visit the city’s archives and art institutions.

At the university, Roman teaches undergraduate courses on the history of the Holocaust and genocide. His research focuses on the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and its participation in the Holocaust in the occupied Ukrainian territories (Reich Commissariat Ukraine). He is also researching the implementation of Holocaust policy in Kryvyi Rih. A monograph based on his research is planned for the future.

He was a scholarship holder at Yad Vashem, Yahad-in Unum, and the S. Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in Vienna. He is the author of more than 60 articles, co-author of three monographs, and compiler of three collections of documents. In 2024, he was awarded a USHMM Virtual Research Fellowship for Ukrainian scholars.

He is currently working on his doctoral project at the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, where he continues to research local cooperation and regional dynamics of mass violence during the Holocaust in occupied Ukraine. He is also a member of the Ukrainian History: A Global Initiative research group, an international project aimed at rethinking and advancing the study of Ukraine's past in a global academic context.

During his stay at the Center for Urban History, Roman will use the Center's resources to work on the text of his doctoral dissertation and plans to visit local archives and libraries.

In 2015, he took part in the seminar "The Genocide of the Jews of Europe: Historical Perspective and Approaches to Study" at the Museum and Memorial House of the Wannsee Conference (Berlin). In 2016, he defended his PhD thesis on the history of Ukraine on the topic: "Lutsk during the Nazi occupation (1941-1944)." As a research consultant, he participated in the creation of the Digital Atlas of the Holocaust by the Tsal Kaplun Foundation. Laureate of the Volyn Regional Mykola Kudela Prize (2019), scholarship holder of the Research in Ukraine program (2023) from the Juliusz Mieroszewski Center for Dialogue (Warsaw).

During his residency at the Center for Urban History, supported by the Foundation for Jewish Studies in Wrocław, he will work on the Holocaust in Lutsk, preparing a study on the activities of the Jewish Council of the City (Judenrat), a body that acted as an intermediary between the Jewish community and the German occupation authorities. Along with revealing this problem, the goal of the research is to restore the historical memory of the Jews of Lutsk. The research should result not only in new facts about the Holocaust tragedy but also in biographies of members of the Judenrat, ghetto prisoners, and their everyday life. The findings will contribute to the marking of the city's surviving Jewish monuments and will serve as a basis for further educational projects.