She holds a BA in philosophy from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, HU) and a MA in social anthropology from Durham University (Durham, UK). She won scholarships from Erasmus College, the Republic of Hungary and the Durham Energy Institute. She was a visiting student at the Department of Philosophy at Central European University (2011-2). Subsequently, she worked as a research intern at the Durham Energy Institute, where she researched the social attitudes towards vernacular architectural heritage and possibilities of sustainable energy-related innovation in the Indian Himalayas.

Her PhD research project deals with the religious heritage and cultural politics of Lviv, focusing on repurposed church buildings, which are currently functioning as galleries, museums, memorial sites. She is interested in the role heritage plays in the public space of the city, in conflicts over different forms of memory politics, and how local and international actors negotiate such conflicts. The projects draw comparisons between Jewish heritage issues and Greek Catholic sites, hoping to situate minority heritage politics in the broader national discourse. As a Guest Researcher in the Center for the Urban History she is conducting year-long field research, materials of which will contribute to the Center's Lviv Interactive project.

In 2009 Olha defended her thesis on "The concept of 'modernity' in architecture during "the thaw." The scientific editor of the book "Aesthetics of 'the thaw' - novelties in architecture, art, culture" (2013), co-author of the book "Leonid Pavlov. 1909-1990"(2015), and author of many articles on architecture, art and culture during the period of Soviet modernism.

Olha specializes in post 1953 architecture and art. In her research, she focuses on the processes of transformation in basic ethical categories of Soviet society - from the death of Stalin through the Soviet collapse - and their effects on aesthetic forms of architecture, urban planning and other forms of art.

Now Olha Kazakova is working on research "From Peaceful atom to Soviet apocalypse: monuments to the Chernobyl Catastrophy in Ukraine, Russia and other countries." This study raises the question of memorializing trauma and about the specifics of this memorialization in the context of a huge nuclear disaster. The researcher examines various (successful and unsuccessful) attempts to express, through sculpture and graphic images, the tragic events of 1986, the main artistic techniques and their origins, and new ways of using Christian themes from the second half of the 1980s. One of the key elements of this research is to explore the reactions "consumers" of the monumental art found in these monuments have as the bearers of "negative," and tragic information. This is being studied using the memorials in Izhevsk (Russia) and Lviv (the monument in Sykhiv). A portion of the research, devoted to monuments of the Chornobyl events in Ukraine, are being conducted at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv.

During her fellowship at the Center, Olha Kazakova will hold a lecture "From the Peaceful Atom to the Soviet Apocalypse - Memorials to the Chornobyl Catastrophe in Ukraine, Russia and other Countries" and also presented the book "Leonid Pavlov. 1909-1990".

Mikhail Ilchenko's research during his internship at the Center is dedicated to analyzing and examining various influences experimental avant-garde and functionalist buildings during the interwar period had on the organization of urban space, rhythms of daily life and general symbolism of Lviv's architectural appearance.

Mikhail Ilchenko's many years of research on the content and context of avant-garde architecture in post-socialist cities formed the basis of the lecture course "Avant-Garde Urban Areas of Eastern Europe in the 1920-1930s." for students of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. A study conducted in Lviv also became part of the course. Mikhail Ilchenko and Yulia Bohdanova, an architect and researcher from Lviv, completed an educational excursion to avant-garde sites in the city with their students.

As part of his internship at the Center Mikhail Ilchenko held a public lecture "The Socialist City of Uralmash: Between "Cultural Heritage" and "Utopia" which focused on basic approaches and discussions on how to work with the content and significance of avant-garde architecture and introduced his own interpretation of the architecture of Uralmash’s residential areas in Yekaterinburg.

Jagoda Wierzejska's research topic is part of her doctoral thesis on ways of conceptualizing ideas of Galicia in the Polish discourse during the interwar period. Before the intensive development of national movements, the concept of Galicia functioned as a transcendent political concept, which opened the possibility of supranational convergence within the Habsburg Empire. After the elimination of Galicia as a territorial unit in the Habsburg Empire and its inclusion as part of the Second Polish Republic this idea was adapted to accommodate the Polish discourse of 1918-1939: sometimes as an extension, but more often as a deconstruction theory. The Polish discourse on the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918-1919 at that time, and especially regarding the battle for Lviv is an example of the how the concept of Galicia was used as a deconstruction theory. It bore all the signs of symbolic violence, because the vision of a completely Polish Lviv was Introduced in such a way, though often indirectly, as to encourage victimizing and disenfranchising Galician Jews, Germans, and especially Ukrainian. Thus, the discourse of these groups was excluded from the official memory of the city and caused a deeper fragmentation of the urban space according to ethnic-religious divisions and also lead to reprisals from non-Polish residents.

Juxtaposing four Jewish museums in Warsaw, Lwów, Prague and Nikolsburg/ Mikulov, which were initiated and opened between 1905 and 1938/1939, before and after the First WorldWar, this project is going to analyze the origin of the first Jewish museums in Eastern Europe in a broader context, their museological concepts, narratives as well as reception. It wants to ask for the social, political, religious biographies of people being involved in these projects, their various ideas of one’s own Jewish identity, the impact of general political and social conditions such as growing national movements, crisis and decay of the great multi-ethnic empires in Europe and the formation of new nation-states or growing anti-Semitism.

An anthropologist and linguist by training, Yevheniy works at the junction of disciplines, using social sciences and historical research methods. He is a member of the European University of St. Petersburg's Center for Research and Technology Studies's "Ethnography of the Hermitage" project (St. Petersburg). Yevheniy Manzhurin's dissertation project is devoted to a grassroots initiative for the creation of urban symbols that unfolded in the USSR during the reign of Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

His research is based on materials from central archives, private collections, and several regional case studies (Lviv, Kyiv, Lithuanian Heraldry Commission, Perm, Penza, Leningrad and Moscow) and for the first time in historiography represents a detailed picture of the city symbols in the USSR. Based on materials related to Soviet city symbols, Yevheniy examines issues such as relations between the center and the regions, system management (governance) in postwar USSR, urban and regional memory and identity, and Soviet subjectivity.

Creating and using the symbol of Soviet Lviv is one of the cases around which Yevheniy Manzhurin builds his dissertation. During his stay in the city, as the Center's Fellow, Yevheniy hopes to collect material from the archives and published sources, conduct several interviews with historians, collectors and artists, and also to process material and visual sources on the practice of using the city's Soviet coat of arms.

Research interests: history of postwar socialist countries, perceptions and representations of space and time, geography, humanity, urban anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.