Fellows

Research Area: Cultural History. 

Oleksii Kuraiev is a Ukrainian researcher of the history of political and cultural contacts of Ukraine with Germany in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. 

As a research associate at the M.S. Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Sources of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, he is engaged in the acquisition, processing and publication of unknown German-language sources on the position of German politicians, diplomats and intellectuals on Ukrainian issues in early and late Wilhelmine Germany, especially during the reign of Otto von Bismarck and the First World War. Thanks to the cooperation with many German experts on Ukraine, he was able to discover important unexplored German and Austrian archival documents and thus substantially expand the ideas about Wilhelmine policy on Ukraine. These research results are presented in two monographs and numerous articles in Ukraine and Germany.

In addition, now also as a DU Fellow, he is working on a new topic, the interpretation of an important and little-researched masterpiece of German cartography and political figurative graphics, the first German map of Ukraine by the Nuremberg cartographer and publisher Johann Baptist Homann. It was published in 1711 under the title “Ukrania quae Terra Cosaccorum ...” (Ukraine or Land of the Cossacks ...” and represents a rare historical phenomenon in which the south-western border of Ukraine is identical to that of the medieval principality of Halyč (Polish: Halicz), and where the Land of the Cossacks shows its largest territorial dimensions in comparison to all other Western European maps of Ukraine. This research also examines the extent to which the legal and political conditions in the Holy Roman Empire of the early 18th century were able to eliminate Moscow's claims to Cossack Ukraine.   

Inna Volosevych is Ukrainian writer and researcher. She gained her Master’s degree in Sociology from the National University ‘Kyiv Mohyla Academy’ with honors in 2006. Since then, she has been working in Ukraine for the research companies GfK, Ipsos, and Info Sapiens in the area of social research. She is currently Deputy Director of Info Sapiens. Volosevych has managed more than 1.000 social research projects, mostly for international donors. She is working on a research project Mobilization and Social Cohesion in Ukraine - The Frictions of Domestic and International Burden-Sharing with Dr. Fabian Burkhardt, Dr. Christofer Berglund, Felix Hett.

Her research interests:

• War and conflict studies

• Gender studies

• Migration studies

• Employment studies

• Values studies

• Mental health studies

Tetyana Panchenko is a Ukrainian social and political scientist specializing in migration and displacement. As a professor at Karazin Kharkiv National University, she researches the social and political impacts of forced migration, particularly on Ukrainian refugees. In recent years, Tetyana has contributed to several research projects, including her role as a Research Specialist at the ifo Center for International Institutional Comparison and Migration Research in Munich (2022–2024), where she investigated the adaptation strategies of Ukrainian refugees. She also held a KIU Fellowship at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (2024–2025), conducting her project “On the Border of Two Spaces: The Transformative Experience of Ukrainian Refugees in Germany.” 

As a DU Fellow, she continues her longitudinal study on the transformative experiences of Ukrainian refugees. Her current research project, “Displaced People as Human Capital for Ukraine’s Recovery: The Case of Germany,” explores how displaced Ukrainians, while integrating into a new environment, preserve their national identity and ties to their homeland—and how they contribute to Ukraine’s struggle, resistance, and recovery.