Scott Appleby is professor of history and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Previously he directed Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The author or editor of fifteen books, Appleby examines the ways religions and religiously inspired actors shape and are shaped by modern ideas, institutions, practices and conflicts. His publications include The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation, The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding, and the five volumes of the The Fundamentalism Project (University of Chicago Press), which he edited with Martin E. Marty.

Appleby has also written extensively about American religious history, Catholicism in the United States, and strategic peacebuilding around the world. Among other media appearances, he was called to offer public commentary on 9/11 and on the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Roman Catholicism. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Appleby (PhD, University of Chicago) is the recipient of five honorary degrees.

Session: Keynote Lecture - "Making War and Building Peace: The Crucial Roles of Religious Actors" | 3:00PM MST, March 15, 2024

Olena Bohdan is an expert in religious and ethnic affairs, democratization and well-being studies. She has taught social science courses in top Ukrainian universities for 15 years, mainly at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which is also her alma mater for BA and PhD degrees in sociology. Olena Bohdan has extensive experience with civil society and government sectors. She served as the Head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Affairs and Freedom of Conscience from 2020 to 2022, having launched this agency in 2020 and directed it into a fully operational central government body despite the challenges of pandemic and Russian full-scale attack on Ukraine. During 2021‒2022, Dr. Bohdan served as the Vice-Chair at the Council of Europe Steering Committee on Anti-Discrimination, Diversity and Inclusion (elected twice by secret ballot of member states). Dr. Olena Bohdan is currently participating in the Project "National values and political reforms in post-Maidan Ukraine (VALREF)", supported by the Research Council of Norway. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo.

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part I | 9:15AM MST, March 15, 2024

Denys Brylov is a senior researcher at the A. Krymsky Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv) and a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin). He is considered the foremost specialist on Islam and Islamic education in Ukraine. His other areas of expertise include Sufi political activism, transnational Sufi movements, religious factors in conflicts, and religion and nationalism. He is a member of the Ministry of Education of Ukraine's commission on the state recognition of higher theological education diplomas, academic degrees, and titles issued by higher theological educational institutions. Brylov has authored some 70 publications in multiple languages and is the co-editor of Sufism and the Islamic Spiritual Tradition: Texts, Institutions, Ideas, and Interpretations (2015). In recognition of his expertise, he led a project funded by the United States Institute of Peace on interconfessional conflict in Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion.

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 16, 2024

Heather J. Coleman is Professor in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion, and Director of the Research Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929, editor (with Mark D. Steinberg) of Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, and editor of Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion. Her current book project is a social and cultural history of the Orthodox clergy in 19th-century Kyiv province.

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part I | 9:15AM MST, March 15, 2024

Nicholas Denysenko is the Emil and Elfriede Jochum University Professor and Chair and Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University, USA. He previously taught at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he served as director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute. He is a specialist in global Orthodoxy with a particular understanding of the dynamics of how conflicts within Orthodoxy in Ukraine play out in North American Orthodox denominations and parishes. Denysenko is an ordained deacon of the Orthodox Church in America since 2003. Denysenko specializes in Orthodox liturgical theology, ritual studies, and writes for an ecumenical audience. He is the author of The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy, which complements his award-winning book The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation.

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 15, 2024

Regina Elsner is a Catholic theologian and, as of April 2023, professor of Eastern Churches and Ecumenical Theology at the University of Münster, Germany. Previously, she utilized her expertise in Orthodoxy and the politics of religion in Russia and Ukraine as a researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS). Most importantly, she came to the academy after having gained extensive experience in the provision by faith-based organizations of humanitarian and other forms of aid as a project coordinator for Caritas Russia in St Petersburg. She is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on Orthodox Churches in Eastern Europe, Orthodox social ethics and questions of peace ethics, and gender justice. To date she has carried out research in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 15, 2024

Andriy Fert holds a PhD in history. He is a UNET non-resident fellow at the Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien in Berlin. He is an expert on the interplay of religion and nationalism, secular martyrs, and the churches' role in memory politics, particularly as they pertain to inter-Orthodox conflict in Ukraine today. Fert also coordinates several educational projects for secondary school history teachers at the Ukrainian office of the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschul Verband. Based in Kyiv.

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part I | 9:15AM MST, March 15, 2024

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is a Professor of Ecclesiology, International Relations and Ecumenism at the Stockholm School of Theology. Fr. Hovorun was previously a member of the clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and has since become one of its foremost critics. He is the author of numerous publications on Orthodox political theology and church-state relations. He has taught theology at theological academies in Kyiv, Moscow, Minsk, the National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy," and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He was a research fellow at Yale and Columbia Universities, a visiting professor at the University of Münster and international fellow at Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part II | 3:00PM MST, March 16, 2024

Tetiana Kalenychenko holds a PhD in Sociology of Religion from National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kyiv, Ukraine and received training in peacebuilding at the Mirovna Academia in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina. She is the Executive Director of the NGO Center for European Strategic Analytics and co-founder of Dialogue in Action, an NGO involved in conflict mediation and community building in Ukraine. She works in the field of conflict analysis and management, peacekeeping, and restorative practices with many international organizations (OSCE, UNDP, USAID, MCC, USIP, and others). She conducts academic research based on fieldwork as a dialogue facilitator and trainer in peacekeeping initiatives in Ukraine. She has been working "on the ground" in the front zones for many years and brings expertise in the role of religious groups in conflict mediation and community building.

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part I | 1:30PM MST, March 16, 2024

Oleg Kyselov is a senior research scientist at the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD in religious studies from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. His main interests include the sociology of religion, interfaith relations, and the history of religious studies. He is the author of Fenomen ekumenizmu v suchasnomu khrystyianstvi (Phenomenon of Ecumenism in Modern Christianity, 2009). He was one of the founders of the NGO Workshop for the Academic Study of Religion. He is the editor-in-chief of the annual journal Relihieznavchi narysy (Essays on Religious Studies). He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Alabama in the USA in 2021-22 and remains there in the Department of Religious Studies as an Instructor.

Session: Reacting to the Experience of War | 1:30PM MST, March 15, 2024

Jacob Lassin is Assistant Professor of Russian Regional and Cultural Studies at the Air University, Maxwell, Alabama. He was formerly a Teaching Fellow at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University of Ohio. Lassin received his PhD from Yale University in 2019. His area of expertise is the intersection of religion, politics, and new media in Ukraine, Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is an expert on the use of social media to build social movements. He is currently writing a book entitled, Sacred Sites: Russian Orthodox Cultural Politics Online, which explores how websites run by the Russian Orthodox Church and its allies work to reframe the national literary canon. He held Postdoctoral Fellowships at Arizona State University and Harvard University.

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part I | 9:30AM MST, March 16, 2024

Lidiya Lozova is a British Academy Fellow in the Theology and Religion Department, University of Exeter, since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prior to that, Lozova defended her doctoral thesis in the History and Theory of Art History at the Modern Art Research Institute, Ukrainian National Academy of Art, in 2015 and was a researcher at the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy on Christian theology, ecumenical relations, and civic peacebuilding. She also continues to works as a translator and editor at "Spirit and Letter" Research and Publishing Association (Kyiv). Her current research concerns the social ethos of Eastern Christian icons, specifically modern icons and icon-like images that appear during wartime in Ukraine. She is recognized as one of the finest and most promising young scholars working in the areas of iconography, Orthodox social ethos, and the encounter between traditional Orthodox spirituality and modernity.

Session: Reacting to the Experience of War | 1:30PM MST, March 15, 2024

Ihor Poshyvailo is Director of the National Museum of Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Museum) and curator of the "Destroyed Temples of Ukraine" exhibit. He holds a PhD in History (Ethnology) from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Ex-chairman of the Museum Council at the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and the ICOM International Committee on Disaster Resilient Museums. When the full-scale Russian invasion started in February 2022 became initiator, co-founder and coordinator of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative (HERI) and a member of the National Council for the Recovery of Ukraine from the War.

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part I 1:30PM MST, March 16, 2024

Marina Sapritsky-Nahum is a social anthropologist and a visiting fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University College London (UCL) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her area of expertise is Jewish life in contemporary Ukraine. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine (2024, Indiana University Press). She has published articles and chapters on the themes of home and diaspora, cosmopolitanism, religious adherence, philanthropy, and heritage travel. Her current research is on Jewish Cultural Heritage funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and looks at the experiences of Ukrainian Jewish refugees in Europe and the effect of Russia's war in Ukraine on Jewish heritage.

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part I | 9:30AM MST, March 16, 2024

Pavlo Smytsynuk is the Mary Seeger O'Boyle Associate Research Scholar at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Department of Religion at Princeton University since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He specializes in political theology and religious nationalism in Orthodox Christianity and has written extensively on the politicization of religion in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. He is currently writing a book on explicating the category of religion as an instrument of anti-colonial struggle. Prior to the invasion, he was the Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies and a Senior Lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. He is a specialist on the intersection of theology, politics and ethics and has spearheaded several international-collaborative projects on Eastern Christian identity, religion, war, and peacebuilding.

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part II | 3:00PM MST, March 16, 2024

Tatiana Vagramenko is a social anthropologist and a religious studies scholar. She is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork and a principal investigator of the SFI-IRC Pathway-funded project "History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine." Her work focuses on the anthropology of religion in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia and the complex history of the entanglement of religion with the Soviet secret police and its legacy in the post-communist context. She is a co-editor, with James Kapaló, of Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (2020, Lit Verlag) and, with Nadezhda Beliakova, of The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR (2024, Lexington Books). She received her PhD in anthropology from the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 16, 2024

Dmytro Vovk is currently a visiting professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Prior to 2022, Vovk was Director of the Center for the Rule of Law and Religion at the Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Ukraine, where he was also Professor of Law. Vovk is a preeminent expert on constitutional law, and has authored and edited numerous books and articles. He has submitted influential briefs to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, the Supreme Court of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian State Agency for Ethnic Policies and Freedom of Conscience, and policy papers on religion and forced displacement. He has served as a religious freedom advisor to several international institutions, including the UN Population Fund, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion of Belief, OSCE, and USAID. As a respected international religious freedom expert, he has been involved in interfaith dialogue and church-state relations in Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, the Balkan countries, and Ukraine.

Catherine Wanner is a historical anthropologist and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Using ethnographic and archival methods, her research centers on the politics of religion and increasingly on conflict mediation, ecocide, and trauma healing. Her two most recent publications are Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell, 2022), which won two book prizes, and an edited volume, Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Routledge, 2024). She is currently writing a book entitled, Ecocide, Animals, and Empathy after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity and in 2023 she received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies. She is the Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute for 2023-24.

Frank E. Sysyn is director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, and editor in chief of the Hrushevsky Translation Project. A specialist in Ukrainian and Polish history, he is the author of Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600-1653 (1985), Mykhailo Hrushevsky: Historian and National Awakener (2001), and studies on the Khmelnytsy Uprising, Ukrainian historiography, and early modern Ukrainian political culture. He is also coauthor, with Serhii Plokhy, of Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (2003). He is editor in chief of the publication of the collected works of Mykhailo Zubrytsky (1856-1919).

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 15, 2024

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part II | 3:00PM MST, March 16, 2024

Indre Cuplinskas is an Associate Professor at St. Joseph's College at the University of Alberta. She is a historian of Christianity with a degree in theology, specializing in 20th century Catholicism. She is currently completing a monograph that examines Catholic youth movements in the first half of the 20th century across the Northwestern world - in Quebec, Germany, and Lithuania.

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 16, 2024

Anna Olenenko serves as the Research Assistant at the Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta, and is doing her PhD in the Media and Cultural Studies program at the MLCS Department, University of Alberta. Anna got her previous degrees at Zaporizhzhia National University and the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. Her research interests include environmental history of the Ukrainian steppe and the reflection of nature transformation in culture. 

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part I | 9:30AM MST, March 16, 2024

John-Paul Himka is a professor emeritus in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. He specializes in Ukrainian history and has written extensively on Ukrainian church history, religious culture, and Ukrainian Jewish relations.

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part I | 9:15AM MST, March 15, 2024

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part I | 9:30AM MST, March 16, 2024

Jeff Stepnisky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Community and International Development at MacEwan University. He teaches classes in sociological theory and social memory, and conducts research on the sociology of selfhood, memory, space, atmosphere, and Ukraine. He has published in journals such as Emotion, Space and Society, Space and Culture, and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior and is co-author with George Ritzer of textbooks on Sociological Theory and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists. He is currently conducting research on classical sociological theory in Ukraine, memory and the Maidan Museum, and the spaces of memory of Ukrainians in Edmonton. 

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part I | 1:30PM MST, March 16, 2024

Marko Živković is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. His publications include Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (Indiana UP 2011) and chapters in Vehicles: Cars, Canoes and other Metaphors of Moral Imagination (Berghahn 2014), Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader (Bloomsbury Academic 2016) and Everyday Life in the Balkans (Indiana UP 2019). He co-edited the final volume in the Berghahn Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Series, Tropological Thought and Action: Essays on the poetics of Imagination (Berghahn 2022).

Session: Reacting to the Experience of War | 1:30PM MST, March 15, 2024

Sean Patterson is a History PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. He is currently researching the ideology and identity of the Civil War-era Ukrainian Makhnovist movement for his dissertation. Patterson is the author of Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War (1917-1921) [University of Manitoba Press, 2020].

Session: The Orthodox Impasse, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 15, 2024

Volodymyr Kravchenko is Professor in the Department of History, Classics and Religion at the University of Alberta and Director of the Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta. He is the author of more than 180 publications on modern history and historiography of Ukraine.

Session: Reacting to the Experience of War | 1:30PM MST, March 15, 2024

David R. Marples is Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Classics, and Religion, University of Alberta and teaches Russian and East European history. His chief areas of interest are Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, and he is also Research Fellow with the Contemporary Ukraine Centre at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta (appointed March 2022). At the University of Alberta, his honours include both the University Cup and the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research. He is a board member of the Kule Institute of Advanced Studies and the Wirth Austrian Centre. His recent media appearances, mostly on Russia's war in Ukraine and on contemporary Belarus, took place in eighteen countries over the past year. He also gave critical briefings to the Department of National Defense and Canada's NATO office in 2022-23. 

Session: Transnational Dynamics of the Religious Landscape, Part II | 11:00AM MST, March 16, 2024

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is the Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Professor and Huculak Chair in Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography at the University of Alberta. She is an expert in the areas of oral history, ethnicity, migration, post-socialist transition, and Ukrainian, Eastern European, and Ukrainian Canadian cultures. She is deeply involved in community research and learning, and was the founder and editor of the Engaged Scholar Journal and co-founder of the Witnessing the War in Ukraine Summer Institute. A native of Kyiv, Dr. Khanenko-Friesen is the author or co-author of several books, including the 2018 Kobzar Award finalist Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century.

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part I | 1:30PM MST, March 16, 2024

Stephen W. Martin is Professor of Theology and Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies and Theology at The King's University in Edmonton, Alberta. He has researched and published in the area of political theology, focusing on the transition in South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He did commissioned research for the TRC on the South African churches during and after apartheid. Martin has also served in different capacities as a lay theologian in the Anglican Church of Canada. He is a member of the Parish of Christ Church, Edmonton. He is married to Susan Oliver, an Archdeacon in the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton. They have two children, Simon and Amelia, and a poodle named Ben. 

Session: Religious Organizations and Peacemaking, Part II | 3:00PM MST, March 16, 2024