Anna Barcz is an Associate Professor at the T. Manteuffel Institute of History (Spatial History Lab), Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) in Warsaw. She has held European fellowships, including the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Trinity Long Room Hub (Trinity College Dublin) and the Rachel Carson Center Fellowship at LMU Munich. Trained as a philosopher and literary scholar at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of Literary Research (PAS), she is distinguished by research that brings literary and cultural archives into conversation with environmental history – showing how narratives, memory, and cultural imaginaries shape ecological knowledge and public debate. Her recent work foregrounds rivers as historical and cultural actors, recovering overlooked sources and developing humanities-based methods for understanding socio-environmental change across time and space. The results of her teams’ work have appeared in leading journals for the eco-debate and underline the humanities’ contribution to environmental research (e.g., Environmental Hazards, Space and Culture, Water History, Secondary Texts). She is also the author of three monographs: Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe: Literature, History and Memory (Bloomsbury 2020, 2021); Animal Narratives and Culture: Vulnerable Realism (CSP 2017); Ecorealism: from Ecocriticism to Zoocriticism in Polish Literature (in Polish, 2016).

Researcher, art historian. Between 2015 and 2019, Nataliia studied Oriental Studies at the bachelor's level in Kyiv, followed by a master's degree in Art History from 2022 to 2024. Starting in 2024, she enrolled as a PhD candidate at the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine’s Modern Art Research Institute. Her research interests include Soviet agriculture, Ukrainian black soil history (chornozem), experiments in cultivating introduced plant species, documentary photography, and the Ukrainian art of the first half of the 20th century. 

Nataliia completed the online course Ukraine’s Environment: From Imperial Frontiers to Ecocidal War (CEU) in 2025. She participated in the first edition of the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine — Epistemologies, Agencies, and Margins and is now a participant in the second edition, Art History in the Expanded Field. In 2026, she also completed a research fellowship at the Center for Urban History (Lviv).

Oleksii Chebotarov is a guest lecturer in Environmental History at the Central European University in Vienna. He is also a research fellow with the KLIMER: Climate, Environment and Energy research group at the University of Oslo and with the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St. Gallen. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at the University of Vienna, the University of St. Gallen, New Europe College in Bucharest, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, and the Ukrainian Catholic University. He earned his PhD in Social Studies from the University of St. Gallen in 2021.

Yevhenii Hohin is a first-year Teleinformatics student at Poznań University of Technology. In 2025 he took the course “Ukraine’s Environment: From Imperial Frontiers to Ecocidal War” within the Invisible University for Ukraine program at the Central European University. Yevhenii’s research interests lies in environmental history and the way international law applies to the ongoing armed conflicts.

Andrianna-Mariia Kis is an M1 student in the AIRE programme (Approaches to Interdisciplinary Research and Education) at the Learning Planet Institute, Université Paris Cité, with a background in medicine and genetics. Her current research is in biophysics, and her broader interests lie at the intersection of physics and biological or ecological systems, including applications of percolation theory to war-damaged Ukrainian landscapes. She also writes poetry in Ukrainian and contributes essays on science and the philosophy of science to a general readership.

Yuliia Kishchuk is a multidisciplinary researcher whose work moves across environmental humanities, critical craft studies, and the history of late socialism in Ukraine. She holds an MA in Gender History from the Central European University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Södertörn University in Sweden. Her doctoral research examines artisan communities in the Ukrainian Carpathians during the late Soviet to early Independence period, with a particular focus on labour and materiality, and the entanglements between community, craft, and place. Recent publications include Kishchuk, Yuliia. 2026. “Split Gills as Companion Species: On Mushrooms, Nuclear Colonialism, and War.” In Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, edited by Adrian Ivakhiv, 166–174. McGill-Queen’s University Press. https://www.mqup.ca/Books/T/Terra-Invicta3; Kishchuk, Yuliia, 2026. “Cross-Stitches That Bind Us Together: Embroidering in Ukraine and Palestine.” South-South Movement. https://www.southsouthmovement.org/dialogues/cross-stitches-that-bind-us-together-embroidering-in-ukraine-and-palestine/

Volodymyr Kulikov is a historian and Lecturer in Ukrainian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research focuses on the business and economic history of Eastern Europe, with particular interests in industrialisation, natural resource extraction, and enterprise development in Ukraine and the Russian Empire. He has published on big business, industrial history and heritage, and the history of company towns in Ukraine.

Sławomir Łotysz is a historian of science, medicine, and technology, with a particular interest in environmental history. His most recent major work is the award-winning book The Pripet Marshes: Nature, Knowledge, and Politics in Polish Polesie until 1945 (Polish title: Pińskie Błota. Natura, wiedza i polityka na polskim Polesiu do 1945 roku, Kraków, 2022), which examines the environmental history of Europe's largest wetlands. He was the principal investigator in an international research project entitled "Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health in the 20th and 21st Centuries," funded by the EU's CHANSE (Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe) program. From 2017 to 2021, he was president of the International Committee for the History of Technology. He is currently a professor at the Institute of the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

Julia Malitska (PhD, History), is a senior researcher at Södertörn University, Stockholm (Sweden), which published her doctoral dissertation as the monograph Negotiating Imperial Rule: Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Steppe (2017). In 2019–2022, Malitska conducted a post-doctoral project on the history of vegetarian social activism in the late Russian empire, with journal articles published, including in Media History and Global Food History. She is a co-editor of Consumption and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russia in the Twentieth Century (2023). Malitska’s current project, titled “To eat or not to eat: Human health, scientific knowledge, and the biopolitics of meat in Eastern Europe in 1860s–1939,” deals with the intertwined histories of food, scientific knowledge, and animals in the late Romanov empire and early Soviet Union.

Sofiia Nazaruk, Center for Urban History, Ukrainian Catholic University, received her bachelor’s degree at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Department of German Philology (2021). She participated in the DAAD scholarship program at Heidelberg University in 2019. Since 2025, she has been pursuing a master’s degree in “The Future of Heritage” at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Her thesis title: “Patron the Demining Dog: Non-Human Agency, War, and the Making of Animal-Sensitive Memory in Contemporary Ukraine”. At the Center for Urban History, she is responsible for organizing and conducting public history events and distributing the institution’s publications. She is involved in organizing academic events and works as an assistant for the educational platform “REESOURCES: Rethinking Eastern Europe.” Research interests: Animal studies, Human-animal relations, Environmental history, Public History, Memory studies.

Anna Olenenko is a PhD Candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta and a research assistant at the Kule Folklore Centre and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. She received her Candidate of Sciences in History degree from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2013. Anna is a co-founder of the EnvHistUA Research Group. She serves as the Regional Representative of Ukraine, Chair of Council of Regional Representatives and a member of the Board of the European Society for Environmental History. Anna’s research interests include the environmental history of Ukraine, particularly the Steppe region, animal studies, and oral history. Her recent publications include a co-authored chapter with Stefan Dorondel, “In Quest of Development: Territorialization and the Transformation of the Southern Ukrainian Wetlands, 1880–1960,” in A New Ecological Order: Development and the Transformation of Nature in Eastern Europe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), pp. 65–86; a chapter titled “Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge,” in Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally (Berghahn, 2023), pp. 151–173; and “‘Our New Sea Is Our New Grief’: The Conflict between the Ukrainian and the Soviet in the Struggle to Construct the Landscape of the Lower Dnipro,” in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (Edmonton and Toronto), vol. 11, no. 2, 2024 (forthcoming).

Dr. Tetiana Perga has 30 years of experience at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and is currently a research fellow at the Technical University of Berlin. She is a member of the European Society for Environmental History and the Leo Baeck Institute Research Group in Jewish Environmental History, serves as an expert for the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, and sits on the editorial boards of three Ukrainian scientific journals. Her projects were supported by DAAD, DFG, Volkswagen Foundation, Simon Dubnow Institute in Germany and Alexanderi Institute in Finland. She participates in the Ukrainian Global History Initiative, writing the environmental history of Ukraine. She has authored 140 articles, co-authored 8 books, and written 2 monographs on environmental history.

Kateryna Pokora is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Kremenchuk, currently living and working in Lviv. She explores the relationship between humans and the environment, focusing on interdependence and vulnerability. Her practice problematises the anthropocentric perspective that treats landscapes and ecosystems not as autonomous worlds but as resources for use and exploration. Through installation, objects, photography and graphics, she works to delineate possibilities for multispecies coexistence. Her recent research engages with questions of nonhuman labour, bioremediation and the instrumentalization of living organisms within extractive economies. As a participant of the IUFU program at CEU, her recent papers include "Between Repair and Extraction: Bioremediation in Ukraine's Waterscape" and "Color of Cyan: Witnessing Colonial Damage through Algal Bloom". Her works have been shown at the solo exhibition Stagnant waters (Mala gallery, Kyiv) and in group exhibitions including Voices from Ukraine (Labirynt, Lublin) and Altered Landscapes (UPV gallery, Valencia).

Michał Pospiszyl is an Assistant Professor of History at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest. In the academic year 2026/27, he will be a fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) at Harvard University. He was the principal investigator on two grants from the National Science Centre and has held fellowships at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, as well as visiting fellowships at New York University, Yale University, and MIT. He is also a fellow of the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education 2025-2028.

Pospiszyl is currently completing a book on escape ecologies in Eastern Europe during the Enlightenment. The project examines how landscapes, natural resources, and environmental opacity enabled the large-scale migration of peasants, deserters, and religious dissidents into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during a period frequently characterized as one of political and economic decline. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, Journal of Social History, and Environmental History. He lives in the Białowieża Forest.

Apolinary Rzońca is a historian and digital humanities researcher specializing in environmental history, surveillance studies, AI-assisted historical methodologies, and the cultural history of modernity. He is an assistant professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD in Digital Humanities from the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) in cooperation with the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology (PJATK).

He is currently engaged in research on the environmental history of the Portuguese-speaking world, particularly the environmental consequences of Portuguese colonialism, within the NCN OPUS project “Imperial Commoners of Brazil and West Africa (1640–1822): Global History from a Correspondence Network Perspective” (project leader: Dr. Agata Błoch). He also collaborates with Prof. Anna Barcz on environmental humanities and water history research. He was the principal investigator of the project Human and Environmental Consequences of Forced Land Reclamation Works in the General Government, funded by the Jan Karski Institute of War Losses, and is currently developing this research into a scholarly monograph.

Daria Syvakos is an artist and researcher whose work examines hidden infrastructures and their effects on memory and land. Daria works with the concept of disaster rehearsals to study how collapse is engineered as a tool of control and to explore strategies of resistance. She programs simulations that reconstruct altered or destroyed spaces. Daria’s projects trace the life cycles of built environments and imagine possible futures in places marked by war and extraction.

Adam Świątek, PhD, is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History, Jagiellonian University. His research focuses on the history of Poles and Ruthenians in the 19th century, with particular emphasis on the formation of national identity and historical consciousness. He is also interested in press history and biographical studies. He serves as editor‑in‑chief of Krakowskie Pismo Kresowe, secretary of the East European Commission of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Polish‑Slovak Commission of Historians of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Iryna Zamuruieva is a researcher and artist interested in human-environmental relations. She writes, photographs, organises participatory projects, and translates. Zamuruieva is currently working on a PhD dissertation at the University of Oxford, where she continues to develop her project “A Field from Afar” — a rapeseed-focused investigation into the environmental history and political ecology of agriculture in Ukraine. Originally from Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine, she spent six years in Scotland, where she led projects on climate and land policy at the sustainability charity Verture. She has recently been an artist in residence at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow, a research fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, the curator of an interdisciplinary art residency and of exhibitions at Climate Art Labs in Chernivtsi and Kyiv. She is a co-editor of the Ukrainian journal Commons.