Team Members

Ole Frahm is a political scientist who has worked as lecturer and researcher in the UK, Algeria, Turkey and Switzerland in addition to his native Germany. Currently, he works as senior researcher at the University of Iceland as part of the Horizon Europe project RECLAIM that analyzes disinformation’s effect on contemporary democracies. In addition, he teaches at the University of St Gallen and at Leuphana University Lüneburg and, since 2022, has been a visiting fellow at Kadir Has University’s Department of International Relations in Istanbul. From 2017-2019, Dr. Frahm worked at the Center for Governance and Culture as part of the Horizon2020 project EU-STRAT on Turkey’s policy towards the EU’s Eastern Partnership. Since then, he has conducted projects for the GCE on Crisis Populism (2022-23) and on Feminist Security Policy (2024). His ongoing research focuses on how principles of feminist foreign policy can be transposed to the field of security policy and on how post-truth discourses impact migration policy in Europe. Ole has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (University of Oxford), an MA in European studies (University of Bath, Science Po Paris and Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences) and a PhD in political science from Humboldt University Berlin.

Dr. phil. Tatjana Hofmann is a researcher, writer and translator. She studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin and received her PhD in Slavic Studies (summa cum laude) from the University of Zurich. Before returning to St. Gallen, Tatjana held a fellowship at the Collegium Helveticum (ETH, UZH, ZHdK), and several positions at the University of Zurich, most of them funded by the Swiss National Foundation. As an early postdoc, she was part of the D-A-CH project team on Ukrainian regionalism under the direction of Ulrich Schmid. 

Her research focuses on Eastern European literatures and cultures from the 19^th to the 21^st century, especially the avant-garde, post-socialism, intersections between art and ethnography, documentarism, and Black Sea studies. 

Wilfried Jilge ist Osteuropahistoriker, Lehrbeauftragter an der Universität Leipzig und assoziierter Wissenschaftler am „Center for Governance and Culture in Europe“ der Universität St. Gallen. An der Universität Leipzig erstellt er derzeit eine monographische Untersuchung im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts „Heroischer Nationalismus: Der Sudetendeutsche Kameradschaftsbund und die Konstruktion sudetendeutscher Identität in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik“ (Leitung: Prof. Dr. Stefan Troebst), das zwischen 2012 und 2014 am Institut für Slavistik/Lehrstuhl Kulturstudien angesiedelt war, vom Beauftragten der deutschen Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (BKM) gefördert und von Wilfried Jilge als wissenschaftlichem Mitarbeiter und koordiniert wurde.

Neben der Erforschung der völkisch-antidemokratischen Bewegung in den böhmischen Ländern bilden die Zeitgeschichte und Politik der Ukraine Hauptschwerpunkte seiner Arbeit, denen er sich als bereits als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas (GWZO) an der Universität Leipzig (2001-2010) widmete. Gegenstand seiner Forschungen und Publikationen der letzten Jahre bilden u.a. die Themen Geschichts- und Identitätspolitik in der Ukraine, regionale politische und kollektive Identitäten in der Ukraine und Ostmitteleuropa, Geschichte der nachstalinistischen Sowjetukraine, deutsch/europäisch-ukrainischen Beziehungen im Rahmen von EU-Integration und Europäischer Nachbarschaftspolitik sowie innen- und außenpolitische Aspekte der Ukraine-Russland-Krise. Zu weiteren Schwerpunkten zählen außerdem die Analyse der ukrainisch-russischen Beziehungen, des russischen Nationalismus sowie geopolitischer, pan(ost-)slawischer und identitätspolitischer Konzepte („Russische Welt“) im postsowjetischen Russland. Themen der ukrainischen Zeitgeschichte behandelt Wilfried Jilge auch im Rahmen seiner universitären Lehrtätigkeit (z.B. Seminar „Nationsbildung und Geschichtspolitik in der modernen Ukraine“ im Rahmen eines Lehrauftrages am Slavischen Seminar der Universität Basel, Herbstsemester 2014/15).

Dr. Bogdan Kolesnyk is a scholar specializing in Ukrainian political discourse and political thought. He received his Ph.D. (magna cum laude) on political narratives in Ukraine from the University of St. Gallen under the supervision of Prof. Ulrich Schmid. Originally trained in finance and economics, he pursues his academic activities in parallel with a career in business.

Dr. Tornike Metreveli is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Christianity, Nationalism, and Populism at Lund University. Tornike received his doctorate in sociology (magna cum laude) from the University of Bern (2017), where he worked under Professor Christian Joppke’s supervision. Before joining St. Gallen, where he taught numerous courses and held an International Postdoctoral Fellowship between 2017-2020, Tornike was a Swiss National Science Foundation Mobility fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Metreveli’s research focuses on nationalism studies and the sociology of Orthodox Christianity. 

Dr. Metreveli is a Principal Investigator of the GCE project “Coronavirus: A New Test(ament) of Orthodox Christianity,” which examines the responses of Orthodox churches to the global pandemic. Tornike is a Team Lead in GCE’s project “Territoriality of the Georgian Orthodox Church” in collaboration with the INDIGO fund.

Catherine Wanner is a Professor at the Pennsylvania State University with appointments in the departments of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies.  She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author or editor of six books on Ukraine.  Her most recent book, Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2022), is a study of how an affective atmosphere of religiosity has shaped key historical events, including the Maidan protests, and has influenced the expansion of religiosity in public space and public institutions. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. In 2016-17 she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology of Humboldt University and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. She was awarded the 2020 Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity.

She is currently conducting research on religion and conflict mediation in Ukraine. The goal of this ethnographic research is to understand how facilitated dialogue can influence forms of participatory democracy as part of greater efforts to solve tangible problems of everyday life. This research considers how such forms of engagement might cultivate, mobilize, and sometimes transform (for better or for worse) theo-political values of trust, hope, and empathy, meaning shared cultural values with distinct religious underpinnings that have direct political relevance, and affect relationships and prospects for change in communities across Ukraine.
She is the convener of the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, a research network that sponsors an annual conference and monthly seminars, thanks to support from the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen University.