Venelin I. Ganev is Professor in Political Science and a faculty associate of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University of Ohio. His main fields of interest are postcommunist politics, democratization studies, constitutionalism, and modern social theory. His book, Preying on the State: The Transformation of Postcommunist Bulgaria, was published in 2007 by Cornell University Press. His publications have appeared in East European Constitutional Review, American Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of Democracy, East European Politics and Societies, Communist and Postcommunist Studies, Slavic Review, Europe-Asia Studies and Comparative Studies in Society and History. He has also contributed chapters to several volumes that explore various aspects of institution-building in contemporary Europe.
Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her most recent books is Nations Under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy.
Julie Hemment is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Empowering Women in Russia: Aid, NGOs and Activism (Bloomington, 2007), and Youth Politics in Putin's Russia: Producing Patriots and Entrepreneurs (Bloomington, 2015).
Abby Innes is Assistant Professor of European Political Economy at the European Institute, London School of Economics. Her research to date has centred on the political economy of the state and party-state relations in central Europe, but she has “gone west,” and is writing a book on what the marketization of the state means for democratic government in advanced capitalist countries.
Sarah Oates is Professor and Senior Scholar at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an expert in media, elections, and democratization. Her most recent book is Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere (Oxford University Press).
Agnieszka Pasieka is a socio-cultural anthropologist, currently working at the University of Vienna, where she conducts research on far-right networks in east-central Europe. Her research and teaching interests encompass anthropology of religion and politics, issues of pluralism and diversity, majority-minority relations, and qualitative methodology. Her first monograph, Hierarchy and Pluralism: Living Religious Difference in Catholic Poland, appeared with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. Since 2016, she has served as the president of the Polish Studies Association.
Brian Porter-Szűcs is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and the author most recently of Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (Wiley, 2014). His earlier work includes Faith and Fatherland: Modernity, Catholicism, and Poland (Oxford, 2011) and When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in 19th century Poland (Oxford, 2000).
Peter Rutland is Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, associate editor of Russian Review, and editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers. In 2016 he was a visiting Leverhulme professor at the University of Manchester, working on the project “Visualizing the Nation.” He is currently editing (with Ray Taras) a volume on nation-building in the post-soviet states.
