Assessing President Zelenskyy's Wartime Leadership

A panel of experts will examine President Zelenskyy’s leadership style and how it has shaped Ukraine’s trajectory during the conflict.

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine is forthcoming, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020.

Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University, Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She has published five books, including Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Broadcasting through Information Wars with Hromadske Radio (2016) Ukraine Twenty Years After Independence: Assessments, Perspectives, Challenges (co-edited with Giovanna Brogi, 2015), Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience (co-edited with Oxana Gaman-Golutvina, 2009), articles in various journals including The Russian Journal of Communication (2014), Demokratizatsiya (2014), and regularly provides media commentary.

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, University of Alberta and other Western scholarly institutions. Since 2013, he serves as Ukraine’s representative in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity in contemporary Ukraine, media and discourse studies, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Dr. Olga

Onuch (DPhil Oxford 2010) is a Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Politics. She joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding posts at the University of Toronto (2010-2011), University of Oxford (2011-2014) and Harvard University (2013-2014). She is an Associate of Nuffield College (Oxford) and The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Onuch was also a Research Fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard) in 2017. Onuch’s comparative study of protest (elections, migration & identity) in Eastern Europe and Latin America has made her a leading expert in Ukrainian and Argentine politics specifically, but also in inter-regional comparative analysis. Her book “Mapping Mass Mobilizations” (2014, reviewed in Europe-Asia Studies), explores the processes leading up to mass protest engagement in Ukraine (2004) and Argentina (2001). She is the author of several scholarly articles (in Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, GeoPolitics among other journals), book chapters, and policy briefs.

Jessica Pisano is an Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She writes and teaches about contemporary and twentieth century politics in Eastern Europe. Her work focuses on the enclosure of public resources, the constitution of material and social power, and political and social processes of dispossession. She asks how shifts in political economy affect people’s lives, and how those effects translate into changes in local, national, and global politics. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on archival sources as well as a variety of immersion-based methods, including participant-observation research. Professor Pisano is the author of Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2022) and The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which received the Harvard University Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies in 2009.