Issue 6 | Contributors

Hélène B. Ducros (JD, PhD, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) is a human geographer whose research has focused on the reinvention of territories and identities and placemaking through heritage-making. She has published in various venues, including the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Global Environmental Politics, Island Studies Journal, Explorations in Place Attachment, the Handbook of Place, and the International Handbook of Walking. She co-edited Decentering European Studies: Perspectives on Europe from its Beyond (UNESP – World Society Foundation, 2025) and Justice in Climate Action Planning (Springer, 2022). In parallel, she has been interested in place-based pedagogies and experiential learning, as well as the role of language in knowledge acquisition and critical thinking, in particular through the languages-across-the-curriculum approach. She is the founder and editor of GlobalEurope Journal.

Oksana Ermolaeva holds a PhD in the history of Central and Eastern Europe from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). She is a part of the “Transnational Encounters on a Global Campus: Academic Mobility (20th–21st Centuries)” project (Transcampus), led by the Ministry of Science, Spain. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), supported by the Scholars-at-Risk Program (2023–2025) and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Düsseldorf, Germany). Her research interests include the history of Communist regimes and the history of borders and borderlands. Her latest publications appear in the European Review of History Journal (Revue Européenne d’Histoire) as “Combating Smuggling in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Strategies, Specificities, and Enduring Legacies (2026), and in Decentering European Studies: Perspectives on Europe From its Beyond (Ducros et al., UNESP, 2025).

Heidi Hein-Kircher is Director of the Martin Opitz Library (Herne) and Professor for German History and Culture in Eastern Europe. From 2003 to 2024, she was Head of the Department “Academic Forum” at the Herder-Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe and a member of the Leibniz-Association in Marburg (Germany).

Emsale Jahiu-Pali is a biology teacher at the Secondary School Vëllazërim-Bashkim in Ulcinj, Montenegro. Drawing on professional experience in both education and healthcare, she works at the intersection of science learning and student development. Her interests include practical science education, scientific literacy, and the role of inquiry-based learning in fostering meaningful engagement with biology. She is particularly interested in how educational opportunities shape students’ relationships with science and their capacity to engage with scientific knowledge in everyday life.

Elizabeth B. Jones retired in 2019 from Colorado State University and now lives in Corvallis, Oregon. Her scholarship focused on rural Germany, gender, internal colonization, and the environment and includes articles published in Central European History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, German History, Agricultural History, and Continuity and Change, among others.  Her book, Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871-1933, appeared in 2009. She lived in eastern Germany between 1993 and 1996, mainly in Leipzig and Dresden, and has made frequent returns since then. In 2021, she began a large oak savanna and meadow restoration project in Corvallis. She joined the research editorial board of Global Europe: A Journal Placing Europe in the World, in 2025. 

Dr. Taras Mahlay was an internist at University Hospitals of Cleveland for over 30 years. He is now the President of the Cleveland Maidan Association, where he focuses on medical supply procurement and physician and medic training programs in Ukraine. He also serves as the president of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives and is the administrator and an instructor at a musical bandura school.

The Vorarlberg Office of Administrative Innovation (Austria) was created in spring 2025, as the successor to the Office of Voluntary Engagement and Participation (Büro für Freiwilliges Engagement und Beteiligung). It is charged with the organization of Citizens’ Assemblies, a model of participatory democracy emulated across Austria, Europe, and the world.

Nicholas Ostrum is Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University and holds a PhD from Stony Brook University. He has published research and reviews in various fora, including the International History Review, Central European History, Energy Humanities, EuropeNow, Journal of World History, and edited volumes on global Germany. His current project analyzes West Germany’s petroleum, development, and political relations with Syria and Libya from the 1950s through the 1973/4 Oil Crisis.

Edina Paleviq is a political scientist specializing in democratic theory, political legitimacy, and institutional change. Her research examines democracy, civil society, nationalism, and citizen participation, with a growing focus on the implications of digital transformation and artificial intelligence for contemporary governance. She combines political theory with comparative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches to explore evolving relationships between technology, power, and political institutions.

Christine Penz is a specialist in German-language education with professional experience spanning Austria and Southeast Europe. Over the course of her career, she has taught in a wide variety of educational settings, including universities, secondary schools, adult education programs, literacy courses, and German-language courses for speakers of other languages. Her work has brought her into contact with learners from diverse linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, including migrants and refugees navigating new educational and social environments. These experiences have given her a distinctive perspective on language learning not only as an educational process but also as a pathway to participation, opportunity, and integration. She currently works in the field of language assessment and certification.

Tatiana Vagramenko is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and affiliated researcher at University College Cork. Her interdisciplinary work combines anthropology, history, archival studies, and computational humanities to investigate Cold War secret police archives, religion, surveillance, and the legacies of authoritarianism in Europe. Focusing particularly on Soviet-era KGB records, she uses ethnographic, oral historical, visual, and computational methods to study archival practices and the production of historical knowledge. She is co-author of The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR (Lexington Books, 2025) and Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (Lit Verlag, 2020), and author of Indigenous Christianity: Missionary, Modernity and Marginality in the Nenets Tundra (Central European University Press, 2026, open access).

Paul Warde is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Cambridge. He has published numerous books and article on the theme of energy and environmental history, including Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Past Five Centuries (2013), with Astrid Kander and Paolo Malanima, and The Invention of Sustainability (2018).

Jiarui Zhou is a doctoral researcher at University College London. Her work broadly engages with film, gender, and visual culture, with a particular interest in contemporary Chinese cinema. She is also a curator whose work explores contemporary film culture through screenings and public programs.

Art Exhibition | Literary Excerpts

Néhémy Dahomey, born in Port-au-Prince, is a writer, poet, and philosopher based in Paris. He is the author of Mots épars, Emmuré, Rapatriés, and Combats, the original French edition of Duels.

Nathan H. Dize is an assistant professor of French at Washington University in Saint Louis and a scholar of French Caribbean literature. He is the translator of The Immortals by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot.

Reza Ghassemi is an Iranian musician, playwright, and novelist. His plays, which won prestigious awards in Iran, were banned after the Islamic Revolution. He has since lived in exile in France, where he has pursued his career as a musician and writer with more freedom. In 2002, he was awarded the Golshiri Literary Award for Best First Novel—Iran’s most important literary prize—for Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime. Of his other two novels, The Spell Chanted by Lambs (Candle & Fog, 2015) has also been translated into English.

Bernhard Lang is a German photographer and visual artist. After an apprenticeship at Photostudio Anker in Munich, he worked as a freelance photo-assistant in advertising and fashion. He now freelances for national and international agencies, galleries, and magazines. His work has been published in numerous, prestigious outlets, such as Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, National Geographic Magazine, Il Corriere della Sera, and Art Magazine, among others. His work has been shown in exhibitions worldwide and his photos are held in corporate and private collections.

Michelle Quay is a scholar, researcher, and translator of Persian literature. She teaches Persian language and literature, in addition to Iranian cinema and culture, at Brown University in Providence, RI. She holds a PhD in medieval Persian literature from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Scholar. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022) and has collaborated on scholarly translations of medieval Persian rhetoric manuals as a postdoctoral researcher. Meanwhile, her contemporary literary translation work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Asymptote, Two Lines Press, and elsewhere. She was the inaugural winner of the Mo Habib Translation Prize for Persian literature in 2023.