About Us

Ukraine Decolonial Studies Network is operated by the Executive Board that oversees the activity of the Network, supports its development, and undertakes decisions regarding project launches, membership, fundraising, and programming.

Executive Board Members

Svitlana Biedarieva

Dr. Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator. She is the author of the book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the editor of Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (Routledge, 2024) and Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives (ibidem Press, 2021), among others. Dr. Biedarieva is the General Editor of The Harvard History of Ukrainian Art forthcoming book series. She serves as President-Elect of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) and is the Founder of Ukraine Decolonial Studies Network. She has published texts in leading academic journals and media outlets, such as October, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper. Dr. Biedarieva holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Olha Korniienko

Dr. Olha Korniienko is a Ukrainian historian specializing in the history of fashion and material culture, with a particular focus on Ukraine and the Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) for Ukraine Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany. She is also the founder of the Digital Archive of Ukrainian Fashion History and has experience in organizing fashion exhibitions. Her research interests include Ukrainian fashion, Ukrainian culture and identity, Ukrainian diaspora, visual and material culture, Cold War cultural diplomacy, and late Soviet everyday life

Sandra Joy Russel

Dr. Sandra Joy Russell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Trained in Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her work explores the material and cultural expressions of gender, sexuality, and race in Eastern Europe and transnationally, with a focus on the biopolitical entanglements of state and nation-building projects. Dr. Russell’s latest article, “‘She’s Our Fathers’ Daughter’: Soviet Citizens and the ‘Free Angela Davis’ Movement— Re-imagining Communist Belonging under Brezhnev” was published in American Communist History. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the Editor of Ukraïnica: Ukraine’s Primary Database—an online catalogue of English Translations of Ukrainian Literature and Film supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Kateryna Yeremieieva

Dr. Kateryna Yeremieieva defended her dissertation on the political humor of Soviet Ukraine at the Department of History of Ukraine, Faculty of History, V. N. Karazin National University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In 2018, she published her monograph, To Beat Satire: The Magazine Perets in the Socio-Cultural Milieu of Soviet Ukraine, with the support of the Kowalski Foundation and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. From 2016 to 2023, she served as an Associate Professor at the Department of History and Philology, Ukrainian State University of Railway Transport. In 2022–2023, she held a fellowship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (Germany). Since December 2023, Dr. Yeremieieva has been a researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre “Cultures of Vigilance” at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich as part of the Walter Benjamin Program, supported by the German Research Foundation. Her current research focuses on a book project exploring inappropriate humor in Ukraine throughout the 20th century.

Dr. Oksana Nesterenko is a music historian specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, religion, secularity, and postcolonial studies. She holds a PhD in Music History and Theory from Stony Brook University. Her current book project, A Forbidden Fruit? Sacred Music in the USSR before its Fall, supported by NEH, ACLS, AABS, and ARISC, explores music in Armenia, Estonia, and Ukraine in 1964-1991, illuminating the impact of imperial power on artistic practice and religious freedom. Dr. Nesterenko’s essays about Ukrainian music have been published in Musicology Now, The Claquers, and Bird In Flight, and are forthcoming in Perspectives on Ukrainian Music, edited by Peter J. Schmelz and Leah Batstone (Indiana University Press). In 2025-2026 she is a Visiting Scholar at the Jordan Center at New York University. She teaches at Union College, hosts contemporary music podcast Extended Techniques, and serves on the advisory board of Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in New York.

Dr. John Vsetecka is Assistant Professor of History at Nova Southeastern University where he researches and teaches about east European and Soviet history, famine, and transitional justice. He is a co-founder of H-Ukraine (part of the larger H-Net platform), which shares and promotes academic and scholarly content related to the study of Ukraine. John also serves as a host for the New Books Network podcast in Ukrainian Studies, and he is the Academic Advisor for the humanitarian group for Peace in Ukraine. He is the co-editor (with Daria Mattingly) of the fortchoming edited volume, The Holodomor in Global Perspective: How the Famine in Ukraine Shaped the World.