Our Faculty
Dmitry Dubrovsky
Ph.D. in History, research fellow at the Center for Independent Sociological Research, historian, graduate of the European University at St. Petersburg. Founder and instructor of the Human Rights Program at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2004-2015). Taught at Bard College (2014), Columbia University (2015-2017).
Research interests include freedom of speech and minority rights, academic rights and freedoms, special judicial expertise.
Alena
Marková
Ph.D. in History, researcher and national expert of the Czech Republic in the Horizon Europe Programme Committee of the Research and Innovation Department of the European Commission (Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society configuration). Delegate of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University at the Council of Higher Educational Institutions (RVŠ). Alena Marková is the principal investigator and the main grantee of numerous Czech and international educational and research projects (SVV UK, 4EU+Alliance, GAČR and others). Author of numerous publications on Belarusian history, winner of 'The Best Historical Monograph of the Year 2016 Award in Belarusian Studies' for the monograph “The Road Toward Soviet Nation. Nationality Policy of Belarussization, 1924-1929“ at the 7th International Congress of Belarusian Studies (Warsaw, 2017).
Official page
Research interests: contemporary history of Eastern Europe, nationalism and national identity, language policy and post-Soviet transformation.
Sergey Medvedev
Ph.D. in History, host of programs on Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, writer, and publicist. Worked as a researcher and lecturer in Italy, Germany, and Finland, served as a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Author of dozens of articles and 7 books on contemporary political issues and international relations, his collection of essays «The Return of the Russian Leviathan» has been translated into 12 languages and received the British Pushkin House Prize. In 2023, his book on the war in Ukraine, «A War Made in Russia» was published by the same publisher Polity in Cambridge.
Research interests: political history of Russia, theories of social and political transformation.
Stanislav
Tumis
Ph.D. in Philosophy, specializing in the history of Eastern Europe. Worked as an assistant at the Institute of World History at Charles University's Faculty of Arts, in 2018-2023 director of the Department of East European Studies at the same faculty.
Author of numerous academic articles. Regularly provides commentary on the history of Eastern Europe and current events in the media.
Research interests: history of the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ukraine, contemporary history of Eastern Europe.
Ivan
Fomin
Dr. Fomin holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and leads the Ideas for Russia initiative at the Boris Nemtsov Foundation. Previously, he worked as an associate professor at the Higher School of Economics and contributed to research projects at Jagiellonian University, INION RAN Center for Advanced Methods, MGIMO University, and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. He collaborated with the Center for European Policy Analysis, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and Ruhr University Bochum.
His research focuses on semiotic methodology and discourse analysis, as well as Russian politics, protest movements, ideology, and propaganda in contemporary Russia.
His articles have been published in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Demokratizatsiya, the European Journal of International Relations, International Theory, and Semiotica. He also contributes to The Moscow Times, Riddle Russia, and Russia.Post.
Ekaterina Rycheva
Ph.D. in Philology. Academic teaching: contemporary Russian language and language of mass media, language of advertising and politics, language of contemporary Russian and Soviet cinema. Leads seminars on the Russian language.
Research interests: contemporary Russian language and language of mass media, language of advertising and politics, language of contemporary Russian and Soviet cinema, phraseology, semantics, jargon, pragmalinguistics, sociolinguistics, diachronic and synchronic state of Czech and Russian languages.
Marek
Příhoda
Ph.D. in Philosophy, co-director of the Boris Nemtsov Academic Center, in 2011-2017 director of the Department of East European Studies at the Charles University's Faculty of Arts. Regularly comments on current events in Russia and Ukraine. Author of numerous academic articles.
Research interests: literature and history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages and early Modern Times.
Hanuš
Nykl
Associate Professor of Slavistics
Research interests: Russian philosophy of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, religion in Russia and Eastern Europe, Russian interwar emigration in Czechoslovakia.
He is published in the journals "Studies in East European Thought", "Slovanský přehled", "Slavia", "Философические письма".
Maria Kuznetsova
Master of Cultural Studies, doctoral student at the Department of Historical Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University.
Participant in research projects and organizer of international conferences (SVV UK, PROGRES Q18 FHS UK).
Research interests: history of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, studies of totalitarianism and post-totalitarian society, as well as the study of the ideas of patriotism and patriotic education in modern Russia.
Karel
Svoboda
lectures on Russia and relations in the post-Soviet space at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. He was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Rochester in 2012/13.
He has published more than twenty articles on the political economy of contemporary Russia in scholarly journals (including Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, International Studies Review), as well as scientific studies (Autocrat and his Time. Russia and the Revolution of 1830-1831 - in Czech, co-author of The Birth of a Superpower: The History of the Soviet Union 1917-1945 in Russian).
He is also the principal investigator of several international grants.
Guest lecturers
Every semester we invite leading experts on Russia and Eurasia to teach compulsory and elective courses
Timothy
Frye
Doctor of Political Science, professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University in the United States.
Author of the books «Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia», «Building States and Markets after Communism: Perils of Polarization for Democracies» and «Property Rights and Property Wrongs: How Power, Institutions, and Norms Shape Economic Conflict in Russia», «Weak Strongman: the limits of power in Putin's Russia».
Research interests: post-communist political and economic transition, comparative politics.
Andrey
Richter
Doctor of Historical Sciences, doctor of philological sciences specializing in journalism, professor-researcher at Comenius University in Bratislava, holding the title of professor of media studies in the Slovak Republic. Taught at universities in Austria, Great Britain, and the United States. Worked as director and senior advisor at the OSCE representative on freedom of the media office in Vienna.
Author of over 250 works on journalism and media regulation, including a textbook on the legal foundations of journalism, a textbook on international standards of media regulation, and a textbook on the legal foundations of Internet journalism.
Research interests: contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe, studies of nationalism and national identity, language policy, post-Soviet transformation processes, international standards of media regulation, legal foundations of Internet journalism.
Olga Solovyova
Bachelor of Political Science, Master of integrated communications, PhD candidate in Organizational Studies and Management.
Preparing a doctoral dissertation on the topic of political accountability of IT-companies in authoritarian regimes, author of scholarly articles on these issues in peer-reviewed journals.
Curates the direction of «Sustainable media in the era of digital authoritarianism» and teaches the course «Understanding digital authoritarianism» in the «Russian studies» program.
