Aleksandra Zdeb holds a PhD in Law and Politics from the University of Graz. She worked as a research assistant at the University of Zurich before taking up a postdoctoral position at Queen's University Belfast. She was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna and is currently a Visiting Researcher at Queen's University Belfast.

Her current research focuses on two projects: one examining the relationship between elite trust and power-sharing institutions, and another—funded by the Polish National Science Centre—investigating governance in divided cities across post-communist Europe.

Her research interests include conflict management, governance, and identity politics, with a particular focus on post-communist Europe. She has published extensively on post-conflict reconstruction and state-building in journals including Problems of Post-Communism, Ethnopolitics, Nationalities Papers, New Eastern Europe, and Swiss Political Science Review. She is also the co-editor of Democracy and Its Fragility: Mapping the Unstable Equilibrium. 

Her forthcoming monograph, Consociationalism and Its Unintended Consequences in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and North Macedonia: Appetite for Destruction?, will be published by Routledge the following winter.

During his two-year residency at the Taube Centre, Fabricio Carrijo is conducting the research project “(Dis)Trust in Refugee Shelter Governance: Lived Experiences across Humanitarian Settings.” He holds a PhD in Politics, Policies and International Relations from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of forced migration and peace and conflict studies, with particular emphasis on humanitarian responses, everyday peace, peacebuilding, refugee shelters, ethnography, decolonial approaches, and visual methodologies. He is a member of the North America Hub of Lancet Migration at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Humanitarian Health, and an affiliated researcher at the Jagiellonian Centre for Migration Studies. Previously, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and an Assistant Professor at the Federal University of Roraima, Brazil. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Wrocław and the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI).

During the two-year residency at the TC Marianna Lovato conducts a research project: "Populism, informality and democratic accountability in European foreign policy." Her research interests focus on European foreign and security policy, informality in global governance, and international diplomacy". Dr Lovato earned her PhD in Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, with a dissertation on the role of informality in EU foreign policy negotiations. Dr Lovato’s work has appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, Contemporary European Politics, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, and Journal of European Integration, among others. She is co-leader of the UACES research network RELATE

For more information go to Marianna Lovato

 

During a two-year residency at the Taube Centre, Paulina Lenik conducts a research project: "Reinventing democracy for unhappy ones: A comparative analysis of voting preferences and self-reported well-being in Central and Eastern Europe". Graduated from University College London in 2023 with a PhD in Economics supervised by Prof Korosteleva (UCL) and Prof Douarin (UCL). She holds a degree in diplomacy from Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford (2018) and a postgraduate diploma in foreign service from the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford (2017).  In 2014, she graduated from Jagiellonian University with a Master's Degree in European Studies. In 2012, she obtained a first-cycle degree in International Economic Relations from the Cracow University of Economics. Her current research interests include: illiberalism, democracy, economic determinants of populism, quantitative methods, survey data, attitudinal trends, electoral behaviour, Central and Eastern Europe.

 

During a two-year residency at the Taube Centre, he conducts a research project: "The final frontier? Democratizing EU foreign policy through citizens engagement". Before joining the Taube Centre, Jost was a Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Director of the Institute for German and European Studies. His monograph ‘Contested Diplomacy of the European External Action Service’ explored the institutional politics behind the creation of the EU’s diplomatic service. He has previously taught American studies at Leiden University and European politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands as well as at the European Institute of Public Administration. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from Loughborough University and was a visiting PhD student at the University of Cambridge.

is a researcher in political science. During the residency at the Taube Centre, she conducts a research project: “The Impact of Stabilitocracies on EU Integration: A Comparative Analysis of the Lack of Media Freedom in the EU and Accession Countries”.  She graduated with a PhD and a MA in European Studies from Cardiff University in 2018. Her research interests include media freedom in the Western Balkans and its impact on EU integration.

Dr. Laura Chazel, 2022/2023

During one one-year residency at the Jagiellonian University dr. Laura Chazel conducted a research project: European left-wing populism and the radicalization of (liberal) democracy: a comparative analysis of the Belgian, French, Greek and Spanish cases

During his two-year residency at the Taube Centre, dr. Ivan Kozachenko was working on a project that explored discursive constructiothe n of Polish-Ukrainian past in the cities of L’viv and Kharkiv. The Euromaidan revolution followed by the Russian aggression forced re-negotiation of political and symbolic boundaries in Ukraine. In this context, the active support of Poland coupled with a greater cultural awareness due to intensification of migration flows between Poland and Ukraine create a powerful drive for the re-evaluation of the Polish-Ukrainian past. The goal of this project was to provide a conceptual framework for understanding of these developments and to examine the role of social media therein. Using the combination of online and offline data collection techniques the study seeks to trace the changes of the urban memory in the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Taylor Robertson McDonald holds a Master's in International Relations and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida. His research broadly examines the relationship between state identity and foreign policy in the cases of Canada and the United States. While at the Taube Centre, McDonald is completing a book-length manuscript elucidating the centrality of identity discourses to Canada's involvement in the War on Terror. Titled The Ambiguity of the Canadian Self: Discourses of Canadian Foreign Policy in the War on Terror, this book examines how popular historical discourses of Canadian identity were habitually invoked and adapted by Canadian parliamentarians to legitimize certain contemporary foreign policies in the War on Terror. It shows that diverse and even opposing representations of Canadian identity were repeatedly expressed through familiar identity narratives that take on drastically different meanings and can legitimize different foreign policies during the process of parliamentary debate. McDonald argues that an understanding of Canadian foreign policy, both then and now, must account for the intractable relationship between this tendency to discuss Canada's place in the world through familiar identity narratives and the various ways these narratives are re-imagined and re-articulated. In the spring of 2022, McDonald is  teaching the undergraduate course International Political and Economic Organizations in the department of Global and Development Studies at Jagiellonian University.

Tore Bernt Sorensen is a post-doctoral fellow whose research focuses on contemporary trends and developments related to European and global governance of learning, education and training. Tore’s project at the Taube Centre has the title "The myths and promises of education: The cultural political economy of educationalisation in European Union governance". Based on an extensive set of interviews and documents, the project analyses the variety of ways in which major actors in EU policy-making have advocated lifelong learning and education reform as solution to wider social and economic issues of European societies over recent decades. Tore’s work has been published in academic journals such as Comparative Education Review, Globalisation, Societies and Education and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the European Educational Research Journal.

For more information go to Tore Sorensen