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SPEAKERS’S BIOS

Zsombor Bobák is a PhD candidate in the research training group “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University Frankfurt and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In his dissertation project he investigates various methods of moving image production that animate queer histories of Central and Eastern Europe, aiming to understand the role of moving images in queer historiographies across the region. He also contributes to the work of the TEDDY Award, the queer film prize of the Berlinale on a regular basis.

Kamila Budrowska, Prof. dr hab. (University of Bialystok), is Polish and literary scholar; head of the Department of Comparative Studies and Editing. She is interested in the relationship between Polish literature and politics, with a particular focus on the tasks of censorship. Author of books: Literatura i pisarze wobec cenzury PRL. 1948-1958 (Bialystok 2009), Stopped by Censorship. Inedita of the mid-20th century (Warsaw 2013), Studies and Sketches on Censorship in People’s Poland in the 1940s and 1950s (Bialystok 2014), Writers, Literature and Censorship in Poland. 1948 -1958 (translated by P. A. Vickers, Berlin 2020), Censorship and the Neighborhood. Studies on Institutional Censorship in Poland in the Years 1944-1990 (Warsaw 2022), and numerous articles. She is the scientific editor of the series “Philological Research on PRL Censorship” and co-editor of the series “Censorship in the People’s Republic of Poland. Archives.” She had stays as a visiting scholar at Columbia University of New York (2019) and University of Regensburg (2022).

Maria Bühner does research on the subjectification of female*homosexualities in Eastern Germany (1945-1994) as a research fellow at Leipzig University. Maria studied cultural studies at Leipzig University and University of East London. She has worked as research fellow at Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden in a BMBF-funded research project on objects and sexualities and as a cybersecurity technical writer for Security Research Labs. Her research foci are the history of sexualities, material culture studies, and technologies. She published several articles on lesbians in the GDR and wrote an expertise for the Senate of Berlin. Additionally, she is a co-publisher of a volume on European gender history (2018, Franz Steiner) and conference proceedings on collection policies and sexualities (2021, Böhlau).

Natalie Cruz is Managing Editor of the Queer Armenian Library. Her research is focused on modern and contemporary Armenian art in the S.W.A.N.A. region (South West Asian/North African) and their diaspora. As an Armenian woman in academia, she hopes to make accessible and spread knowledge of queer Armenian artists who are absent from art history and the Armenian community. She holds an MA in Art History.

Zoltán Csehy was born in 1973 in Bratislava, he is a member of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. He currently teaches literature at the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature at Comenius University in Bratislava. He is a poet, literary translator (mainly from classical languages, Latin, ancient Greek and Italian, and has translated into Hungarian works by Martialis, Petronius, Cicero, Petrarch, Antonio Beccadelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini) and literary historian. His research interests include minority literature, Renaissance and humanist literature, the survival of ancient literature and the representation of otherness in literature. His monograph Sodom and its environs was the first to summarise the history of Hungarian queer poetry.  He is currently working on a monograph on queer Hungarian literary history. He also has a project called queERATO, which would be a database, an international Thesaurus of queer(ed) poetry.

J.P. Der Boghossian (he/they) is the founder of the Queer Armenian Library. He hosts the podcasts This Queer Book Saved My Life! and 7 Minutes in Book Heaven. His recent essays have appeared in the anthologies The Sun Isn’t Out Long Enough (Anamot Press, 2021) and We Are All Armenian (University of Texas Press 2023). He was a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow and was also a mentee in the Association of Writers and Poets’ 2022 Writer to Writer mentorship program. He holds a Master of Public Affairs degree from the University of Minnesota and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Armenian Literary Alliance.

Ramona Dima is a researcher in queer and gender studies with focus on South-East Europe. Her publications and topics of interests include queer culture, sexuality and migration, LGBT+ activism, and anti-gender politics. She is the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger (2021-2023). Dr. Dima holds a PhD from the University of Bucharest and is the initiator and co-organiser of Queer and Feminist Studies in Southeastern Europe International Conference.

João Florêncio is Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, and upcoming Professor of Gender Studies and Chair of “Sex Media, Sex Cultures” at Linköping University. A cultural theorist of the body, sexuality, and visual cultures, he is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020). 

Aleksandra Gajowy (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on narratives of queerness, race, and
Jewishness in Polish visual cultures since the nineteenth century. She is currently preparing a monograph on modern and contemporary lesbian art from Poland. She is also editing a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies, titled “Can CEE Lesbians Speak? Towards Central and Eastern European Lesbian Studies.”

Philip Gleissner is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He specializes in the cultures and literatures of socialist Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on print media in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR. He is particularly interested in media as agents of mobility: mechanisms that facilitate the transnational circulation of cultural forms within and beyond Eastern Europe. Dr. Gleissner is currently finishing his first monograph titled Subscribing to Sovietdom: The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal. It shows how under the umbrella of state socialism a fragmented cultural field was organized by literary magazines and traces how these periodicals moderated multidirectional networks that connected the cultures of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the West. Other current research projects include the edited volumes Red Migrations: Marxism and Mobility after 1917 (with Bradley Gorski; forthcoming with Toronto UP) and Lockdown in the Kitchen: American Immigrant Foodways in Times of Crisis (with Harry Kashdan; Rutgers UP 2022). Professor Gleissner’s research relies on digital humanities methodology as a tool for the critical exploration of culture for the project Soviet Journals Reconnected. His current project Kvir_Izdat is an attempt to rethink digital humanities from a queer perspective.

Dan Healey is Emeritus Fellow at St. Antony’s College at Oxford University, where he previously taught History for over a decade. His research and publications have concentrated on the social and cultural history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, in particular, the history of sexualities and gender in modernising Russia and the role of medicine and law in shaping the regulation of sexual and gender dissent and conformity. He is the author of Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001), with Russian translations issued in 2008 and 2022; Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (DeKalb, Il., 2009); Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of modern German history at George Mason University. He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022) and A Queer Theory of the State (2023), and he is currently at work on a book examining queer women in Nazi Germany. 

Georgy Mamedov is a curator and writer based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The central themes of his artistic and research projects are history and practice of radical imagination and progressive re-interpretation and appropriation of the soviet socialist legacies.Georgy is the co-author of “Queer-Communist Manifesto” and several books including A Book on Happiness for Young (and not so) LGBT (and not only) People (Bishkek, 2020), the pioneering Russian language collection of feminist and queer science fiction, Utterly Other (Bishkek, 2018); Queer Communism is Ethics (Moscow, 2016); Concepts of the Soviet in Central Asia (Bishkek, 2016) and Bishkek Utopian (Bishkek, 2015). Georgy also regularly writes on politics, culture and art for international media outlets such as Jacobin and OpenDemocracy. As the day job Georgy holds a position of Assistant Professor of film and media arts at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek. In 2015, Georgy became a chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters. 

Aleksandar Ranković is a PhD candidate at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and a PhD fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. His current research focus lies at the intersection of transformation, sexuality, and gender in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space. His doctoral thesis covers debates on conscientious objection, military service, and civil service in the Yugoslav People’s Army with a particular focus on gay–lesbian activism during the 1980s and early 1990s. He also collaboratively works on researching migrant and post-migrant perspectives on knowledge production in Southeast European Studies. He graduated in Political Sciences and East European Studies from Sciences Po Paris (BA) and University College London (MRes). Further research stays include Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Free University Berlin, and the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana.

Łukasz Szulc (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester. He specializes in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. His publications include a monograph Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (Palgrave, 2018), an edited collection LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe (Routledge, 2016).

Błażej Warkocki – Ph.D., professor of Polish literature at A. Mickiewicz University in Poznań – works at the Department of Anthropology of Literature at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology in the School of Language and Literature of the Adam Mickiewicz University. His fields of interest include Polish literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, literary criticism, comparative literature, emancipatory discourses and literary theory. He is the author of three monographs on literature from the perspective of queer theory: Homo niewiadomo. Polish prose towards queerness (2007), Pink language. Literature and the Politics of Culture at the Beginning of the Century (2013), and Memoir of the Affections of Adolescence Gombrowicz – queer – Sedgwick (2018). Co-editor (with Z. Sypniewski) of Homofobia po polsku (Warsaw 2004). He took part in the HERA grant “Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures.” Co-editor of the volume Disorientations. An Anthology of Polish Queer Literature (2021). Member of the Joseph Conrad Prize jury.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZER:

Tatiana Klepikova is a Freigeist Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation at the University of Regensburg, where she leads the research group on queer literary cultures under socialism. She is editor and translator of Contemporary Queer Plays by Russian Playwrights (Bloomsbury, 2021) and co-editor of Outside the “Comfort Zone”: Private and Public Spheres in Late Socialist Europe (De Gruyter, 2020, with Lukas Raabe). Her work focuses on queer drama and performance and cultures of non-normative genders and sexualities in Eastern Europe.