15th Biennial International Postgraduate Conference

The aim of the conference is to bring together postgraduate students and early career researchers from the social sciences and humanities to showcase new research from across academic disciplines relating to Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This year, there will be more than 40 presenters from Argentina, Canada, Russia, Finland, Poland, France, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Germany, Belgium, Ukraine, Belarus and the UK. For more details on the conference theme, please read the Call for Papers.

This year's conference has two keynote speakers, Dr Frances Pine and Dr Bobo Lo. Dr Frances Pine is an anthropologist from Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr Pine has been conducting research in Eastern Europe for more than thirty years. Focusing on Poland, her work deals with kinship and gender, history and memory, informal economy, unemployment and restructuring, and migration. 

Dr Bobo Lo is the conference’s second keynote speaker. Dr Lo's most recent (2015) book, Russia and the New World Disorder, has been well received by experts. Robert Legvold from Foreign Affairs Magazine describes Lo as “one of the most balanced and insightful” experts on Russian foreign policy. He is an associate fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House (U.K.), and an associate research fellow with the Russia and New Independent States Center at the French Institute of International Relations. He was previously director of the China and Russia programs at the Centre for European Reform, London; head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House; and deputy head of mission at the Australian Embassy in Moscow.

The conference will also be holding a Professional Development Event on Academic Publishing, which aims to provide networking opportunities and advice for early career researchers on how best to get their work published. This special event will feature roundtable discussions on publishing best practices with experts from Palgrave MacMillan, Routledge, Emerald Group Publishing, and UCL Press, the Russian film critic journal Kinokultura, the Security Dialogue journal, freelance publisher Jakob Horstmann, and digital publishing expert Jane Winters, and more.