RUPTURES
RUPTURES
RUPTURES
GRACEH 2026
Professor Lyndal Roper (Keynote Speaker)
Lyndal Roper is an Emeritus Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her most recent award-winning book Summer of Fire and Blood, a history of the German Peasants’ War (1524-6) is dedicated to the greatest uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. Her previous books include a biography of the reformer Martin Luther (2016) and, on Luther's cultural legacy, Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy (2021). She has also written on gender and the German Reformation and on witchcraft. Professor Roper Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Fellow of the Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften and holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Melbourne and the University of Basel.
Professor Roper will give her paper at the Maison Française d’Oxford at 5:30pm on 15 April. Her talk will be free and open to the public.
Dr Daria Mattingly (Keynote Speaker)
Daria Mattingly is a Lecturer in Contemporary International History at the University of Chichester. Her research interests include perpetrator studies, social and cultural history of the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on Ukraine. She is currently finishing her first book, Stalin’s Activists. The Rank-and-File Perpetrators of the Holodomor, on the identifiable and memorial traces of the rank-and-file perpetrators of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine. Dr. Mattingly has previously taught at the University of Bath and the University of Cambridge where she also held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2019-2023). She also frequently writes and comments for the media, including CNN, BBC, Daily Telegraph, Politico, L’Express, Lokalna Istoria, i24news.
Dr Mattingly will give her paper at Ertegun House, Oxford at 11:30am on 17 April. Her talk will be free and open to the public.
Anil Atilgan
Anil Atilgan is a graduate student in historical studies at Central European University, specializing in the intellectual history of political economy. His thesis examines how the liberalization of grain trade in the late eighteenth century led to a debate concerning the nature of political economy in Britain and France. Anil’s further research interests include history of economic thought, radical political thought, and republicanism.
Panel: Making Sense in Rupture, Making Sense of Rupture
Alexander Beard
Alexander Beard is a first-year DPhil student at the University of Oxford, where he is fully funded by the AHRC OOC DTP and Magdalen College Scholarship. As an undergraduate, he studied History and German at University College, Oxford; Alexander graduated with a First, and received various academic awards, including the Gibbs Prize (proxime accessit). He was also awarded first place in the German History Society’s nationwide Undergraduate Essay Prize for his thesis on Vietnamese contract workers in the GDR. He studied for an MPhil at the University of Cambridge, where I was fully funded by a Benefactors’ Scholarship from St John’s College, and awarded a Distinction.
Panel: Voicing Rupture: Literature and the Underground
Julia Boechat Machado
Julia Boechat Machado is a PhD Candidate at the Central European University, Vienna, researching Book History in the Soviet Union. She is current a Marietta Blau Fellow in the department of Book Studies in Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. She also works as a Bibliographer in the Editorial Board of SHARP News (Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing).
Panel: Voicing Rupture: Literature and the Underground
Vesta Burk
Trained as a Sovietist, Vesta Burk is a second-year history PhD student at Brown
University currently retraining as an Americanist for her bi-national dissertation project, exploring the “mail-order brides” of the former Soviet Union in their immigration to the US. She holds a master’s in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Yeshiva University and a bachelor’s in Russia Studies from Tulane University. Born in Belarus, she is an elected member of the Coordination Council of the Belarusian democratic forces.
Panel: Beyond the Archives: Reading Cultural Ruptures Through Alternative Sources
Julia Carrera
Julia Carrera is a political scientist and doctoral candidate at the Institute of
Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and the Technical University of
Munich, and a fellow at the Institut für Historische Sozialforschung (IHSF) in Vienna. Her
dissertation project, “Breaking Cover: Joseph Buttinger and Muriel Gardiner. A
Political–Intellectual Double Biography”, reconstructs the lives and work of an
extraordinary couple who were active in the socialist underground during the
Austrofascist dictatorship (1933/34–1938), helped hundreds escape Nazi persecution,
and later pursued academic careers in exile in the United States.
Panel: Recurring Rupture: Individuals, Politics, and Experiences of Exile
Jana Christin Lammerding
Jana Christin Lammerding is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna and currently a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, St Edmund Hall. Her research focuses on media-cultural approaches to knowledge production and historical epistemology, combining media studies with archival research, discourse theory and cultural historiography. In her doctoral project, she examines the mediality and epistemological quality of the witch as a figure of thought in reproduction dis[1]course, with particular attention to rationality, knowledge, and problematization. She is currently undertaking research on early modern manuscripts and nineteenth-century ephemera at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford.
Panel: Vice and Device: Conceptualising Rupture
Karolina Cholewa
Karolina Cholewa is a graduate of the Institute of History at Jagiellonian University and currently a doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at Jagiellonian
University. Her research interests focus on the history of Jacobitism, early modern
Scottish-English relations, the history of English literature, and intellectual life in London and Edinburgh during 18th century. From a methodological perspective, she is particularly interested in narrative research, the reconstruction of discourses, and the study of memory structured through narrative.
Panel: Remembering Rupture
Georgie Crespi
Georgie Crespi is a doctoral researcher at the University of Reading, looking into medieval and early modern drama, specialising in morality plays, vice figures, and the relationship between theatre, politics, and moral authority in late medieval England. Her research examines how concepts of misrule, demonic agency, and governance are staged in texts such as Wisdom, The Castle of Perseverance, and Mankind. She has undertaken specialist training in palaeography and codicology at the University of Göttingen ATRIUM in Berlin. Her work engages closely with manuscript culture and political allegory in medieval performance.
Panel: Vice and Device: Conceptualising Rupture
Petar Ćurčić
Petar S. Ćurčić is a doctoral candidate in Modern History at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia, where his research focuses on Werner Sombart’s interpretation of capitalist history. Since 2021, Ćurčić has been affiliated with the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade, initially serving as a Research Trainee and currently holding the position of Research Associate. His scholarly output includes articles such as Sombart’s History of Capitalism and Contemporary World, Global and Transnational History: Similarities and Differences, World and Global History and The Serbian and Yugoslav Reception of Werner Sombart (1895-2022).
Panel: Vice and Device: Conceptualising Rupture
Laura del Alisal
Laura del Alisal is a Spanish second-year doctoral student at Reuben College, University of Oxford. Her research examines revolutionary republican networks in late nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how political ideas–particularly discourses of liberty–were transmitted and transformed between Cuba, a Spanish colony until 1898, and the Spanish mainland. Prior to beginning my doctorate, she completed an MA in History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a BA in Liberal Arts (History and Politics) at King’s College London, and worked for three years as a secondary school teacher of Humanities in Mumbai, India.
Panel: Recurring Rupture: Individuals, Politics, and Experiences of Exile
Aimée Dion
Aimée Dion is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in History at Université Laval. Her book, Affiches de guerre, guerre d’affiches, published by the Presses de l’Université Laval (2024) was shortlisted for the Canadian Historical Society’s Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History prize. With the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de recherche du Québec, her thesis explores Great War propaganda in French Canada and Ireland, with a particular focus on visual culture. She examines how images influenced war cultures and political discourse, using a comparative approach to understand how representations of violence and nationalism shaped collective identity.
Panel: Media and the Tools of Constructing National Identities
Sarah Evison
Sarah Evison studied history and philosophy at the University of Basel and FU Berlin. She is currently a project assistant and PhD student at the Chair of Eastern European History at the University of Basel. Her PhD project examines Soviet climate engineering in the Arctic during the Cold War, focusing on the climatic futures envisioned for the region. Moreover, she explores the ways in which climate knowledge and climate emotions were intertwined within these projects. Having commenced in September 2025, the project is presently in its conceptualisation phase, with an initial case study already available.
Panel: Climates of Uncertainty: Rethinking and Regeneration in the Face of Change
Thomas Glasman
Thomas Glasman is a PhD Student in the History of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. He researches the influence of religion and politics on mathematical thought, paying particular attention to the Foundational Crisis of Mathematics and the relationship between the critique of modern mathematics and modern culture at large.
Panel: Making Sense in Rupture, Making Sense of Rupture
Élisabeth Heid
Élisabeth Heid is a doctoral student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled “Coming and Going in the Mikhailovsky Theatre of Saint Petersburg: the construction of a transnational theatrical career from 1833 to 1918”. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century theatre, the Russian Empire and Franco-Russian cultural exchanges.
Panel: Ruptured Belongings: Displacement and Identity Across Borders
Saskia Heyn
Saskia Heyn is pursuing an MA in Eastern European history and Anglophone literary/cultural studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She has previously published on cinematic depictions of Soviet Jewry in the graduate journal Eras (Monash University, Australia). Additionally, she has led a tutorial on working with Soviet films as historical artifacts. Her current research focus is the cultural history of 20th-century Ukraine, with particular attention to visual culture such as philately, numismatics, and heraldry.
Panel: Beyond the Archives: Reading Cultural Ruptures Through Alternative Sources
Aoife Kearins
Aoife Kearins is a first-year DPhil student in the History of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, funded by the Oxford-Richards Graduate Scholarship. She holds an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University and a BA in Mathematics from Trinity College Dublin.
Panel: Epistemic Rupture: Re-writing and Re-shaping Science and Medicine
Yuliia Kishchuk
Yuliia Kishchuk is a multidisciplinary researcher whose work moves across environmental humanities, critical craft studies, and the history of late socialism. She holds an MA in Gender History from the Central European University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Södertörn University in Sweden. Her doctoral research examines artisan communities in the Ukrainian Carpathians during the late Soviet period, with a particular focus on materiality, landscape, and the entanglements between community, craft, and place. She is a member of the editorial board of Commons, Journal for Social Criticism.
Panel: Media and the Tools of Constructing National Identities
Theresa Langer
Theresa Langer is the DAAD-Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, specialising in the teaching of the German language and area studies. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Bielefeld, exploring how history is taught in classrooms for German as a Foreign Language. Her work seeks to highlight the need for the discipline to question the current style of the delivery of historical content and to ultimately develop the fields’ firm theoretical grounding in history and history didactics.
Panel: Remembering Rupture
Katharina Langolf
Katharina Langolf completed her MA in Eastern European Cultural Studies (Potsdam) with a thesis on Mark Zhitnitskii’s Gulag testimony. Presented his artistic activities at Shoah‑art conferences in Budapest and Berlin. Since 2024 she has been pursuing a PhD in the International Research Training Group “Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth‑Century Europe and Beyond” at the University of Leipzig. Her project examines Zhitnitskii’s life and work through his album Voina (War), focusing on how the album itself and the artworks it contains commemorate the Shoah in the Soviet Union and how this memory is entangled with Stalinism.
Panel: Ruptured Belongings: Displacement and Identity Across Borders
Roberto Larrañaga Domínguez
Roberto Larrañaga Domínguez was born in Mexico City in 1990. He attended the Lycée Franco-Mexicain and obtained the French Baccalauréat before completing a BA in International Relations at El Colegio de México (with an exchange at the University of Montreal), where his thesis won the Genaro Estrada Prize in 2015. Roberto subsequently obtained an MA in History at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. He completed his PhD in History at the European University Institute in 2025 (with an exchange at the EHESS). He has worked as a history teacher and at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Panel: Climates of Uncertainty: Rethinking and Regeneration in the Face of Change
Viola Lászlófi
Viola Lászlófi is a junior researcher on the ERC Synergy project Taming the European Leviathan at Central European University and a PhD candidate in History in the joint programme of EHESS (Paris) and Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest). She studied History at EHESS and ELTE, and Psychology at the University of Debrecen. Her research explores how political, social, and economic transformations in the 20th century Hungary reshaped the doctor-patient relationship, patients’ experiences of healthcare, and medical knowledge production, and how these phenomena contributed to the reproduction of social order and inequalities, especially under state socialism.
Panel: Epistemic Rupture: Re-writing and Re-shaping Science and Medicine
Gunhyuk Lee
Gunhyuk Lee completed a BA and MA at Seoul National University and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Historical Studies at Central European University (CEU). His research focuses on Late Antique Egypt between the fourth and eighth centuries, with particular attention to the intersections of hagiography, papyrology, and material culture. Before entering CEU, he worked as a secondary school teacher and received training in papyrology at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE), PSL. His doctoral project examines how donations to Christian institutions were progressively framed as acts of charity and linked to the salvation of the soul during the transition from Byzantine to Islamic rule, drawing on Greek and Coptic hagiographies, inscriptions, prayers, and documentary sources such as papyri and ostraca.
Panel: Faith in Flux
Duncan Murray
Duncan Murray is a Master of Arts in History student at the University of British Columbia, where he is also affiliated with the Science and Technology Studies program. His research interests include the history of medicine and the human sciences, with a particular focus on how these fields have operated within imperial contexts. His current work examines the entanglement of racial science, migration, and medico‑legal authority in French Algeria.
Panel: Epistemic Rupture: Re-writing and Re-shaping Science and Medicine
Maria Pantazi
Maria Pantazi is a PhD researcher at Department of History of the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). In her thesis titled “The city of extremes: Social networks, social distance, and survival in Thessaloniki during Jewish deportations” she explores the survival of Salonican Jews who escaped deportations. Maria has participated in the Summer School with POLIN Museum for Early Career Scholars (Warsaw, 2025), and the Holocaust Testimonies and Their Afterlives summer university course organized by the Central European University (Budapest, 2025).
Panel: Recurring Rupture: Individuals, Politics, and Experiences of Exile
Pia Paul
Pia Paul is a PhD student in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of medicine and the body in twentieth-century Europe, with particular attention to trauma, anxiety, and theories of the organism. She works at the intersection of historical analysis and critical theory. Pia’s current work examines how neurophysiological debates after the First World War reshaped understandings of renewal and catastrophe in social and political life.
Panel: Making Sense in Rupture, Making Sense of Rupture
Anthony Popov
Anthony K. Popov is a historian of eighteenth-century Britain, France, and the Atlantic World. He is a Master of Arts student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the social circulation of cheap print in Paris and London during the French Revolution. He examines song-sheets, garlands, and poems to understand how these mediums imparted ideals of political citizenship based on a sense of national belonging onto lower- and middle-class consumers. Popov has also previously worked on cheap print in London in the late Stuart period between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution.
Panel: Beyond the Archives: Reading Cultural Ruptures Through Alternative Sources
Wren Potter
Wren Potter is currently pursuing graduate studies in history at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Their research centres on the confluence of art and political imagination, particularly its manifestation in nation-building and imperialism. They completed undergraduate studies in international relations at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2024.
Panel: Media and the Tools of Constructing National Identities
Stephanie Rieder-Zagkla
Stephanie Rieder-Zagkla is a PhD candidate at the Department of History as well as at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna. She studied law and history in Vienna and is also currently a University assistant (pre-doc) at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna. Her fields of research are the history of sexuality, women´s and gender history, the history of work and the history of law.
Panel: Recasting Legal Traditions: Rupture in the History of Civil Law
Emma Schwak
Emma Schwak is a third-year PhD researcher in the History department at the European University Institute. She holds a BA in Japanese Studies and History from SOAS and an MA in Early Modern Studies from UCL. Her current research sits at the crossroads of social history and material culture and examines how elites between the Directoire and the First Empire constructed social identity through fashion and interior decoration. Emma has a forthcoming article in the French journal Modes Pratiques, which will be published later this year.
Panel: Beyond the Archives: Reading Cultural Ruptures Through Alternative Sources
Brigitta Schvéd
Brigitta Schvéd is a PhD candidate at the University of Pécs and an assistant research fellow at the Ludovika University of Public Service (Budapest). Her doctoral research focuses on the early modern conceptualization of the balance of power, with particular attention to British political media and Habsburg-Hungarian political discourse. She was a visiting researcher at Senate House Library (London, UK) in 2019, attended and completed the Concepta Summer School: ‘Introduction to Conceptual History’ (University of Helsinki, 2019), and was a doctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG Mainz) in 2024. Her research interests include early modern conceptual history, political media, and political iconography. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation and preparing for her defence.
Panel: Vice and Device: Conceptualising Rupture
Tess Shaffer
Tess Shaffer is a PhD student in Archaeology at the University of Exeter, where her research focuses on the Christianization of early medieval Alemannia and the influence of monastic centres on burial practices, health, and the lived experience. Her research integrates bioarchaeology, archaeothanatology, and historical analysis. She holds an MSc in Osteoarchaeology from the University of Edinburgh, where her research focused on vitamin D deficiency. She completed her undergraduate at West Virginia University in Anthropology and History. Tess has worked in both lab and field settings with human skeletal remains in the UK, Greece, and America.
Panel: Faith in Flux
Caleb Silvergleid
Caleb Silvergleid is a master’s student at the University of Oxford studying medieval history, particularly medieval law in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the 12th and 13th centuries. He wrote his undergraduate thesis at St Andrews and Richmond on the Assizes of Romania and its legal ties to the western traditions, and has researched law and emotion in medieval history. Following the completion of his master’s degree, he hopes to go to law school to further deepen his understanding of legal history.
Panel: Recasting Legal Traditions: Rupture in the History of Civil Law
Emyleigh Simoes
Emyleigh Simoes is an MA student in European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on late-imperial Russian social and cultural history, with particular attention to popular culture, revolutionary movements, and the relationship between class, culture, national identity, and political mobilization. She holds an Honours BA in European Affairs and Slavic Languages and Cultures (Russian) with a minor in History from the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed undergraduate journals, and she is enthusiastic about the opportunity to present her research at a conference for the first time. Her current work examines the development of political cultures in the Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Panel: Remembering Rupture
Hanna Sinclair
Hanna Sinclair is a final-year doctoral student at Oxford University. Her thesis focuses on the perceptions of foreignness and national identity at the marriage of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV in 1600. By examining how the participants of one sustained period of interaction between courts and peoples were described by their counterparts, she intends to show that there was a strong sense of national identity amongst early modern Europeans, even in pre-Risorgimento Italy. This fits within her research interests of the cultural history of early modern Italy and France, particularly the production and manifestations of authority, knowledge, and identity
Panel: Ruptured Belongings: Displacement and Identity Across Borders
Denys Tereshchenko
Denys Tereshchenko is a second-year doctoral researcher in History at the European University Institute in Florence (EUI), working on the dissertation “Social Science Between the Empire and the Union: ‘Scientific Statistics’ in Kyiv, 1905–1930.” Before coming to the EUI, he obtained his MA from Central European University, where he defended a thesis entitled “Radicals into Experts: The Case of the Poltava Provincial Zemstvo’s Statistical Bureau, 1881–1914.” His research interests include history of science and statistics, and history of bureaucracy and bureaucratic knowledge, with the area focus on the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
Panel: Making Sense in Rupture, Making Sense of Rupture
Jessica Varela and Sun Parker Schuette
Jessica Nogueira Varela is an Afro-Brazilian PhD candidate in Gender Studies at the Central European University in Vienna. Her main fields of interest are Black European History, Black Feminist and Decolonial Theories, and Migration Studies in Contemporary Europe. Jessica is highly interested in digital research methods as tools for uncovering and amplifying marginalized intellectual histories in Europe
Sun Schuette is an MSc philosophy student at the University of Edinburgh with particular interests in decolonial philosophy and Africana intellectual history. He completed his BA with Honors in philosophy, political science, and economics at Central European University.
Panel: Ruptured Belongings: Displacement and Identity Across Borders
Matej Vodopivec and Tamara Logar
Matej Vodopivec is a master’s student in History at the University of Ljubljana with a broad interest in medieval history, church history, palaeography, and royal history in Europe. Matej has published a paper on caroline minuscule scripts, entitled “Karolinška minuskula in centri njenega širjenja” in Klio : glasilo Društva študentov zgodovine SLO-ISHA (2025).
Tamara Logar is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. She specialises in the history of World War II, as well as royal history from the sixteenth through nineteenth century, with a particular focus on royal women and cultural and political connections between East Asia and Europe. She has co-published a paper on the data collection of fatalities in Solvenia during and immediately after World War II, entitled “Zbirka raziskovalnih podatkov Smrtne žrtve med prebivalstvom na območju Republike Slovenije med drugo svetovno vojno in neposredno po njej” which appeared in Zgodovina v šoli (2025).
Panel: Climates of Uncertainty: Rethinking and Regeneration in the Face of Change
Rashel Zemlinskaya
Rashel Zemlinskaya is a second-year DPhil student in History at the University of Oxford, specialising in Russian late-imperial and Soviet cultural history. She holds an MA in Art History and currently focus on problems of national identity and historical imagination. Her dissertation project, entitled ‘In Pursuit of Cultural Identity: The Debate on the Russian Renaissance, 1860-1980”, explores how ongoing discussions about the existence of a Renaissance in Russia shaped perceptions of national culture from the mid-nineteenth century onward.
Panel: Voicing Rupture: Literature and the Underground