Members of the Selection Committee for the Scholars in Residence Programme 2026 Announced

INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange announces the members of the selection committee who will review and select applications for the Scholars in Residence Programme 2026 at INDEX.

• Dr Yana Barinova — Program Director for European Policies and Ukraine at ERSTE Foundation since April 2022.
  Having completed her PhD in Arts and Science at Sorbonne University and an MBA at Paris Business School, Barinova held senior positions in the Ukrainian government as Director of the Department of Culture of the Kyiv City Administration and Advisor to the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. She also served as Chief Operating Officer at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and chaired the Working Group on the Nomination of the Chornobyl Zone to the UNESCO World Heritage List (2019–2020). Barinova is an alumna of the Aspen Institute Ukraine and the Ukrainian School of Political Studies, combining cultural expertise with strategic insight into governance and policy.
  
  She curated the course "Cultural Diplomacy in Times of War" at Central European University and is the author of New Media, Memory, Places. Barinova has also initiated and curated a range of European cultural forums and exhibitions and consulted for several leading institutions, including the Austrian Integration Fund, Belvedere Museum, Gmunden Photo Festival, Vienna Contemporary Art Fair and the European Forum Alpbach.
  
  

• Dr Myroslav Shkandrij — Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba.
  Prof. Shkandrij has taught at the University of Calgary, U of Ottawa, U of Columbia and, most recently, at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. The focus of his research has been on twentieth-century Ukrainian intellectual and cultural history. He has also published on Ukrainian-Russian and Ukrainian-Jewish relations, nationalism, avant-garde and the Second World War. He is the author of seven books, six of which have been or are being translated into Ukrainian.
  
  He is author of In the Maelstrom: the Waffen-SS ‘Galicia’ Division and its Legacy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917-2017: Flashpoints in History and Contemporary Memory War (Routledge, 2020), Avant-garde Art in Ukraine: Contested Memory, 1910-1930 (Academic Studies Press, 2019); Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929-1956 (Yale University Press, 2015), Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation and Identity (Yale University Press, 2009), Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001) and Modernists, Marxists and the Nation: The Ukrainian Literary Discussion of the 1920s (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1992).
  
  

• Natalie Nougayrède — French journalist.
  Former editor-in-chief of Le Monde and member of The Guardian's editorial board, Nougayrède covered post-1989 transitions in Central Europe, including Ukraine. She was Le Monde's Moscow bureau chief and then its diplomatic correspondent. Nougayrède was awarded the Albert Londres journalism prize for her coverage of the Chechnya war. She is a member of the Körber Foundation's History Forum, and has held fellowships at the Robert Bosch Academy (Berlin), the Centre of Urban History (Lviv), and INDEX.
  
  She supports media and civil society initiatives in Europe’s Eastern Partnership region. Nougayrède also chairs the jury for the European Press Prize.
  
  

• Dr Sasha Dovzhyk — director of INDEX, writer, editor, project curator and cultural researcher.
  Former curator of special projects at the Ukrainian Institute in London and the writers’ residency Ukrainian Laboratory, Dovzhyk is the editor-in-chief of London Ukrainian Review. Since 2022, she has been engaged in international advocacy for Ukrainian resistance, contributing to The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, CNN, and New Lines. Dovzhyk holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Birkbeck, University of London, where she also taught English literature. She taught Ukrainian literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London.
  
  After nine years in London, she returned to Ukraine to lead INDEX, a cultural and research institution based in Lviv.
  
  

• Olesya Yaremchuk — researcher and writer specialising in intercultural dialogue in borderland regions.
  Yaremchuk is the author of Our Others, a non-fiction book about national communities in Ukraine and co-author and co-editor of Free Voices of Crimea: Stories of Crimean Journalists Imprisoned by the Kremlin.
  
  From 2015 to 2017, she curated the Mike Johansen Award for Literary Reportage for Tempora Publishing House. From 2017 to 2019, she served as editor-in-chief at Choven Publishing House. Since 2022, Yaremchuk has been actively raising awareness of Ukraine among international audiences and continues to document stories about Ukraine's national communities. In 2024, she was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
  
  She won the Samovydets literary reportage competition and the LitAkcent of the Year awards and was shortlisted for the ADAMI Media Prize, the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Award, and the Women in Arts Award.
  
  

The open call runs until 16 November 2025. More information about the programme and participation requirements can be found via the link. To apply, please complete the application form.

The programme is supported by ERSTE Foundation.