Our Team
- Members
Malkhaz Toria is the coordinator of the Memory Studies Group. He studies at the graduate program in Sociology at New School for Social Research (NSSR). He is also a member of the Decolonizing Eastern European Studies (DEES) group at the NSSR. At the same time, he is an associate professor of history and the head of the Memory Study Center in the Caucasus at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia). His research focuses on the politics of memory and the totalitarian past in post-Soviet and post-socialist societies; historiographical theory; modern museology and memorial culture. He has several publications and has been teaching various courses on this broad thematic. He has held fellowships (Fulbright, DAAD, OSF, etc.) at the NSSR, Central European University (CEU), Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung (ZfL), Humboldt University of Berlin, University of California Berkeley, and the Harriman Institute of Columbia University.
Elisabeta (Lala) Pop (TCDS Program Manager) is a PhD student in Politics at The New School for Social Research. She is interested in issues of mobility and migration with a special focus on the Romani people. She is also Program Manager of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. Before coming to The New School, she worked for the American Council of Learned Societies for over seven years, managing international fellowship and grant competitions and related workshops, publications, and events in Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia.
Franziska König-Paratore (Communication, Social Media, and Public Outreach) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. She is interested in the politics of cultural and artistic production as well as media representations. Her research explores the role of artists and cultural intermediaries in the memory politics in Germany after 1989. In 2020-21, she is a recipient of a dissertation fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin and a research fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.
Silvana Alvarez Basto (Website Administration and Maintenance) is an MA student in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. She holds a BA in Art History from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is interested in the construction of memory through images and, particularly, how new media have affected the transmission of and engagement with symbols associated with incipient nation-states in Latin America. In 2019, she co-authored a chapter in the book Las colecciones de arte en la Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2019), with Ana M. Franco, PhD.
Malgorzata Bakalarz Duverger is a sociologist, an art historian, and a curator; she received her PhD from the New School for Social Research. Her research interests develop around negotiations of local collective memory, spatial and urban studies, the politics of archives, and decentralization and civil society in post-Communist countries. She works as Director of Academic Programs at the Center for Jewish History and teaches at Parsons School of Design. Her article “Teaching Re-Seeing: Deploying Archive in Art and Design Education,” co-authored with Mariah Doren, will be published in the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her essay “Whose Memory? Whose Activism? Remembering, Forgetting, and Negotiating the Narratives about the Past in Multiethnic Spaces of Borderland Poland” will be published in The Oxford Handbook of Memory Activism, ed. by Irit Dekel e.a.
Chang Liu is currently a second-year MA student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, with research interests in political sociology, historical sociology, and the sociology of China in general. She also holds a master’s degree in global development from University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Central University of Finance and Economics in China. She has had ethnographic researches on Thai female immigrants in Denmark; Tanzanian hip-hop music and local youth political engagement; and the social change of Chinese Hui Muslim community since the 1990s. In the recent year, she has been working on the Chinese economic reform during the 1980s and Chinese anarchist movement in the early 20th century. Besides, she is working as a freelance translator of a book on the history of Soviet Union and the great purge in the 1930s.
Karolina Koziura is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. Her work explores problems of nationalism, spatial transformations, and memory politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in East European Politics and Societies, Culture and Ukraina Moderna, among others. Her doctoral dissertation seeks to understand the Great Ukrainian Famine as a global event shaped by Cold War era politics of knowledge production. She is a recipient of the 2020 American Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Association Dissertation Research Grant.
- Faculty Advisory Committee
Elzbieta Matynia, Professor, Sociology Department, and Director of Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
Jonathan Bach, Professor of Global Studies
Benoit Challand, Associate Professor, Sociology Department
Alexandra Delano, Associate Professor of Global Studies & Chair and Departmental Faculty Advisor for Global Studies
Ellen Freeberg, Associate Dean, Faculty Affairs and Curriculum at the NSSR
William Hirst, Professor, Psychology Department
Robert Kirkbride, Associate Dean of SCE and Associate Professor of Architecture and Product Design
Dmitri Nikulin, Professor of Philosophy, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Departmental Faculty Advisor for Philosophy
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University Professor
Susan Yelavich, Associate Professor of Design Studies