Team

Catherine Gibson – Principal Investigator 

Catherine is Associate Professor of East European Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu. Her research to date has focused on the history of nationalism, language, and science in Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on the Baltic provinces of the Romanov Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of the book Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 University of Cambridge Baltic Geopolitics Network Publication Prize. At the Skytte Institute, she is the academic head of the Centre for East European and Eurasian Studies (CEURUS), leads the programme committee of the annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies, and teaches on the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in Central, East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CEERES). Estonian Research Information System (ETIS) profile.

Anton Kotenko – Research Fellow

Anton Kotenko is a researcher at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, who studies the intellectual, social, and spatial history of Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of The Promise of Ukraine: A Conceptual History of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2026). As part of EMPSOLID, he will focus on the interconnection between charity and nationalism in the empire’s southwestern provinces. Estonian Research Information System (ETIS) profile.

Ana Lolua – Research Fellow

Ana Lolua is a historian of the Caucasus specializing in the history of knowledge and material culture. She completed her PhD in Eastern European History through a joint program at Ilia State University (Tbilisi) and the Georg-August University of Göttingen. Her dissertation, “Between Imperial and Anti-Imperial: The Case of the Georgian State Museum from the 1930s until Perestroika,” focuses on the practices of historical knowledge production in Georgia. More specifically, she analyzed how local curators and the public at large engaged with ethnographic and archaeological collections within the framework of the imperial project of modernization. Her dissertation also draws extensively on the late imperial period and the Museum of the Caucasus in Tiflis to trace historical continuities between the Romanov Empire and the Soviet Union.

Upon completing her PhD, she joined the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in 2025. As a research fellow on the “Empire of Solidarities” project, she will examine orphanages and childcare in the colonial Caucasus at the intersection of charitable and welfare practices of the late Romanov Empire. Her broader interests lie in empire-building from below, relationships that peripheral actors in the borderlands were forging among themselves, and how these networks were made and unmade through ethnicity, class, education, and different legal and political possibilities created under the imperial rule. Estonian Research Information System (ETIS) profile.

Alongside her academic work, she enjoys writing poetry.

Harry Fennell – Junior Research Fellow

Harry Fennell is a first-year PhD student in Political Science at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. He holds an International Master’s degree in Central and Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian studies (IMCEERES) from the University of Glasgow and the University of Tartu, a Master in International Relations from KIMEP University, and a first-class honours degree in European Studies from Trinity College, Dublin.

His principal research interests include intellectual history, conceptual history, religious history, Orthodox studies, nationalism, and Russian history. Moreover, his dissertation, Orthodoxy Beyond Autocracy: Religion, Solidarity, and Civil Society in the Romanov Empire, 1836–1917, interrogates how Orthodox ideas of solidarity shaped civil society in the late Romanov Empire. Employing conceptual and lived historical approaches, his research challenges portrayals of the Orthodox Church as an essentially reactionary institution. He aims to demonstrate how Orthodox thinkers in the imperial peripheries, through their interactions with other faiths and cultures, revised their conceptualisation of Orthodox and imperial identity. Estonian Research Information System (ETIS) profile.

Roberta Erkmaa – Project Manager

Roberta is a project manager at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu. She manages various international educational and science projects (with Horizon Europe, Jean Monnet, and Estonian national funding sources) mainly focusing on Ukraine and Moldova.

Jelizaveta Potapenkova – Project Communication Specialist  (2025)

Jelizaveta is a Master´s student at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu and is also the project communication specialist for the EMPSOLID ERC project. She manages the social media and advertisement for Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies (CEURUS), particularly for the annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies, and leads the communication planning for The Empire of Solidarities research project.  

Michela Quercetti – Erasmus+ Intern (Spring 2025)

Michela is an Erasmus+ Intern at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. She recently graduated from the MA East European and Eurasian Studies (University of Bologna) and holds a BA in Foreign Language and Literature. Her main research interests lie in the fields of diaspora, memory, and civil society studies. From April-July 2025, she is interning with the EMPSOLID project, assisting Catherine with archival research in the Estonian National Archives and working with historical newspapers.

Helena Gross – Project Assistant (Summer 2025)

Helena is a senior year student at Hugo Treffner Gymnasium and will continue her studies in the University of Tartu next September.  She provides technical assistance with database searches, data cleaning and geocoding, and digitization of archival materials.

Avelyn Batts – Stanford University Intern (Summer 2025)

Avelyn Batts is a BA student at Stanford University, pursuing a double major in International Relations and Slavic Studies. She will work as a summer intern on the EMPSOLID project (and more), assisting with data collection, mapping, and digitization of Russian-language archives.