Ursula Woolley

Research Fellow

Contact

via dathe@europa-uni.de

Vita

Ursula Woolley is a final year PhD Candidate at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) in London. Her research in politics and philology is partly informed by practice in cultural relations.  In her dissertation she uses (historical) discourse analysis and political analysis to examine recent strategies of discursive resistance in public history to current and inherited official Russian history narratives in four different regional cities in Ukraine. She received her BA in 1990 from Clare College, Cambridge where she studied Soviet and Russian history and literature; comparative European modernism; and ‘Tragedy’ in European drama. She received her MRes in 2018 from UCL SSEES with a dissertation on ‘Ukrainian Decommunisation: A Political and a Policy Response to Russian Securitisation of Identity’. Her main areas of research interest are: Ukraine; the post-Soviet relationship between Ukraine and Russia; historical politics and decolonisation; the securitisation of historical memory; narrative as argument; affect in political communication; intersubjectivity between academic discourse, elite public discourse and government policy formation.

During her EUTIM research stay at the European University Viadrina she is working on the following topic:

‘Local amateur and public historians in Ukraine as (unwitting) security actors in the context of recent Schmittian aspirations in Russia for a regional “smyslokratiya”’.