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Principal Investigator of the Postsecular Conflicts Project and professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Innsbruck. PhD in social and political sciences from the European University Institute (2007), Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (2009-12), APART Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (2012-2015).
Her research is set at the intersection of social and political theory and comparative sociology of religion with a special focus on Orthodox Christianity. Her work is motivated by a profound interest in philosophical questions of political nature, in particular the relationship between the freedom of the human subject and community, and by a genuine perplexity about the breach between secular modernity and traditional and/or religious worldviews. With her research on the Orthodox world, she wants to make a case in point about the ambiguous relationship between the modern and the traditional and she wants to explore philosophically and empirically the difficulties of negotiating modern secular and traditional and religious views about legitimate authority, personal freedom and human rights.  

Contact

Department of Sociology 
University of Innsbruck
Universitätsstraße 15, 2nd floor west, room w 2.21
A-6020 Innsbruck

Tel: +43 512 507-73424
E-Mail: kristina.stoeckl@uibk.ac.at
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Boris Knorre is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies of Civil Society and the Nonprofit Sector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He received his doctorate in religious studies from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, also known as Lomonosov Moscow State University. His interests include sociology and philosophy of religion, social anthropology, cross-cultural studies, politicization of religions, and church-state cooperation. He has conducted extensive fieldwork since 1997, and took part in groundbreaking research for the Encyclopaedia of Religious Life in Russia Today, supported by the Keston Institute. He is the author of In Search of Immortality: Fyodorov`s Religious-Philosophical Movement (Moscow, 2008) and at least 100 articles (in Russian) on issues of ideology, social impact, and cross-cultural comparisons of contemporary religious communities, including Orthodox Christianity, Paganism, New-Age, and neo-Orientalist cults in Russia.       

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Caroline Hill joined the Postsecular Conflicts Project as a researcher in September 2017, and commenced work as a PhD student in Sociology of Religion at the Uppsala University Department of Theology and Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies in September 2018. She previously studied political science at Uppsala University, international relations at the University of Amsterdam, and Russian language at St. Petersburg State University. Her research interests include morality policy debates in the former Soviet states and Southeastern Europe, and the role of the Orthodox Church and evangelical Christian groups in mediatization of religion in Eastern Europe and the West. 

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Julia Mourão Permoser is a senior research fellow in the Postsecular Conflicts Project since 1 April 2018. She has a Bachelor in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, a Master in International Studies from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Vienna. Before joining the project, she held research positions at the University of Vienna (Department of Political Science/Research Platform on Religion and Transformation/Department for Gender Equality) and at the Free University of Brussels (Institute for European Studies). Her research centres on the governance of diversity, the role of norms and values in politics and on the challenges that dealing with pluralism pose to liberal democracy.

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Dmitry Uzlaner is a senior researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project. Ph.D. in philosophy and religious studies (M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University). Research fellow at Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) and Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES). Editor-in-chief of two academic peer-reviewed journals “Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii i za rubezhom” (in Russian) and “State, Religion and Church” (in English). Dr. Uzlaner published numerous articles on theoretical and empirical aspects of secularization and post-secularity both in Russian and in global contexts. His current interest is focused on psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan) and psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of social and cultural issues.

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Pasquale Annicchino is an associated senior researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project. He is a Senior Assistant professor of Law at the Law Department of the University of Foggia. He was a Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and a Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies, Cambridge. He has been Adjunct Professor of Law at BYU Law School (U.S.A.) and Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium).

He serves as book review editor for Religion and Human Rights: an International Journal and is a member of the editorial board of Quaderni di Diritto e Politica Ecclesiastica published by Il Mulino. His main interests include the followings: Legal Theory, Law and Religion, EU Law, National Security Law, Ethics of AI. Among his recent publications: Law and International Religious Freedom. The Rise and Decline of the American Model (Routledge, 2017); A Transatlantic Partnership for International Religious Freedom? The United States, Europe and the Challenge of Religious Persecutions, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 2016.

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Phillip Ayoub is an associated senior researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Drexel University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University in 2013, after obtaining a B.A. from the University of Washington and M.A. degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Cornell University. He also spent a year as Max Weber Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute.  His research bridges insights from international relations and comparative politics, engaging with literature on transnational politics, gender and politics, norm diffusion, and the study of social movements. His book, titled When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility, was published by Cambridge University Press in April 2016.  Using a mixed-method approach that combines large-n quantitative analysis with in-depth qualitative analysis of key cases, it explores the domestic conditions under which international norms governing LGBT rights are most likely to spread. Professor Ayoub’s publications have appeared or are forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Critique Internationale, the European Journal of International Relations, Mobilization, the European Political Science Review, and Perspectives on Europe. He has received various grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright Schuman Fellowship for the European Union, an Alexander von Humboldt Chancellor Fellowship, a Cornell Sage Fellowship, a Mellon Writing Fellowship, three FLAS Fellowships, and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship.

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Sergei Chapnin was visiting researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project from October 2016 to January 2017. He has a Master in Journalism and Communication Science from Moscow State University in 1993 and was a chief editor of the official magazine of the Russian Orthodox Church the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and the official newspaper the Church Herald. He also served as a senior lecturer at the Theological faculty of the St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, as a secretary of the Commission on Church, state and society of the Inter-Conciliar Board of the Russian Orthodox Church and a deputy chief editor of the Publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate. He organized many national and international events for the Church, including a biannual Festival of Orthodox Media and exhibitions of contemporary Christian art and architecture. His main interests include: the intersections of religion, state, and society, civil religion and secularization with a focus on a period of so-called ‘Church revival’ in Russia. His book, titled “The Church in Post-Soviet Russia. Revival, ‘quality of faith’, dialog with the society” was published in Russian in 2013. 

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Olena Kostenko was doctoral researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project from 2016 to 2019. She studied social sciences at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, University of Jena and University of Augsburg in Germany. She was especially interested in epistemology and qualitative methods of social research.

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Hannes Vorhofer is a Postdoc-Associate Researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project. His research interests include theoretical and empirical aspects of secularization and post-secularity, secular-religious conflicts in Israel and political communication of religious, anti-secular organizations in democracies. He is a co-author of numerous articles on political communication. From 1992 until 1998, he was a member of the Middle East Youth Peace Forum, initiated by the BKF Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue (Vienna, Jerusalem, Ramallah). Hannes Vorhofer was CEO of the APA-MediaWatch Institute for Media Analysis and a member of the Management Board of APA-OTS Originaltext Services and APA Austria Press Agency (2001 -2014). He is now a partner of the Communication Agency Kommunikationsraum GmbH (Vienna and Innsbruck).

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Ksenia Medvedeva was a researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project from September 2016 until February 2017. She received her MA in Sociology from Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg) in 2012 after having finished her research on faith-based extracurricular activities for schoolchildren in Orthodox and Protestant parishes of St. Petersburg. She served as a teacher assistant in sociology and sociology of religion in 2014-2015 and was an international visiting graduate research student at the University of Toronto in 2015. She completed the postgraduate program in Sociology at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) in 2016 where she conducted her research on contemporary Russian Orthodox monasteries for women. Apart from Christian monasticism, her research interests include pilgrimage; Orthodox Christianity; nationalism, multiculture and religion. In the Postsecular Conflicts Project, Ksenia will focus on international networks of conservative organizations and the role of the Russian Orthodox church. 

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Chrissy Stroop is an associated senior researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project. After earning a Ph.D. in modern Russian History and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from Stanford University in 2012, Chrissy Stroop spent three years teaching at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) in Moscow. Currently a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the History Department at the University of South Florida, and editor of RANEPA's scholarly journal State, Religion and Church, Stroop focuses on the intersections of religion, politics, and society as both an academic and freelance journalist and commentator, in which latter capacity Stroop has written about American evangelical Protestantism and the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate. As a scholar, Stroop has organized international conferences, published in journals including Russian Review, and participated in the international research project "Russia's Great War and Revolution: The Centennial Reassessment." In addition to studying the influence and reception of Nikolai Berdyaev and other Russian intellectuals with a particular focus on twentieth-century anti-secular discourse and anti-Communism, Stroop is working toward a co-edited volume (with Ana Siljak) provisionally titled "Russia, Religion and Secularism" and a monograph provisionally titled "The Politics of Providentialism: A Russian Civil Religious Vision in War, Revolution, and Exile."

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Bernhard Schneider was responsible for the open access strategy, dissemination of POSEC results and publications and the POSEC homepage until June 2022.

Together with Kristina Stoeckl he designed a Proof-of-Concept application to the ERC (MORE) that aims at building inside the Orthodox world the capacity for critical reflection on the larger global dynamics, political problematics and local repercussions that are connected with taking over social teaching from the transnational Christian Right.

His own research critically examines issues of security in the tensions between political theory and political science, discourses of security, and the role of emotions in politics.

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Vera Pozzi is Postdoc-Researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project – COrE Values since February 2021. In 2015 she obtained her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Milan. Her dissertation received the “Sangalli Institute Award for the Religious History 2016” and has been published under the title “Kant and Russian Orthodoxy. Ecclesiastical Academies and Philosophy in Russia between the XVIII and XIX Century” (FUP, Firenze 2017). During her university years she met the Russian poet and essayist Olga Sedakova and started reflecting about the role of world culture in late Soviet intellectual sphere. In 2014 she was invited to take part in the first international research project about Sedakova’s poetry and thoughts (The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova. Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention, Moscow 2017 and Madison 2019). Her contribution, “The Poetic Anthropology of Olga Sedakova: In Dialogue with Sergei Averintsev and Boris Pasternak”, is devoted to the intellectual sources of Sedakova’s thought and aims to start tracing a map of Orthodox liberal intellectuals in contemporary Russia. In 2017-2018 she has carried out post-doctoral research at the School of Philosophy of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) in Moscow, Russia. She developed a research project about Orthodox liberal intellectuals and their role in the public sphere in the early post-Soviet years. The first results of her research have been published in the article “Culture as paideia. Sergei Averintsev and Olga Sedakova: Mapping Out a Path for Contemporary Christian Humanism” (2019). Since 2019 she has collaborated with the “Lelio and Lisli Basso Foundation” and “Confronti Magazine and Study Center” (Rome, Italy) on a research project about religious pluralism and migration in Italy, focusing her contribution on the relationship between culture and religion in the life of a set of Orthodox parishes in the Lombardy region. In her research, Russian Intellectual History intertwines with Post-Soviet studies and Sociology of Religion.

Bio

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Bio

"Hannah Jordan joined the Postsecular Conflicts Project in February 2021 as a research assistant in a quantitative research project. She completed her Bachelor in Sociology in Innsbruck and spent part of her Bachelor degree programme in Israel at the Ben-Gurion University. Currently she has been studying in the master program Social and Political Theories at the University of Innsbruck." .

Bio

Georgios E. Trantas is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie guest researcher in the Postsecular Conflicts Project since September 2019. He is currently employed as Senior Researcher at the Centre for Intercultural Communication, VID Specialised University in Stavanger. Moreover, he is an Expert Evaluator of the European Commission MSCA H2021 programme, a founding Editorial Board Member of two academic journals and a UK Higher Education Academy Fellow. His expertise involves the interplay of religion and politics, and specifically dimensions pertaining to the Politics of Religion and Cultural Diplomacy, Soft Power, Religiocultural Geography, Refugee/Migrant/Minority/Diasporic Religioscapes formation, as well as national Boundaries and Religiocultural Frontiers. In this context, also, he specialises in emergent conflict and security issues due to Intersecting/Antagonistic Religioscapes, and further, Interreligious Dialogue and Reconciliation. Moreover, he is an expert in the analysis of Christian Orthodox aesthetics as religiocultural heritage and the role of places of worship as arks of collective narratives, self-perception, and as means of communication.

For further information and details, visit:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9134-9544 
https://vid.academia.edu/GeorgiosTrantas
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/789827 
https://zenodo.org/record/3946235#.Xye_GSgzbDc
https://goreligioscapes.wordpress.com/