Keynotes

HARUTYUN G. HARUTYUNYAN (Dr. lic. Theol.) studied theology in Armenia, Switzerland and Germany. He was a research fellow in the Cluster of Excellency “Religion and Politics in Pre-Modern and Modern Cultures” at University of Münster/Germany and postdoctoral fellow at Center for Studies of Religion and Society at University of Victoria/Canada. He works currently as adjunct lecturer for Religious Studies at American University of Armenia and research fellow at Center for Intercultural and Religious Studies, and lecturer for Systematic theology at Theological Faculty of Yerevan State University. He has several individual publications on the wars in Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) and the role of religion or Armenian Apostolic Church in them. He was a co-editor of collective volumes on such topics as the rhetoric of violence, the history of Armenian-German encounters in modern Armenia and Artsakh, and the cultural heritage of Artsakh. Besides that, he is actively involved in project development and fundraising for the humanitarian support of forcibly displaced refugees from Nagorno Karabakh at the Diocese of Armenian Church of Vayots Dzor and Community Development NGO in the southern and border regions of Armenia.

Keynote topic: “Armenian Apostolic Church during and after the last Nagorno-Karabakh war”.

Links with CVs: https://people.aua.am/team_member/harutyun-harutyunyan/

and linkedin.com/in/hharut

TORNIKE METREVELI (PhD, University of Bern) is Associate Professor of Sociology of Religion and Reader in European Studies at Lund University. Prior to his appointment at Lund, Tornike was a Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, a Postdoc at the University of St. Gallen, and a Fellow at the Davis Center at Harvard. His research focuses on the intersection of nationalism and Orthodox Christianity in international relations. For his project on the Territorality of Orthodox Churches, he was awarded the EU Prize for Journalism in 2023. Dr. Metreveli is the Principal Investigator of the HERA-CHANSE-funded RELIDEM project, which examines religious responses to the war in Ukraine. He is also the host and editor of Religion in Praxis, a Lund University-based blog and biweekly podcast on religion and politics which broadcasts in 39 countries and features leading scholars and public intellectuals in the field.

Archimandrite CYRIL HOVORUN is a professor of ecclesiology, international relations and ecumenism at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm, and a director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Theological Academy in Kyiv and National University in Athens, he accomplished his doctoral studies at Durham University under the supervision of Fr Andrew Louth. He was a chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, first deputy chairman of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church, and later research fellow at Yale and Columbia Universities, visiting professor at the University of Münster in Germany. He is an international fellow at Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta in Canada, an invited professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and guest professor at the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong. More than 500 pieces of his research and journalism have been published in 30 languages. His books include Eastern Christianity in Its Texts (London: T&T Clark, 2022; Italian translation published in 2025); La riconciliazione delle memorie: Ricordare le separazioni tra le Chiese e la ricerca dell’unità (Roma: San Paolo, 2021, in co-authorship with Lothar Vogel and Stefano Cavallotto); Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2018; Ukrainian translation published in 2018); Ukrainian Public Theology (Kyiv: Dukh і Litera, 2017, in Ukrainian), Scaffolds of the Church: Towards Poststructural Ecclesiology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017; Ukrainian translation published in 2018; Russian translation published in 2024); Meta-Ecclesiology, Chronicles on Church Awareness, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Ukrainian translation published in 2017); From Antioch to Xi’an: an Evolution of ‘Nestorianism’ (Hong Kong: Chinese Orthodox Press, 2014, in Chinese and English); Will, Action and Freedom. Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2008). He also was an invited editor of the issue on “Putin and the New Russian Imperialism. An Approach from Communication and International Relations” of the peer-reviewed journal Tripodos published by the Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations, Ramon Llull University (no. 56, 2024).

IRYNA FENNO is a PhD in philosophy, and program and project manager at the Kyiv Center of the Ukrainian Catholic University, guest researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, associate professor at the Department of Religious Studies of the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University.

CATHERINE WANNER is a historical anthropologist and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Using ethnographic and archival methods, her research centers on the politics of religion and increasingly on conflict mediation, ecocide, and trauma healing. In addition to several other books on Ukraine, her two most recent publications are Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell, 2022), which won two book prizes, and an edited volume, Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Routledge, 2024). She is currently writing a book entitled, Ecocide, Animals, and Empathy after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. She has been the convenor of the Working Group on Lived Religion since 2014. In 2016-17, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity and in 2023 she received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies. She was the Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute for 2023-24. As of 2024, she serves as the Senior Advisor for the Religion and Peacebuilding program responsible for the Ukraine portfolio at the United States Institute of Peace.