Visiting Scholars

Janete Eloi Guimaraes

Visiting PhD Student

Janete Eloi Guimarães is a PhD candidate in English at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, advised by Prof. Renata L. Dalmaso. For the 2026–2027 academic year, she is a visiting PhD student at the University of Alberta, Canada, supervised by Prof. Laura J. Beard. Her research examines life narratives written by Indigenous women in Canada, focusing on the intersections of Indigenous epistemologies, gender coloniality, and posthumanism. Drawing on life writing studies, decolonial feminist theory, Indigenous literary studies, and feminist new materialism, she investigates how Indigenous women’s self-representations challenge Eurocentric models of subjectivity and articulate alternative ways of knowing and being.

Dr. Kostiantyn Moharychev

Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor

Kostiantyn (Kostia) Moharychev is currently a Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. Previously, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of History at Purdue University (USA). His research explores Jewish political history in twentieth-century Eastern Europe, with a focus on Soviet Jewish unit projects. In 2021, he defended his dissertation and published the book Our New Soviet Zion: Project and Creation Attempts of the Jewish National Entity in Crimea (in Russian), which examines the “Crimean Project” — an effort to establish a Jewish national entity in the Soviet Union. He is currently working on a refined and expanded English translation of his book, as well as a digital humanities project related to the 1897 Russian Empire Census and Jewish demography. He is also interested in Gaming Studies.

Dr. Maria Katarzyna Prenner

Visiting Professor

Dr. Maria Katarzyna Prenner is a linguist specializing in Slavic languages, with a particular focus on Belarusian in its broader East and Central European context and on Bosnian and multilingualism in the Western Balkans. She studied Slavic philology in Vienna and received her PhD from the University of Cologne with a dissertation on agentivity in human impersonal constructions in Polish and Russian. After positions at the Universities of Cologne and Giessen, she has worked since 2023 as a professor assistant at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz.

Her research combines formal linguistics with contact and conflict linguistics to examine how grammatical structure, language contact, and sociopolitical conditions interact. Her habilitation project investigates the emergence of the Belarusian standard language under competing Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian influences, focusing on how political and cultural power relations shape processes of standardization. Methodologically, she works with comprehensive corpora of written texts, including historical newspapers and literary publications.

Prenner’s current research interests include impersonal constructions, grammaticalization, biscriptality, the morphosyntax–semantics interface, verb semantics and agentivity, conflicts over languages and alphabets in Eastern Europe, and multilingualism and script choice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Western Balkans. Her work integrates linguistic and cultural-historical perspectives on language development in situations of contact and conflict.