Email: Federica.Prina@glasgow.ac.uk

Federica Prina is a Research Associate at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Glasgow. She is part of a team implementing the three years (2014-2017) research project ‘National Minority Rights and Democratic Political Community: Practices of Non-Territorial Autonomy in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Her field of research encompasses cultural, linguistic and participatory rights of national minorities in the post-Soviet space, particularly the Russian Federation, Moldova, Estonia and Ukraine. From 2011 to 2013 she was a researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), in Flensburg (Germany), where she coordinated the research cluster ‘Culture and Diversity’. From 2012 to 2014 she was the editor of the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE). Federica Prina has also worked for human rights organisations, including Article 19 (the Global Campaign for Free Expression), Amnesty International and Minority Rights Group. 

Email: r.mole@ucl.ac.uk

Prof Richard Mole is Professor of Political Sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. He has an MPhil from Cambridge University and a PhD from the London School of Economics, both in International Relations. He spent extended periods of time studying and working in the USSR and subsequently in Russia and the Baltic States and speaks fluent Russian. His research focuses on homosexuality and homophobia in Russia and the former USSR (especially political homophobia) and migration by LGBT individuals from Russia, the former USSR and Poland to the Germany and the UK. He has provided expert reports on asylum cases made on the basis of ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Email: tiina.kirss@ut.ee

Dr. Tiina Kirss is a professor of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Tartu in Estonia.  She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 1994, and went on to teach at both the University of Tartu on the Faculty of Philosophy and at Tallinn University’s Estonian Institute of Humanities.  She has authored pieces on Estonian literature, folklore, and cultural memory.  In addition to her research and faculty positions, Dr. Kirss also serves as the Chair of the International Editorial Board for Estonian Humanitarian Studies and as a member of the Estonian Comparative Literature Association.  She is currently a Senior Research Fellow of Estonian History of Thought at the University of Tartu.