Meet our 2026 Civic Freedom Residents-Elect

In residence in Odessa this summer!

Christine Hamel is a German radio and television journalist with Germany’s public broadcasting network ARD, with а quarter century's experience of covering post-Soviet life. Since 2014, she has reported extensively on Russia’s war against Ukraine. In Odessa she will be examining shifting social moods.
Matthew Porges is an Oxford-based anthropologist who studies war, conflict, and life in their aftermath. He has worked across the Balkans and Northern Africa on how post-conflict societies reckon with moral contradictions and recover plural life. He has written for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. This summer in Odesa, he will study new forms of collective life in the city.
Nick Sturdee is a British documentarist, journalist and writer who has made numerous features for the BBC and Channel 4, and has reported on Ukraine for decades, covering Russia’s full-scale invasion from Hostomel. This summer he will work in Odessa on language, identity, urban change, and wartime everyday life.