Prof. Dr. Olena Panych

Dr. Olena Panych is an Associate Professor at the Department of Religious Studies at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research focuses on the history of Evangelicalism and religious diversity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine (supported by an ACLS research grant in 2009–10). In 2012–13 she was awarded a Fulbright grant to study memory and identity among post-Soviet Evangelical immigrants in the USA. Dr. Panych is also an expert in higher and vocational education policy, and has worked as an educational policy analyst at the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science (2018–2020), as assistant to MPs in the Verkhovna Rada (2015–2022), and as a member of various international research teams (2017–2021). Her teaching areas include different aspects of interfaith relationship and state policies towards religious denominations in the countries of Eastern and Western Europe and Ukraine.

Dr. Panych’s research project at the LMU Historisches Seminar, “Protestantism and Soviet Foreign Policy,” aims to explore the strategies, which the Soviet authorities employed in order to instrumentalize Protestants, particularly Evangelical Baptists, as their agents of influence in international religious and ecumenical organizations during the Cold War.

Prof. Panych has been associated with the Collegium Carolinum Munich as a visiting scholar since September 2022.

Website Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Department of Religious Studies