Current Fellows

Nikola Pantić is a Permanent Fellow at the Center for Religious Studies, CEU, and a postdoc researcher and lecturer at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna. He studies religious establishments and charismatic authority in early modern Ottoman Sunnism, and focuses on the history of the beliefs in grace, wonder-workers, cults of saints, and thaumaturgical rituals in Islam before modernity.

Kateryna Kovalchuk has graduated from Ivan Franko Lviv State University with a degree in Classics. Having completed her MA and MPhil in Medieval Studied at CEU, she then earned her doctorate in Greek and Latin: Language and Literature from KULeuven. She was a recipient of a number of fellowships at top institutions for Byzantine research, including the University of Oxford, Dumbarton Oaks, NRF in Athens with Onassis scholarship. She has written about Animal Sacrifice in Christianity, the Festival of Encaenia and its hagiographical expression in Jerusalem and Constantinople, the image of Justinian in Byzantium. At the moment, her research focuses on Byzantine legends of church and monastery foundation and cultural memory.

Dima Hussain

Dima Hussain is a CIVICA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Central European University in Vienna. Prior to joining CEU, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, where she also completed her PhD in law. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Tribal Laws and Legal Pluralism in Syria: Societal Justice Beyond Legal Centralism,” examined tribal justice in Syria, exploring its historical and contemporary interactions with both state law and Islamic Shari’a. Her research interests include living law and non-state law, tribal justice and Shari’a, the concept of indigenous law and the codification of law. Currently, her work at the CEU’s Center of Religious Study focuses on the historical relationship between tribal justice and Islamic law in Syria, as well as their contemporary connection.

Martin Pjecha is a doctoral graduate of the CEU History Department and the author of Theo-Politics of the Hussite Movement: From Reform to Revolution (Brill, 2024). He is currently working on his second monograph, Politics in the Holistic Thought of Jan Comenius. This project examines the political thought of Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), who served as bishop in the Unity of Brethren, the dissident community that preceded the Moravian Church. Comenius represents an alternative intellectual trajectory between Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment universalism, competing with the “realist” tradition of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Despite extensive scholarship on Comenius’s pedagogical, philosophical, and religious work, a comprehensive synthesis of his political thought remains a desideratum. Central to this study is a deeper understanding of the pan-European, interconfessional influences Comenius engaged with, especially his unique Central European context. As a leader of his heterodox religious community during the Thirty Years’ War, Comenius was exiled from Bohemia by the Counter-Reformation and was deeply disillusioned by the enduring strength of Catholic powers following the Peace of Westphalia. His outspoken opposition to the peace settlement increasingly drew him to circles of prophetic visionaries who foresaw cataclysmic restitution. Although often celebrated today as a forerunner of the Enlightenment, Comenius’s vision of fantastic progress was profoundly shaped by medieval monastic prophecies. These included notions of messianic warfare and social engineering aimed at establishing a global theocracy. A holistic thinker in the tradition of Christian Platonism, Comenius integrated politics into a unified vision of natural and supernatural order. As the monograph will show, the roles of Platonism and apocalyptic thought as catalysts for political modernity reside in their ability to challenge static conceptions of existence and imperial authority while supporting visions of boundless human potential.