Ursula Woolley received her PhD in Ukrainian Studies from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies for a study of responses in Ukraine to Russian history propaganda. In September 2022 she was an EUTIM visiting researcher and, in October-November 2021, a graduate student research fellow at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder)/Słubice. She received her MRes (East European Studies, Political and Social Sciences) from UCL in 2018 and as an undergraduate studied in Cambridge and Moscow.

Between 1990-2004 she worked for the British Council. Between 2006-12 she was in local politics in Islington. She was Director of Pushkin House in London (2012-2016). She is Chair of the Ukrainian Institute London 2022-6.

Research interests

Politics, security, public policy, foreign policy, Ukraine, securitisation, epistemic imperialism, post-communism, democratic backsliding, political agency, prefigurative politics, historical politics.

Office hours

Thursday: 10.00-12.00

Bush House North West, room 5.27

Teaching

• Russia and its West
• Comparative European Politics
• Italian Politics

Latest publications

2025 (Nov): '"Holier Than Thou?" Discourses of Orthodox Interdenominational Ecclesiastical Historical Politics in Ukraine at the Time of the Ukrainian Autocephaly Process' in L. Berezhnaya and H. Hein-Kirche (eds), Sacralization of History in Times of Crises: Modern Eastern Europe.

2024: 'Writing the History of the Holocaust in Ukraine Before and After 24 February 2022: An Outside View', Holocaust Studies: A Ukrainian Focus, vol.16, 2024, 29-72.

2022: 'Ukraine and Putin's Post-Soviet Imperialism' in Political Insight, vol.13(1), 15-17.