Dr Maria Gunko

Postdoctoral Affiliate

Maria Gunko defended her DPhil in Migration Studies thesis “‘Nothing there’: An Ethnography of Place-Making in an Armenian Town” in June 2026 at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. She was supported by the Hill Foundation (2021–2024) and participated in the ERC-funded Emptiness Project (2021–2026).

Maria holds an MSc and PhD (Kandidat Nauk) in Human Geography from Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her experience includes positions at the Faculty of Sociology Yerevan State University (Yerevan, Armenia), Institute of Geography RAS (Moscow, Russia), the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). She held the position of visiting fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Leipzig) in 2015 and at the Institute of Geography at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris) in 2019.

Maria’s research interests lie at the intersection of urban studies and social anthropology, including ethnography of the state, infrastructures, postsocialism, and urban decay (e.g., shrinkage, ruination, etc.), with a geographical focus on Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus. She is book review editor at Eurasian Geography and Economics, co-editor of Postsocialist Shrinking Cities (Routledge, 2022) and author of over thirty peer-reviewed articles. Beyond her academic career, Maria is a freelance contributor to various media outlets including EVN Report, Yerevan Journal, Berliner Gazette, and e-flux. 

For full list of publications in English:

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5994-6368

LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/maria-gunko-84198625a