Harald Wydra, Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge, is one of the two holders of the 2025-2026 Phyllis Beddington Wiener Chair at the ULB, inaugurated this year by the Fondation Wiener-Anspach.
Professor Wydra’s research interests include Eastern European and Russian politics, democracy (comparative and theory), political anthropology, religion and politics, politics of memory, interpretive methods in the social sciences. His major publications include Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition (Palgrave 2001), Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2007), Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe (coéditeur) (Routledge 2008), Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (coéditeur) (Berghahn 2015), and Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge University Press 2015).
Professor Wydra is welcomed at the ULB by Professor François Foret, President of the Institute for European Studies, who has coordinated the programme of the Chair:
25 March (14h-16h): opening lecture « Who is the enemy in a borderless world ? »
2 April (14h-16h): seminar « The limits of European identity. A cultural memory of borders »
8 April (12h-13h): seminar « Cultural war of mimetic conflict? Illiberalism as legitimacy in contemporary Europe ».
The full programme and practical information are available on the website of the Institute for European Studies.
As holder of the Chair, Prof. Wydra will also be working with Prof. Foret on a research project exploring the mutation of political domination and what it reveals from the changing interactions between power and culture in comparative perspective across time and space.
The call for application for the 2026-2027 Phyllis Beddington Wiener Chair will be launched in April 2026.