Kateryna Zarembo is a Ukrainian policy analyst, university lecturer, writer, and mother of four. She defended her PhD in 2016. Her professional path combines three of her passions: policy analysis, academic research, and literature. As an academic, she has been combining teaching in Ukraine with work as a guest researcher at the Technical University Darmstadt (Germany) and publishing on Ukraine’s civil society and the hierarchy of knowledge production in academia. As a policy analyst, she has been advocating for Ukraine across the globe, from Canada to Italy (she speaks fluent Italian and German).

In 2022, during the full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine, she finished and published her first non-fiction book, which she had started in 2017, The Rise of Ukraine’s Sun: Stories of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions at the Beginning of the 21st century. Crucial for our current understanding of the differences in Ukraine’s social fabric, the book is devoted to Ukrainian civil society activism in Donbas. She is currently promoting this book with a book tour in various Ukrainian cities.

Kateryna is very vocal about the problems of women with children in academia, and has worked as a coach, speaking about self-care, where to find support, and how to survive forced migration with children. Her chapter on parenthood in times of war and the expectations put on women who had to leave their partners and ended up alone with their children in foreign countries – an autoethnography – will be published soon in an edited volume on the Russian war against Ukraine.