Maryna Shevtsova is a Ukrainian political scientist and LGBT rights activist with an interdisciplinary background in International Economic Relations, Gender Studies, Psychology, and Political Science. She is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a Senior FWO Fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium. After finishing her PhD dissertation on LGBT movements in Turkey and Ukraine in Humboldt University, Berlin, she was a Fulbright scholar (University of Florida) and a Swedish Institute Fellow (Lund University). She also had visiting fellowships with the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, and the Middle East Technical University, Ankara.
She is a co-founder of Equal Opportunities Platform, a Dnipro-based Ukrainian NGO working towards combatting discrimination and promoting gender equality. In 2022, she joined the board of AtGender, European Feminist Research Network.
She is proficient in Russian and Ukrainian, English, Spanish, and Italian. Her research centers on sexual diversity and equality, homophobia, on migration, on democratization and social struggle in Ukraine, the wider Eastern and Central European region, and Turkey. She is also involved in three academic or semi-academic initiatives helping researchers from Ukraine: UGS – Ukrainian Global scholars, UGU, Ukrainian Global University, and ScienceforUkraine for which she is the national coordinator in Slovenia.
