Iryna Kaplan, M.A. in Religious Studies. She received her M.A. in Religious Studies at the State University of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence (Donetsk, Ukraine). She later participated in various formal and informal educational programs, including the Program for Hebrew and Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies and Semitic Philology in Ostroh (2016, 2017), where she studied Classical Syriac Language and Turoyo.
She has been active in organizing conferences, workshops, and summer schools in the NGO Workshop for the Academic Study of Religion. Selected examples: Summer Youth School Buddhism and Other Buddhisms (2018, Kyiv); International Summer School Western Esotericism and Spiritualism in the 19th–21st Centuries (2017, Kyiv); International Summer Youth School New Religious Movements (2015, Kyiv).
In 2021–2022, she was project manager for Combining the Incompatible: Making the Problems of Feminist and LGBTQ+ Believers Visible in Ukraine. From April to December 2022, she was a guest researcher at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES), Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. From June to December 2023, she was a DAAD scholarship holder. Since 2024, she has been a researcher in the DFG project Encountering Theologies in the Context of Migration, subproject Theology of/in the Homeland: The Community of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Tur Abdin Region.
Selected presentations:
03/2025 — “The Challenges of Religious Education for Syriac Orthodox Christians in Tur Abdin,” Symposium Syriacum Bambergense, Bamberg University, Germany.
07/2022 — “Combining Incompatible Identities: A Study of Feminist and LGBTQ+ Believers in Ukraine, 2021–2022,” Center for Religious Studies (CERES), Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.
06/2022 — “Combining the Incompatible Identities: Study of Feminist and LGBTQ+ Believers in Ukraine (2021–2022),” Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
04/2022 — “In Search of Alternative Religiosity for LGBT People” (Combining the (In)Compatible, 2021–2022), 15th Conference of the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association (ISORECEA) Drifting Apart or Consolidating? Religious and Secular Organizations in Political Constellations.
06/2019 — “Role of Media Products in Religious and Language Changes in a Christian Migrant Community from Turkey,” 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR 2019), Tartu, Estonia.
Languages:
English — Advanced
Turkish — Intermediate
Turoyo — Pre-intermediate