Joseph Livesey  worked as a Research Affiliate on MAPA's 'The Great Famine' project between 2011 and 2012, taking part in early demonstrations of the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine program design process in Cambridge, Toronto, and New York City in 2013. As an undergraduate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, Joseph studied Ukrainian and spent a year abroad at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. A graduate of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, Joseph was awarded the 2007 Theodosius and Irene Senkowsky Prize for Demonstrated Achievement in Ukrainian Studies. Subsequently, as a master's student on the REECA Program at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Joseph concentrated on Soviet History, conducting archival research in Kyiv on the role of local officials during the famine in the 1930s. He is now in the process of completing a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at New York University.