The Shevchenko Scientific Society in the Context of Ukrainian Intellectual History – 150th Anniversary of Shevchenko Scientific Society Conference

In celebration of the Shevchenko Scientific Society’s 150th anniversary year, we are pleased to present a conference to be held at the Ukrainian Institute of America, 2 E 79th St, New York, NY 10075 (212) 288-8660. Scholars from the United States of America, Ukraine, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, and Austria will present three panels that discuss the history of the establishment of the Society, its activity, and its influence on Ukrainian intellectual and cultural life from its founding to the present day.

Conference speakers:

Fabian Bauman (University of Heidelberg): Academic Ukrainophilism and Ukrainian Politics in the Russian Empire under the Ems Ukaz

Serhiy Bilenky (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta):Before NTSh-A: Scholarship and Politics in the 1870s Kyiv

George Grabowicz (Harvard University): Rethinking the Cyrilo-Methodian Brotherhood: Problems of Historiography and Some New and Old  Aporias

Tomasz Hen-Konarski (Polish Academy of Sciences): The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Kyrylo Studyns′kyi and Amvrozii Androkhovych as Historians of the Greek Catholic Clerical Education

Ola Hnatiuk (Kyiv Mohyla Academy): Колекція Василя Мудрого в архіві НТШ в Нью Йорку як унікальне джерело для вивчення міжвоєнного періоду

Anton Kotenko (University of Düsseldorf): “Scientific Society” or an “Institution of the most radical Ukrainophile party”? NTSh in the Materials of the Romanov Imperial Censorship

Martin Rohde (University of Vienna): Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Making of Ukrainian “National Science”, 1892–1939 

Steven Seegel (University of Texas): The NTSh and Geography: On Some Challenges and Legacies in the Making of Modern Ukrainian Maps, from the 1860s to Stepan Rudnyts’kyi and The February 24th Archive Project

Jan Surman (Czech Academy of Science): (Re)writing Ukrainian scientific language from Habsburg Galicia to the Soviet Union

Maryna Paliienko (Taras Shevchenko National University): Архіви української еміграції у Другій світовій війні і повоєнний період під прицілом нацистських і радянських спецслужб

Fabian Baumann is a historian of Eastern Europe, with a focus on the history of nationalism and empire in Ukraine, Russia, and East Central Europe. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Basel in 2020 and was a SNSF.Mobility postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University Vienna before joining the University of Heidelberg in 2023. His book Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, which deals with the nationally divided Shul’gin/Shul’hyn family of Kyiv, was published by Cornell University Press in 2023

Serhiy Bilenky is a Research Associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and, since 2023, Editor-In-Chief of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. He also has been Program Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) since 2015. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Bilenky graduated from Kyiv National Shevchenko University, from which he also received his Candidate of Sciences degree in 1997. In 2007, he received his PhD in History from the University of Toronto. Bilenky has taught courses on Russian, Ukrainian, and east European history at the University of Toronto, Columbia University, and Harvard University. His monographs included Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford University Press, 2012) and Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He is also the editor of the selected writings of the leading 19th-century Ukrainian intellectuals: Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2014). Bilenky’s most recent book is Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914 (McGill-Queen’s University Press and CIUS, 2023) – a multidisciplinary history of Ukraine during the “long” 19th century.

George G. Grabowicz is the Dmytro Čyževs’kyj Research Professor ameritus of Ukrainian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where he has served as chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures (1983–1988) and director of the Ukrainian Research Institute (1989–1996). He has been president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US (2012–2018) and is currently a member of the Board of Directors. In 1997 he founded and since then has been editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian monthly Krytyka, a leading intellectual journal in Ukraine. He has written on Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian literature and on literary theory. His first book on Shevchenko (The Poet as Mythmaker) was voted the most influential academic book of the post-Soviet period in Ukraine. In March 2022 he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize, Ukraine’s highest award in the humanities and arts, for his series of articles on modernism and the poet Pavlo Tychyna.

Tomasz Hen-Konarski is a full-time researcher at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (IH PAN). He holds a Magister degree from the University of Warsaw, where his teachers included Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, and Zofia Zielińska. He has a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2017), where he worked under the supervision of Lucy Riall and Pieter Judson. Apart from Florence and Warsaw, Tomasz either studied, carried out his research, or taught in Bielefeld, Budapest, London, Lviv, and Vienna. Most recently (in 2023), he was a Fulbright-funded visiting scholar in the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research interests include: Polish and Ukrainian nation building in Galicia, Catholic Enlightenment, and the Greek Catholic Church as a political institution of the Austrian Monarchy. 

Ola Hnatiuk is a Polish and Ukrainian scholar, professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and professor–emeritus at University of Warsaw, translator, diplomat, and civic activist. Vice-president of Ukrainian PEN centre (2018-2022). Her scholarly work has been in the borderlands between the disciplines of history, the history of ideas, philology, literary studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of culture. Since 2017 she has been editor-in-chief of the project Ukraine. Europe 1921–1939 (publishing series appearing in the at Ukrainian Catholic University with the support of Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), the aim of which is to publish little-known documents that counteract falsifications of history, which are still prevalent in eastern Europe.

Anton Kotenko is a research fellow at the Chair of Eastern European History of the University of Düsseldorf. His recent publications include “Ukrainians as ‘Aliens’ (Inorodtsy): Governmental Regulation of Ukrainian Cultural Associations, 1905–17” published in March in Russian Review, and “For Fame and Fortune: The Origins of St Petersburg’s Zoo” forthcoming in Urban History. Currently he is finalising a book manuscript entitled “In Search of Ukraine: A Conceptual History of Nationalism, 1840s–1921” and is starting a new project “Zootopia: History of Zoological Gardens in the Romanov Empire.”

Maryna Paliienko is a Doctor of Historical Sciences and head of the Department of Archival Science and Special Branches of History at Taras Shevchenko National University. She is also editor-in-chief of the journal Archives of Ukraine and is the author of several monographs and numerous scholarly articles on archival theory, history, and practice; the role of the Ukrainian diaspora in the preservation of cultural heritage; and the digital transformation of Ukrainian archives and their visibility in the modern information space. Thanks to a grant from the Fulbright Program, she is currently conducting research in the United States at New York University on the topic “Archives in the Time of War and Emergency: Problems of the Cultural Heritage Preservation and Usage (from the Experience of the USA and Ukraine)”.

Martin Rohde is a senior post-doc at the University of Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund(FWF) with the project “Transregional Region-Making in the Eastern Carpathians. Ukrainian Knowledge Production and its Challenges, 1921–1939”. Rohde studied History and Slavic Studies in Salzburg and Göttingen, and received a PhD in history from the University of Innsbruck in 2020 with a dissertation called “National Science Between Two Empires. Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1892-1918”. Former workplaces include universities of Innsbruck and Halle/Wittenberg, the Historical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. His research interests include history of science and knowledge, history of photography, approaches to postcolonial, imperial and spatial history with a focus on Ukraine, the Habsburg and Russian Empires, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago’s international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute‘s summer exchange program. You can find him active as the host of author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, an ongoing community-driven, public-facing digital project (follow @steven_seegel on Twitter/X) with 20 GBs of tweets, 1000s of threads, and 30 million people per month in terms of audience reach) that focuses on building global solidarities during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. 

Jan Surman is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe currently based at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Science, Prague. Surman holds a PhD in history from the University of Vienna and has most recently been working at the Herder-Insitute, Marburg; IFK, Vienna; and Higher School of Economics, Moscow. His interests are history of internationalism, language of science, and history of Ukrainian science. His recent publications include Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space (Purdue University Press 2018);  Science and Terminology in-between Empires: Ukrainian Science in a Search for its Language in the nineteenth century. History of Science 57:2 (2019), 260-287; Imperial Science in Central and Eastern Europe. Histories 2:3 (2022), 352–361.