Bringing Ukrainian Studies to New Audiences

In connection with the members-only general meeting taking place earlier in the day, we are pleased to invite the broader community to meet our board members and find out more about their research. Please join a panel of three leading Shevchenko Scientific Society scholars, the outgoing First Vice President and candidate for President, Prof. Vitaly Chernetsky, the outgoing Learned Secretary and candidate for Vice President, Prof. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, and Full Member and candidate for Learned Secretary, Prof. Catherine Wanner, as they discuss their current Ukraine-focused research projects that aim to appeal to broader and new audiences, while also encouraging the core audience of Ukrainian studies to discover new dimensions of Ukraine’s global importance.

Сhair: Dr. Halyna Hryn, President, Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US; Editor, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Harvard University

Participants:

Rethinking Odesa’s City Myth: Multidirectional Memory and the Challenges of Decolonization

Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, University of Kansas

Odesa is one of Ukraine’s most internationally famous cities. An oft-mythologized image of it, however, largely derives from Russian-language literary texts and has trickled into a stereotypical version exploited for decades by the Russian mass culture and propaganda. This outdated cliché narrative obscures many facets of the city’s cultural diversity both past and present. The sea is at the center of both the old myth, on the one hand, and of the revisionist decolonial Ukrainian narratives, on the other. For the latter, Odesa is envisioned as a threshold linking the Black Sea with the “sea” of the Ukrainian steppe. The narratives it has generated tap into the cross-cultural contacts this contact zone has generated and into the aura of the city’s climate and landscape, as emphasized by its nonconformist visual artists. This talk discusses the contemporary Odesa-focused revisionist projects pursued by writers and visual artists, as well as the efforts by local intellectuals to decolonize the Odesa narrative in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

What Putin Gets Wrong: National Revival and Philosemitism in Ukraine 1991-2022

Dr. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Northwestern University

Based on his recently edited volume (with Zeev Khanin) After Soviet State Antisemitism about the transformation of Jewish life in the FSU countries, Petrovsky-Shtern will outline ten radical changes in Jewish life that occurred in post-1991 Ukraine entirely reshaping Jewish communities in the country. Exploring how democratization processes affected Ukrainian Jews, he will coffer ways to reconsider Russian propaganda insinuations about Ukraine as a xenophobic right-wing polity.

Ecocide and War:  How Animals Experience the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Dr. Catherine Wanner, Pennsylvania State University

What could be gained by looking at war from the perspective of animals?  How would evaluations change as to what constitutes a “just war” or a “just peace” if we considered the rights of animals and the rights of nature? Until now, such questions have been almost entirely absent from discussions of the ethics of war.  The goal of my research on analyzing how different types of animals – companion animals, livestock, wildlife and exotic animals – experience war is to make a case for the introduction of ecocide as a war crime by raising awareness of the environmental costs to a region, if not the planet, of waging war. Correspondingly, restorative justice must include compensation for environmental damage as well as for damage to the material infrastructure of a country.

Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007), of five edited or co-edited volumes, and numerous articles on modern and contemporary Slavic and East European literatures and cultures where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is forthcoming. His published translations into English include two novels, two poetry collections, and numerous shorter literary works, as well as scholarly articles and historical documents. Translation of Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria is forthcoming. He is the editor of the Ukrainian Studies book series at Academic Studies Press. Prof. Chernetsky is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. In 2024, he is serving as the President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

Dr. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Chair of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. He focuses on political, cultural and multiethnic interference in comparative literature, early modern and modern Jewish history, and East Europe with a focus on Ukraine. For his expertise, Petrovsky-Shtern has been appointed a Fulbright Specialist on Eastern Europe; a Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; a Full Professor at the Free Ukrainian University in Munich, a Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, the Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, the Kosciuszko Visiting Professor at Warsaw University, and the honorary doctor of the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv.

Dr. Catherine Wanner is a historical anthropologist and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Using ethnographic and archival methods, her research centers on the politics of religion and increasingly on conflict mediation, ecocide, and trauma healing. In addition to several other books on Ukraine, her two most recent publications are Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell, 2022), which won two book prizes, and an edited volume, Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Routledge, 2024). She is currently writing a book on ecocide, animals, and empathy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She has been the convenor of the Working Group on Lived Religion since 2014. In 2016-17, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity and in 2023 she received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies. She was the Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute for 2023-24. As of 2024, she serves as the Senior Advisor responsible for the Ukraine portfolio for the Religion and Inclusive Societies program at the United States Institute of Peace.

Admission to this event is free, registration is required. Suggested donation is $10. Building capacity is limited, please register below to secure your spot.

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