New Perspectives on the Holodomor. Online webinar

Iryna Skubii, ‘Our Village Was Also Helped by Nature’: Remembering Survival in the Holodomor

Iryna Skubii is the inaugural Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Melbourne. She holds a PhD from Queen’s University, Kingston (Canada) and a Candidate of Science Degree from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine). Dr. Skubii is the author of Trade in Kharkiv in the Years of NEP: Economy and Everyday Life (1921–1929) (2017). Her article on food waste and survival practices during the Soviet famines in Ukraine received the Best Article Prize from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. Her current research explores the global history of sunflowers in Ukraine, and she is preparing book manuscripts on survival, environment, and material culture during the Soviet famines, as well as on the history of consumption in early Soviet Ukraine. 

John Vsetecka, “The Holodomor as Current History: Russian Disinformation about the Holodomor as part of its Historical War against Ukraine”

John Vsetecka is Assistant Professor of History at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He is a scholar of East European and Soviet history, with a specific interest in the history of Ukraine. His research and writing focus on the history of famine, mass violence, and transitional justice. Dr. Vsetecka is finishing his first book, entitled, In the Wake of Hunger: Confronting the Legacies of the 1932-1933 Famine (Holodomor) in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s. He is also a co-editor (with Daria Mattingly) of The Holodomor in Global Perspective: How the Famine in Ukraine Shaped the World (ibidem-Verlag/Columbia University Press), which will be published in late October 2025. He is also the founder of H-Ukraine (part of the larger H-Net platform), which shares and promotes academic and scholarly content related to the study of Ukraine. 

Daria Mattingly, “Stalin’s Activists: Rank-and-File Perpetrators of the Holodomor”

Daria Mattingly is a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine and a Lecturer at the University of Chichester. Her research focuses on the Holodomor, collectivization, and the social history of violence, with particular attention to rank-and-file perpetrators and memory. She is completing a monograph, Stalin’s Activists: The Rank-and-File Perpetrators of the Holodomor and together with John Vsetecka co-edited the volume The Holodomor in Global Perspective. Dr. Mattingly’s work has appeared in leading journals and edited volumes, and she frequently contributes public-facing scholarship on Ukrainian history and its contemporary resonances.

Moderator Dr. Catherine Wanner (Pennsylvania State University/Shevchenko Scientific Society)