Webinar: New Paradigms in Historical Research after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Webinar

Saturday, October 10, 2026

10:00 AM (New York)

17:00 (Kyiv)

New Paradigms in Historical Research after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Does the empire exist within Ukrainian Studies, and if so, how should we respond?  Earlier efforts to reframe Ukrainian history were guided by derussification,  desovietization, and decommunization. The Russian invasion of Ukraine intensified efforts to decolonize and deimperialize knowledge production across disciplines. But what do these paradigms mean exactly for historians of the region and their efforts to rethink and reinterpret the Ukrainian historical experience in light of recent events? Four distinguished historians discuss new paradigms for reframing the Ukrainian past.

Andriy Fert (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)

Steven Seegel (The University of Texas at Austin)

Frank E. Sysyn (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies)

Yaroslav Zhuravlov (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

Moderator: Catherine Wanner (Shevchenko Scientific Society/Penn State University)

Andriy Fert holds a PhD in history from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and is currently an associate professor at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). He also heads the Center for the Study of Religion at KSE and is a Kone visiting researcher at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. Andriy’s research focuses on the connections between religion, collective memory, and nationalism in Ukraine. He is currently working on a book about late-Soviet anti-religious policy in Ukraine.

Steven Seegel is Professor (tenured, full rank) in the Department of European 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.

Frank E. Sysyn is director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, and editor in chief of the Hrushevsky Translation Project. A specialist in Ukrainian and Polish history, he is the author of Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600-1653 (1985), Mykhailo Hrushevsky: Historian and National Awakener (2001), and studies on the Khmelnytsy Uprising, Ukrainian historiography, and early modern Ukrainian political culture. He is also coauthor, with Serhii Plokhy, of Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (2003). He is editor in chief of the publication of the collected works of Mykhailo Zubrytsky (1856-1919).

Yaroslav Zhuravlov is a Postdoctoral Researcher (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, where he has worked since 2024 at the Imre Kertész Kolleg within the profile area Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century: Comparative Historical Experience. His current research project, Eastern European Debates of the Holocaust in Exile and Emigration, explores the intellectual and historical dimensions of Holocaust debates in Eastern European exile and émigré communities. In 2026, he conducted archival research in the United States at the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) in the United States, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States (UVAN), the Ukrainian History and Education Center (UHEC), and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Archives. His research and teaching interests include East Central European Studies, particularly Ukraine, the USSR, and Poland, as well as Jewish history, Genocide Studies, Memory Studies, and Oral History.

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https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_XIoolluBSHizDdkMnEKmaQ#/registration