The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) is an institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences. Founded as a place of encounter in 1982 by a young Polish philosopher, Krzysztof Michalski, and two German colleagues in neutral Austria, its initial mission was to create a meeting place for dissenting thinkers of Eastern Europe and prominent scholars from the West.
Since then, it has promoted intellectual exchange across disciplines, between academia and society, and among regions that now embrace the Global South and North. The IWM is an independent and non-partisan institution, and proudly so. All of our fellows, visiting and permanent, pursue their own research in an environment designed to enrich their work and to render it more accessible within and beyond academia.
Professor Snyder is the Lesya Ukrainka Permanent Fellow at the IWM.
Ukrainian history is central to global history, to an extent that can be hard to bear and hard to acknowledge. In this light, the connections between the present war and larger developments in global economy and politics are no surprise. Ukrainian History Global Initiative (UHGI) seeks a new empirical and conceptual understanding, using an innovative approach across disciplines and application of new technologies to write history today. It is seeking indirectly to answer fundamental questions such as: Who are we? How was a nation possible?
UHGI is a major new project in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, with the goal of establishing a scholarly and accessible presentation of the deep history of the lands of contemporary Ukraine and the peoples who have inhabited them. It aims to generate a new model of synthetic public history.
Professor Timothy Snyder is the Chair of the International Academic Advisory Council and Research Associate Dr. Daniel Fedorowycz is the Public History Lab lead on the project.
Launched in March 2022, Documenting Ukraine is an IWM research project that seeks to contribute to creating a record of the Russo-Ukrainian War, capturing the human experience of that war, and making it accessible and comprehensible to the broader world.
Through Documenting Ukraine, the IWM supports scholars, journalists, public intellectuals, artists, and archivists based in Ukraine as they work on documentation projects that establish and preserve a factual record—whether through reporting, gathering published source material, or collecting oral testimony—or that bring meaning to events through intellectual reflection and artistic interpretation. Ultimately, the materials collected and produced through these projects will be housed in a complex, transdisciplinary archive.
This is a project that centers Ukrainian intellectual work: the projects are conceived, developed, and carried out by Ukrainians, and Documenting Ukraine grantees retain full intellectual property rights to any work they produce. The same thinking underpins the archive that will result from the project: any materials contributed by people we are supporting are an important part of Ukraine’s intellectual heritage.
Documenting Ukraine: How and Why from the IWM on Vimeo
Professor Timothy Snyder is head of the Project. The Public History Lab collaborates closely with Dr. Katherine Younger who oversees the project and Anastasiia Kovach, the Ukraine Program Coordinator at IWM.