Battle for Ukraine's Past

Speaker bios:

Lynn Viola, University Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto. Professor Viola is an archival researcher extraordinaire and award-winning historian of 20th-century Russian political and social history. Her research interests include gender, rurality, political culture, and violence in the era of Stalin. Author of many articles and books, her most recent publication is a monograph on NKVD perpetrators in Soviet Ukraine during Stalin’s “Great Terror,” Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Taras Koznarsky, Associate Professor, Ukrainian and Interim Chair and Graduate Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. He is currently working on a project on the ‘text of Kyiv’ and the constructions of the city in Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, and Polish literary and cultural imaginations, 1800s-1930s.

Oksana Dudko, Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Department of History, St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan. She is an historian of 20th-century Europe, whose research focuses on violence, gender, and the cultural history of the First World War and the revolutions in Eastern Europe.

Serhy Yekelchyk, Professor of History and Germanic & Slavic Studies, University of Victoria. His research interests include the social and political history of the Stalin period, as well as the formation of a modern Ukrainian nation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present He is the author of six books on Ukrainian history and Ukrainian-Russian relations, with most recent book on the role of Ukraine in Russian and geopolitics Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Sponsored by Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.