Professor Marci Shore & Uliana Hlynchak Discuss: Ukraine’s Struggle for Freedom Amidst the Rise of Western Totalitarianism

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a decisive end to "The End of History." We now know there is no liberal teleology of progress.  "The habit of civilization is fragile," as the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote. How has Ukraine emerged as the avant-garde in a world succumbing to postmodern forms of tyranny?  The Italian philosopher Olivia Guaraldo has argued that the European failure to appreciate the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 was connected to the West’s having forgotten what revolution means. For Hannah Arendt it meant natality, the human capacity to give birth to something new. How has this revolutionary experience shaped Ukrainian resistance in the largest European land war since WWII? What does this mean for the rest of the world? Professor Marci Shore, Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School, and Uliana Hlynchak, journalist for the KONTAKT Ukrainian TV Network, will address these critical policy questions during Professor Shore’s first appearance as a newly appointed-chair after leaving the United States.

 

Doors open at 5:30pm/ Event begins at 6pm. Book sale and signing to follow.

 

Marci Shore began a position as Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in 2025. She was previously professor of history at Yale University; she has also been a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna since 2004. In spring 2025 she guest curated, together with Oksana Forostyna, the Kyiv Book Arsenal with the theme “Everything is Translation.” She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her book project about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled In Pursuit of Certainty Lost: Central European Encounters on the Way to Truth.

 

Uliana Hlynchak is a Toronto-based journalist for KONTAKT Ukrainian TV Network, a weekly Ukrainian TV show. Uliana works with young talents to develop the youth TV program Kontakt Next Gen. She is on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation and  volunteers for the Bloor West Village Toronto Ukrainian Festival.

 

Uliana writes articles and blogs for local publications. She also writes and translates poetry and short stories in Ukrainian and English  that are published in Ukraine and abroad.

 

Her latest English short story, Fatimeh, is published in the oldest magazine of the University of Toronto, Acta Victoriana. A Ukrainian short story about the war in Ukraine “Mother’s Heart” was published in January in the Ukrainian People’s magazine (USA), short story "Accidental Meeting on the Metro", (Zbruc Magazine, Lviv, Ukraine, June 2024), the short story "Red Boots" (Babyn Yar tragedy) published in Sept. 2024 in VSESVIT, foreign literature magazine  (Kyiv, Ukraine),  collection of poetry in a hundred-year-old DZVIN Magazine (the publication of the Association of Ukrainian writers in Lviv, Ukraine) (Sept 2024 edition), short story “Silence” (Ukr. version) in Zbruc (Lviv, Ukraine, Oct. 2024), play “Butterfly In Blue” (Zeitglas Magazine, October 2024), poetry translation of an American poet Carolyn Forche (KYIV magazine, Ukraine, March 2025).