Ukrainian Cities under Siege: Looking to the Past to Understand the Present

Speaker bios:

Maria Avdeeva, Research Director at the European Expert Association and security analyst. She focuses on disinformation, information operations, and threats to democracy. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine she has been documenting Russian war crimes and reporting from the ground on the situation in the besieged city of Kharkiv.

Nejra Nuna Čengić is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz, Centre for Southeast European Studies. She holds a PhD in the Anthropology of Everyday Life from AMEU-ISH Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research interests and work focus on precarious work, gender, memory(-ies), storytelling and war violence. She made a significant contribution to the establishment of the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Sarajevo, where she gained most of her working experience. Her current research project deals with domestic paid female care work.

Mychailo Wynnyckyj is Associate Professor at the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Sociology Department and Business School), and is the university’s Academic Development Officer. Until recently he served as Head of the Secretariat of Ukraine’s National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance, and prior to that as Advisor to three of Ukraine’s Ministers of Education (2015-2019). Originally from Canada, Mychailo has lived permanently in Kyiv for almost two decades. He was awarded a PhD in 2004 from the University of Cambridge (U.K.). His book Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity was published in 2019.

Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written three books and many articles on the First World War, both on its combat operations and on its wider societal impact as a ‘total war’. His most recent major work is The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2020), which explores the Imperial Russian Army’s invasion of what today is western Ukraine and southern Poland and recounts the story of the longest siege of the First World War. Alex’s books have won the U.S. Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award (twice), the British Army Military Book of the Year Award, the Fraenkel Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History.

Sergii Pakhomenko is Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science and International Relations of Mariupol State University. Sergii’s recent positions include the academic coordinator of the Erasmus+ project “Rethinking Regional Studios: Baltic-Black Sea Communication” and the head of the Center of Baltic-Black Sea Studies of Mariupol State University. Among recent publications are articles “Between History and Propaganda: Estonia and Latvia in Russian Historical Narratives”, “Russian-Ukrainian War in Donbas: History as a Tool of Propaganda,” and in a number of foreign specialized publications – “Securitization of Memory During the Pandemic: Cases of Russia and Latvia,” “Memory Policy in Latvia and Ukraine,” and others. In 2017, Sergii was a recipient of the Ivan Vyhovsky Award from the Institute of Eastern Europe of the University of Warsaw.

Sponsored by Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine and co-sponsored by Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.