Timothy Snyder and the Public History Lab host an international workshop for the Ukrainian History Global Initiative.
In December 2025, Professor Timothy Snyder, his Public History Lab, and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy welcomed 17 scholars from a wide range of disciplines at a workshop in support of an international collaboration that is exploring the central role of the lands of today’s Ukraine in global history: the Ukrainian History Global Initiative. The focus of the event was to make the rigorous and cutting-edge research of the authors accessible to broad audiences. The result was an exceptionally motivating gathering. The format allowed participants the time to engage with each other’s work and with different types of expertise, displaying an empathetic approach to academic collaboration.
The UHGI workshop, facilitated by the Public History Lab’s Research Associate Daniel Fedorowycz, encouraged participants to apply the dentist’s office test: to assess whether a scholarly text is suitably intelligible to engage the attention of an imagined educated but non-specialist reader as they wait for a dentist's appointment. This proved to be a beneficial approach, according to Yana Prymachenko, a historian with the Institute of History of Ukraine, currently based at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI): “When you work on a topic, you think that some things are self-evident, but they're not. And it helps to do that self-check and understand how clear it will be for a wider audience.” For Chiara Di Leone, a graduate student in the history of science from UCLA, who is working on a module about archaeological mysteries in Ukraine with collaborator Maksym Rokmaniko of the Center for Spatial Technologies, “sometimes as an academic, you only write for your peers. There are a lot of resources in this initiative that will make it a truly public history work that everyone can read. I would like my work to reach hundreds and thousands of people.”
The focus on making the research findings accessible provided a uniquely collaborative and productive space. The president of the American Historical Association, renowned environmental historian John McNeill, noted that he had “a substantial harvest of critique, and I expect to get a lot of recommendations for things I need to read.” Patrice Dabrowski, of HURI, is an expert of the 19th and 20th centuries but will be providing a module that covers the geology and pre-history of the Carpathian mountains: “To have access to people who really comment and point me in the right direction, as well as correct your bad interpretations, is just priceless.”
In addition to diverse expertise, the workshop participants benefited from its intergenerational character. Of early-career scholars like Di Leone and Rokmaniko, Alexey Nikitin, an expert on Indo-European DNA and professor of biology at Grand Valley State University, said they “are doing something that I didn't even know was possible–a 3-D reconstruction of an archaeological site that's no longer there. It's gone. And that site is a key site in the whole history of Indo-European development. Because of their work, we can now go inside this dig in virtual reality, which has never been done before.”
In closing the event, Professor Snyder said: “We work on various topics that happen to intersect on the territory of Ukraine. Some people have worked together before, and some have met each other for the first time here, and that is very special. We’re doing it not in the symbolic way; we’re actually interacting. Making your work comprehensible to your colleagues is the first step to making it accessible to the general public. ”
The UHGI will host its annual conference in Kyiv in September 2026.
The Toronto UHGI Workshop was supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, the Myhal Family Foundation Ukrainian Research and Program Fund, and the Office of the Vice-President International, University of Toronto.
