The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute is pleased to announce
the recipients of HURI Research Fellowships for the 2003-2004 academic
year. They are: Juliette Cadiot (France), Vitaly Chernetsky (Ukraine),
George Liber (USA), Olena Rusina (Ukraine), Lidia Stefanowska (Poland),
and Roman Syrota (Ukraine).
Over the past few years the financial support and generosity of
many private donors and foundations,such as Eugene and Daymel Shklar,
and the Petro Jacyk Educational Foundation, has enabled HURI to
offer scholars from different countries an opportunity to do research
at Harvard University over a period of four to nine months in various
Ukraine-related fields. Under the auspices of the Eugene and Daymel
Shklar Fellowship alone (2001-2002 and 2002-2003), a total of seventeen
academics worked on their projects bringing to the Institute and
the greater Harvard community new ideas and contributions to Ukrainian,
Slavic and East European studies broadly defined. The Shklar Fellowships
created a momentum for exciting scholarship and unprecedented research
opportunities in Ukrainian studies in the United States. HURI was
thus able to attract a new cadre of Ukrainianists from many countries,
including Ukraine, the United States, Canada, Poland, Germany, Russia,
Israel, and Belarus.
In 2003, when due to various circumstances Shklar fellowship funding
entered a hiatus, the Institute decided to continue the Eugene and
Daymel Shklar initiative that had come to be so appreciated by its
beneficiaries. The Institute's Executive Committee earmarked funds
for a new program of HURI Research Grants that by its goals and
philosophy was a continuation of the Shklar Fellowship. The six
recipients of this year's fellowships were selected through an international
competition. The diverse research projects and specific disciplinary
perspectives of these scholars will make HURI a place to watch for
stimulating ideas and new approaches in Ukrainian studies in the
coming academic year.
Juliette
Cadiot. Historian. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Watson
Institute for International Studies, Brown University. Cadiot received
her Ph.D. in 2001 from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
Paris, France and the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
She has written on nationality issues and policies in the Russian
Empire and the Soviet Union, and, on two occasions, presented papers
at HURI: "Ethnic Categorization in Censuses and Census Projects
in the Russian Empire" (November, 2002), and " Historical
Perspectives on the Ukrainian Census: the Imperial and Soviet Legacy"
(February, 2003).
As part of her research project at HURI entitled "Social Sciences,
Demographic Masses, and the Construction of the Ukrainian Nationality
(1897-1932)", she intends to examine how statisticians, especially
demographers, as well as sociologists, linguists and ethnographers,
constructed the category of Ukrainian/Little Russian (Malorossiiskii)
nationality in the period between the end of the nineteenth century
to the 1930s. The study, which will form part of a book on the construction
of national categories in Russia and the Soviet Union, will focus
on the ideas and work of a generation of Ukrainian demographers
and ethnographers who were both the top experts in their field as
well as nationalists eager to serve a new socialist Ukraine. This
connection between new social sciences and the nationalist agenda
in all its components, which defined the political community in
both ethnic and civic terms, was particularly critical in the case
of Ukraine. The study also seeks to elucidate the population's reaction
to the efforts of the specialists to instill national consciousness
among the Ukrainian masses and promote linguistic unity.
Cadiot's eight-month fellowship at HURI begins in September. Her
fellowship is financed by the Mr. and Mrs. Alex Woscob endowment
in support of scholars conducting research on issues related to
Ukrainian history.
Vitaly
Chernetsky. Literary scholar. Chernetsky is an Assistant Professor
at the Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University. He received
his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from University
of Pennsylvania in 1996. His research interests include Ukrainian
and Russian literature, and cultural aspects of globalization, postcolonial
theory, and gender and feminist studies. He recently finished writing
his first monograph that discusses the contemporary literature and
culture of the two largest Slavic nations, Russia and Ukraine, and
places them in the context of the global-scale paradigm shift associated
with the notions of post-modernity and post-coloniality. In addition
to his essays on various aspects of modern Ukrainian and Russian literature,
Chernetsky has also published translations into English and Russian
of works by Yuri Andrukhovych, Petro Karmanskyi, Vasyl Makhno, Oksana
Zabuzhko and others.
His research project at HURI is a reflection of a key aspiration of
his academic endeavors - to help familiarize intellectual audiences
in the West with modern Ukrainian literature and culture, and thereby
to bring Ukrainian literature and culture into closer contact with its
counterparts elsewhere around the globe. He will be studying a number
of modern Ukrainian writers in close comparison with selected representatives
of other literatures: Vasyl Stefanyk with Joseph Conrad (England), Olha
Kobylianska with Willa Cather (USA), Volodymyr Vynnychenko with Witold
Gombrowicz (Poland), Mykola Khvylovyi with Frantz Fanon (France), Viktor
Domontovych with Konstantin Vaginov (Russia), Yuri Andrukhovych with
Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), and Oksana Zabuzhko with Dubravka
Ugresic (Croatia).
Chernetsky will be at HURI for eight months beginning in January. His
fellowship is funded by the Ukrainian Studies Fund, Inc. endowed gift
in support of research in Ukrainian Studies.
George
Liber. Historian. Liber is a Professor at the Department of History,
University of Alabama, Birmingham. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia
University in 1986. His scholarly interests include Soviet, post-Soviet
and East European social history, nationalism and national identity
formation, and twentieth-century Ukrainian history. His list of publications
includes two monographs: "Alexander Dovzhenko: a Life in Soviet
Film" (British Film Institute, 2002) and "Soviet Nationality
Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934"
(Cambridge University Press, 1992). While at HURI, Liber will be working
on an interpretative and synthetic essay analyzing the Communist Party's
and the Soviet Government's policies designed to mobilize and manage
the expression of non-Russian identities within the USSR. Building
on his first monograph and on reinterpreting the work produced by
many scholars over the past fifty years, the project will provide
the first substantial synthesis of Soviet nationality policy from
1917 through 1991.
Liber's four-month fellowship will start in February, 2004. It is funded
by the Wolodymyr Smigurowskyi endowed gift fund established to promote
"good scholarship on Ukraine."
Olena
Rusina. Historian-Medievalist. Rusina is a Senior Research Associate
at the Institute of Ukrainian History of the National Academy of Sciences
of Ukraine. She received her Ph.D. in History from the National Taras
Shevchenko University of Kyiv in 1991. She has authored numerous publications,
including three books dedicated to various aspects of Ukrainian medieval
and early modern history. Rusina's project at HURI entitled "Kyivan
Princely Tradition in the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries"
is intended as a conceptually innovative and comprehensive study of
the Kyivan princes during the age of the Tatar and, then, Lithuanian
supremacy. This period remains the most obscure in the city's history,
so obscure in fact that some authors question the very existence of
Kyiv as a city in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Because
local chronicle-writing was interrupted soon after Kyiv had been conquered
by the Batu Khan, information about the Kyivan princes of the period
remains very fragmentary. The project seeks to fill in this gap.
Rusina will be carrying out her research at HURI for seven months beginning
in November. Her fellowship is funded by the Dr. Jaroslaw and Nadia
Mihaychuk endowed gift.
Lidia
Stefanowska. Literary scholar. She is currently an adjunct and
full-time research associate at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw).
Stefanowska's ties with Harvard and the Ukrainian Research Institute
go back more than a decade. It is at Harvard that she received both
her M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1999) in Ukrainian Literature. Since then
she has returned to teach the course "Twentieth-Century Ukrainian
Literature: Tradition and the Avant-Garde" at the Harvard Ukrainian
Summer Institute (2001). She has also taught at the National Ivan
Franko University of Lviv and at the Ukrainian Catholic University
(Lviv). In her articles, reviews and analyses, she focuses on such
earlier and more recent representatives of twentieth-century Ukrainian
literature as Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Valerii Shevchuk, Yuri Andrukhovych,
Taras Prokhasko, Yuri Izdryk, and the poetic group Bu-Ba-Bu. She has
also translated into Polish works by Izdryk, Prokhasko, Liudmyla Taran,
Yuri Pozaiak, Vasyl Holoborodko, and Viktor Neborak.
During her five-month fellowship at HURI beginning in September, Stefanowska
will be working on a book with the provisional title "Between Vision
and Construction: the Poetics of Bohdan Ihor Antonych". Bohdan
Ihor Antonych, who lived and worked in Lviv in the 1920s and 1930s,
is one of the most distinguished Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century.
His poetic legacy was deliberately overlooked and obscured in the Soviet
Ukraine, and even after he was "rediscovered" in the 1960s,
his work was manipulated to fit it into the canon as a "materialist"
writer. Even today critics have not yet fully acknowledged Antonych's
importance in the evolution of Ukrainian poetry.
Stefanowska's fellowship is funded by the Dr. Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk
endowed gift established to support postdoctoral research at HURI.
Roman
Syrota. Historian. In his research project entitled "An Independent
Intellectual in International Politics: R.W. Seton-Watson and the
Ukrainian Question in Great Britain in the First Half of the Twentieth
Century," Syrota intends to develop a framework for writing an
intellectual and diplomatic history of the "Ukrainian question"
and do a specific case study of the influence a private individual
could exercise on public policy in the first half of the twentieth
century.
In 1996-1997 Syrota studied at London University in the Ukrainian Fellowship
Programme. He received his Ph.D. in History from the National Taras
Shevchenko University of Kyiv in 1998. Presently he is an Associate
Professor at the Department of History at the National Ivan Franko University
of Lviv where he has taught such history courses as "East-Central
Europe in Modern Times", "Contemporary Western Historiography
of East-Central Europe", and "Historian as Nation-Builder
in Western and Eastern Europe in Modern Times." Syrota's relationship
with HURI began in the summer of 2002 when he was a student at the Harvard
Ukrainian Summer Institute.
His five-month fellowship at the Institute begins in January, 2004.
It will be financed by the Ukrainian Studies Fund, Inc. and, in particular,
by the gift fund in support of a research position in Ukrainian Studies,
with preference given to research on twentieth century history and
political science.
