Nations after Communism

Panelists:

Alison Frank Johnson, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Georgiy Kasianov, Professor and Head of the Laboratory of International Memory Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland

Terry Martin, George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies, Department of History, Harvard University

Roman Szporluk, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History - Emeritus, Harvard University

In conversation with Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University

IN-PERSON ONLY

All attendees of this panel are warmly invited to join us for a reception immediately following the event. The reception will take place right next door in the Lee Gathering Room (S-030), CGIS-South Concourse Level.

About the Speakers

Alison Frank Johnson is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her teaching and research focus on the history of central and eastern Europe and the region's interactions with the rest of the world in the modern period. She teaches courses on late imperial Vienna; commodities in international history; on German history in the broadest sense of the phrase; on the Habsburg Empire and its successor states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (2005), was awarded the Barbara Jelavich 2006 Book Prize, the Austrian Cultural Forum 2006 Book Prize, and the Polish Studies Association 2006 Orbis Book Prize. She is currently working on two concurrent projects. The first investigates Austria-Hungary's engagement with maritime commerce in the long nineteenth century. The second traces nearly two centuries of ambivalence about capital punishment in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Republic of Austria: Habsburgs were among the first European rulers to abolish the death penalty in the 18th-century. After periods of reintroduction, haphazard application, partial abolition, and systematic implementation, capital punishment was only completely eliminated in Austria in 1968. Additional interests include the transformation of the Alpine environment and the Mediterranean slave trade. Frank Johnson offers general exam fields in German-speaking Europe, Eastern and/or Central Europe, and European Environmental History. [Image Source] [Text Source]

Georgiy Kasianov is a professor and the Head of the Laboratory of International Memory Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. In 2003 - 2021, he was the head of the Department of Contemporary History and Politics at the Institute of Ukrainian History at the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv. He is a Fulbright (1995-1996, 2017-2018) and Kennan Institute (2003) alumnus. He studied and taught at London University, Cambridge University, Harvard, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Berlin Free University, and universities of Japan, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Italy, and Poland. His research interests are the social, political and cultural history of Ukraine from the 19th to 21st centuries, the epistemology of history, nationalism, memory studies. Central aspects of his current studies include national, international, and transnational politics of memory, instrumental use and abuse of history, and cultural and social memory studies. He is an author and co-editor of more than 20 books and edited volumes and coauthor in more than 20 edited volumes. His latest book is called Memory Crash. Politics of History In and Around Ukraine, 1980s–2010s (2022), which is available online, open access here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/52570).

Terry Martin the George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of History at Harvard University. He is the author of The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 (Cornell UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Ronald Suny) of A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford UP, 2001). In addition to questions of nationality and empire, he has written on religion, political and administrative history, Soviet neo-traditionalism, and the political police, as well as the Nazi-Soviet comparison. He is currently completing a book on the politics and sociology of state information-gathering in the USSR from the revolution through the death of Stalin. [Image Source] [Text Source]

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. His interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author of, among others, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (W.W. Norton, 2023); Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters (W.W. Norton, 2022); The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present (HURI, 2021); Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W. W. Norton, 2021); Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand/ Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2019); Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Basic Books, 2018); and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2015). His books have won numerous awards, including the Ballie Gifford Prize and the Shevchenko National Prize (2018). [Text Source]

Roman Szporluk is Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History - Emeritus at Harvard and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Michigan. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev. His research focuses on modern Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish history, and on Marxism and nationalism in Eastern Europe. He is the author of The Political Thought of T.G. Masaryk; Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List; Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union; and U poshukakh maibutnioho chasu (“In search of future time,” in Ukrainian, 2010). His recent articles include “Lenin, ‘Great Russia,’ and Ukraine,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies; “Mapping Ukraine: From Identity Space to Decision Space,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies; and “The Making of Modern Ukraine: The Western Dimension,” in A Laboratory of Transnational History, edited by G. Kasianov and P. Ther (2009). [Text Source]

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This Special Event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) in celebration of our 50th Anniversary (1973-2023).

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks  in advance of the session.

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