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Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute
HUSI 2026 | June 22–August 7
Read articles by Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute students!
HUSI Blog
Through Words and Images: Anna Remembers Dnipro
Born in Horlovska in the Donetsk region, Anna went to Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro since 2016) for university when it first opened in 1987. The institution, back then known as Dnipropetrovsk State University in honor of the Russo-Ukrainian Union, now bears the...
The Ukrainian Sky is Dark Like Nowhere in Russia: Malevich's Artistic Expression of Ukrainianness
[…] I listened with great pleasure, studying the Ukrainian sky against which stars burned like candles. For the Ukrainian sky is dark, dark like nowhere in Russia. —— Kazimir Malevich “ Chapters from an Artist’s Autobiography ” If someone asked you to...
Last Christmas (Ukrainian Wartime Mix)
by Ernest Huk In a 2023 historic break with Russia, Ukraine’s two leading churches, responding to strong public sentiment, shifted their Christmas celebrations from January 7—still observed by the Russian Orthodox Church—to December 25, aligning with the...
From Estonia's Fulbright Program to HUSI
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this blog post are mine and do not represent the Fulbright Program, U.S. Government, American Embassy in Tallinn, or host institutions. In the summer of 2022, less than a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine...
Colonial Perspectives on National Identity in Ukrainian-Soviet Animation (1960–1990)
by Olesia Tymoshenko As a child in Ukraine, like many others, I was raised on Soviet cartoons that were widely broadcast. Some were in Ukrainian, reflecting our traditions, and no one questioned their portrayal. However, after Russia's full-scale invasion...
Translation Shenanigans at HUSI
by Madeleine Aber Over the summer, whilst taking Prof. Dibrova’s Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge and feeling thoroughly empowered by our leader, I decided to take a stab at literary translation. I chose my favourite Ukrainian author, the satirist Ostap...
What's So Wrong with Empathy? — Conversations on Knowledge Production and Empathy in Research during Wartime
by Sierra Salazar When I first read Julia Buyskykh's article "Old-New Colonial Tendencies in Social Anthropology" during the first week of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute in Dr. Emily Channell-Justice's course, I was shocked by such profound, raw...
From History to Poetry: The Galician Time Machine
by Mykolaj Suchy I scanned the pages of my grandmother’s red notebook for sentences and phrases I could understand. It began, “ For the second time in my life I’m writing a journal. The interesting phenomenon is…” I couldn’t decipher the letters that...
AI and Disability Rights: Rebuilding Ukraine
by Sofia Melnychuck Sofia Melnychuck is a rising third-year undergraduate at Harvard University pursuing a double major in Slavic Literature & Languages and Applied Mathematics with a focus on AI and computational neuroscience. Her academic focus is on...
“Show the people we see” — Ivan Franko on how to make the Ukrainian National Theater competitive
by Vincent Hoyer Vincent Hoyer (HUSI 2024) wrote this piece as part of his work for Dr. Dibrova’s course“Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge.” “The stay of the Ukrainian national theater in Lviv began quite nicely and ended in a total disaster […].” With...
