Meet the HUSI Class of 2025
We are pleased to introduce you to the 2025 HUSI cohort! The 55th consecutive Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) is underway, and with it, the latest cohort of students has arrived from all over the world. Learn more about their interests, backgrounds, and goals through the bios below.
Sophie Baran
Sophia Baran is an emerging fiction writer who draws on her connection with her Ukrainian heritage to fuel her writing. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto, majoring in History and double minoring in Writing & Rhetoric and Book & Media studies. More recently, she completed her MFA in Writing with a concentration in Fiction at the University of New Hampshire. She was also the fiction editor of Barnstorm Journal housed by the University of New Hampshire’s MFA program. Her thesis is a collection of short magical realist stories about Ukrainian folklore and the experiences of the diaspora.
She is taking two courses this summer at HUSI: “Tradition and Modernity in Ukraine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” and “Ukraine’s State and Society.” She is taking these courses for three reasons. First, they sound cool. Second, she is eager to learn more about Ukrainian history, culture, and society to explore her roots and find personal fulfillment. Finally, she wants to use what she learns in these classes as a foundational basis for her future writing. She also looks forward to attending the weekly lecture series and getting to know other students interested in Ukrainian studies.
Ziva Benedejcic
Ziva Benedejcic is a rising sophomore at Harvard College with a concentration in Government. Having experienced firsthand challenges connected to the dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the intricate relations among its successor states, she has become interested in questions of identity formation and politics. Ziva particularly believes that more attention should be paid to the thirteen Slavic countries that appeared on the map of Europe after 1989, also because their interactions have profoundly impacted global security. For this reason, after coming to Harvard, she enrolled in Professor Serhii Plokhii's course "Frontiers of Europe: Ukraine since 1500." This course sparked her interest in the Ukrainian role in modern history.
At HUSI, Ziva is taking Dr. Serhiy Bilenky's course "Tradition and Modernity: Ukraine in the 19th and 20th Centuries" and Dr. Sophia Wilson's course "Ukraine's State and Society". Dr. Bilenky’s course will allow her to deepen her understanding of Ukrainian national formation as a response to challenges of modernity and urbanization and as an example of the Self being defined by the Other, be it Russian, Polish, or Jewish. Dr. Wilson’s course will allow her to better appreciate the role of civil society in nation-building, also from the vantage point of major political science perspectives, including constructivism. Together, the two courses will contribute to her further research on the role of identity in international relations, especially in the Slavic-speaking space.
Sofiya Boroday
Sofiya is a PhD student in the Harvard Slavic Languages and Literatures department. She received a joint BA in linguistics and MA in digital humanities from the University of Chicago. Born in Poltava, Ukraine, she grew up in a Russian-speaking family in Virginia and has long been interested in formally learning Ukrainian. Her research interests include amateur art movements and folk art practices in the early 20th century, especially in Ukraine. She hopes Professor Dibrova's Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge course will develop her Ukrainian language skills, aid in her research, and deepen her engagement with Ukrainian culture.
Lada Butska
Lada Butska is a third-year student at the Université de Montréal's Faculty of Law. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, she is a third-generation Ukrainian Canadian. She has a strong interest in international law. As President of her university's Lawyers Without Borders Canada student committee, she leads fundraising efforts and works to engage students in global legal issues. While on summer break in 2023, 2024, and 2025, Lada volunteered with Ukrainian Patriot and other civil society NGOs, contributing to humanitarian aid efforts across Ukraine. She was inspired by the dedication of local communities, whose efforts affirmed her commitment to supporting Ukraine.
This summer, Lada is enrolled in the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute courses “State and Society” and “Tradition and Modernity.” She chose these courses to gain a deeper understanding of Ukraine’s political and cultural development. She sees this knowledge as essential to pursue work in international law, particularly in support of Ukraine’s recovery and justice efforts.
Lada is interested in Ukraine’s efforts to align its national legislation with international human rights standards and to prosecute russian war crimes. She views historical and contemporary insights into Ukrainian state-society relations as crucial context for this work and is grateful for the opportunity to expand her understanding through HUSI.
Tomáš Čorej
Tomáš Čorej (b. 2002) holds a Bachelor's in Political Science from the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts. Starting September 2025, he will pursue a Master's in Political Science, specializing in Conflict Studies and Comparative Politics, at the London School of Economics (LSE). Aside from academia, he works as a foreign affairs journalist for the Slovak daily Denník N.
For Tomáš, born in Eastern Slovakia, Ukraine has been of both academic and professional focus. In his bachelor's thesis, he examined the emergence of a new generation in light of the full-scale Russian invasion. As a journalist, he has aimed to write stories from below, featuring the reintegration of soldiers returning from the frontline and the mental health crisis amid ongoing Russian attacks.
While not shying away from existing problems, Tomáš could not help but admire the resilience of millions of Ukrainians. Out of respect for Ukrainians but also for the purpose of improving his research and work, he feels the need to further his comprehension of Ukrainian history and the political system. For that reason, he is honoured to be taking two courses this summer: Tradition and Modernity: Ukraine in the 19th and 20th Centuries and Ukraine’s State and Society.
Julia Gerdner
Julia Gerdner is a writer and PhD candidate from Stockholm, Sweden. She holds an MA in Russian and East European Literature and Culture from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and a BA in Literature from Uppsala University. This spring term, she began a PhD programme in Slavic languages and literatures at Stockholm University. Her research project, “Resurrecting through Language”, examines the phenomenon of linguistic conversion from Russian to Ukrainian in contemporary Ukrainian literature.
The topic of her dissertation also reflects her linguistic journey. While born in Sweden, Julia has a Ukrainian background and spent significant time in Ukraine. However, her understanding of the Ukrainian language largely remained passive, as she grew up speaking Russian. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Julia resolved to attain full proficiency in Ukrainian and has learned the language since, not least through translating the poems of displaced Ukrainian friends into Swedish. Some of the bilingual and metalinguistic poetry she encountered inspired her PhD project.
With support from the HUSI scholarship, Julia is taking Dr. Volodymyr Dibrova’s course “Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge” to further enhance her knowledge of Ukrainian. She is confident that the course will provide her with the linguistic proficiency and cultural, social, and historical contexts necessary to confidently engage with Ukrainian-language scholarship and literary texts. She also hopes it will enable her to continue translating poetry between Ukrainian and Swedish.
Zuzanna Kubicka
Zuzanna is a post-graduate student in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Groningen, where she also earned her bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Philosophy, and is a prospective student at the College of Europe in Natolin. During her master’s studies, she focused on courses related to policy-making and trade economics. She is currently finishing her thesis, which explores the concept of digital sovereignty and the challenges it faces today, particularly in the context of AI development.
Russia’s full-scale invasion made her aware of the risks to the security and stability of the European Union, especially for her home country, Poland. It also deepened her conviction that a secure Europe depends on a free and democratic Ukraine. Her time as a national delegate to the Council of Europe, where she worked on topics such as post-war reparations and the return of abducted Ukrainian children, strongly reinforced this belief.
Looking ahead, Zuzanna hopes to live in Ukraine after the war and contribute to its long-term economic and civic recovery. Besides, her ambition is to partake in designing policies on the assimilation of Ukrainian refugees in Poland, which unfortunately remains a significant yet unaddressed challenge. To better prepare for this, she is currently taking the following courses: “Tradition and Modernity in Ukraine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” with Dr. Serhiy Bilenky and “Ukraine's State and Society” with Dr. Sophia Wilson at the Harvard University Research Institute. Learning more about the country’s past and present is an important step in the realization of her professional career.
Yevheniia Kuznetsova
Yevheniia Kuznetsova is a Ukrainian scholar and activist pursuing a Master's degree in Contemporary Societies, with a sociology track, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology with a focus on Gender Studies from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, earned in 2023. Her research explores how forced migration shapes national identity and civic belonging among Ukrainian refugees. Beyond her academic work, Yevheniia is passionate about Ukrainian civic activism. She has organized awareness events about the Holodomor and co-organized exhibitions such as Unissued Diplomas in Finland to highlight the stories of Ukrainian students whose lives were cut short by russia’s full-scale invasion.
Yevheniia is taking two courses: Tradition and Modernity in Ukraine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and Ukraine's State and Society. These courses align with her broader academic and activist goals of deepening her understanding of Ukrainian historical development, social transformation, and state-building. Her interest in studying Ukraine stems from both personal commitment and scholarly ambition: she aims to become an expert in Ukrainian studies and use her platform to elevate Ukrainian voices within academic discourse. Through research and activism, she seeks to contribute to a more nuanced and globally visible understanding of Ukraine’s past, present, and future.
Rachel Landau
Rachel Landau (she/they) is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. They study experimental poetics, literary translation, and Jewish Studies. Before starting at Harvard, Rachel received an AB in Slavic Studies and Literary Arts at Brown University and an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University. She has also worked in human rights and free expression advocacy, researching cases of incarcerated journalists and writers across Eastern Europe. Outside of their academic work, Rachel writes and translates poetry; they were an American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellow in 2023, and currently, they read translation submissions for The Adroit Journal.
This summer at HUSI, Rachel is enrolled in Intensive Elementary Ukrainian. Rachel has taken a few Ukrainian literature courses at Harvard, and the incredible syllabi for these courses introduced Rachel to Ukrainian literature in translation. Rachel would like to approach the texts once more with a deepened knowledge of the language and culture in which they were originally written. Further, they are excited to learn Ukrainian for their research on Jewish Studies. The course is sure to complement her concurrent study of Yiddish language and Ashkenazi history, which she studies with support from Harvard, the Workers Circle, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Samantha Lieberman
Having just completed her first year of graduate school at Georgia Tech, where she is getting her PhD in the History of Science and Technology, this Summer at HURI, Samantha will sharpen her archival research skills in Volodymyr Dibrova’s Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge course. Russia’s May 2022 shelling of Ukraine's largest gene bank at the National Center for Plant Genetic Resources in Kharkiv underscored the vulnerability of Ukrainian ecological and cultural plant material and their stewards, placing the gene bank squarely within the future imagined by these doomsday structures. Sam’s dissertation seeks to situate this event within a broader narrative of Ukrainian biodiversity preservation, global agricultural development, and national plant science, thus contributing a Ukrainian geopolitical context to international discourse evaluating the relationship between food sovereignty and the role of seed banks and their scientists in preserving cultural memory.
Sam’s project has connected her with people worldwide, but it originally began as a way to become acquainted with her heritage. Sam’s great-grandparents emigrated from Odesa to Philadelphia and Brooklyn on the eve of the 20th century, determined to begin their new lives as true blue-jean Americans. In the fall of 2022, while working towards her bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley in Genetics and Plant Biology, Sam grew curious about the importance of Ukrainian agriculture and began to uncover a vibrant history of дача vegetable patches and basement potatoes. In her experience, humor and irony are crucial bulwarks in circumstances as precarious as the safety of Ukraine’s ecological futures. A shared literary context is a wonderful place to build this connection, beyond a mastery of the language itself.
Coline Maestracci
Coline Maestracci is a postdoc at École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and an associate at HURI. She wrote her Ph.D. in political science on the engagement trajectories of Ukrainian volunteer combatants at the beginning of the war in 2014. Her research adopts an ethnographic approach based on in-depth interviews with Ukrainian combatants. Her new research project focuses on the impact of the current war on combatants’ family life.
Coline has been studying Ukrainian for a few years. She is taking the course “Ukrainian for reading knowledge.” This course is a unique opportunity to further develop her linguistic skills. More broadly, she believes that it is also an opportunity to sharpen knowledge on Ukraine through the many interesting activities organized by HUSI. She seeks to create a new network through interactions with other HUSI scholars, as well.
Hadi Mahdeyan
Hadi Mahdeyan is an international student from Iran pursuing a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with certificates in Energy Studies and Persian and Iranian Studies at Yale University. Hadi has previously engaged in language education as an English tutor in Iran and as a Persian language teaching assistant and tutor at Yale’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
His academic interests include linguistics and politics, with a particular focus on the intersection of language and historical politics in Iran. At Yale, he has taken courses in linguistics, international relations, political philosophy, politics, and literature in modern Iran and Afghanistan, as well as ancient languages, including Old Persian.
At HUSI, he is taking "Intensive Elementary Ukrainian" to explore the linguistic influences between Slavic languages and Mazandarani, an ancient Indo-European Iranian language and his ethnic language, during the Russo-Persian Wars and the Soviet occupation of Iran, as well as potential linguistic convergence between Mazandarani and Ukrainian.
Hadi enjoys reading and writing Persian prose and poetry. He aims to use political journalism to advocate for the people of Iran and other nations, including Ukraine, affected by the ideology, warmongering, and terrorism of the Islamic Republic in Iran.
Will Nechipurenko
Will Nechipurenko, a Massachusetts native with Ukrainian heritage, is a rising high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. He loves studying languages and has been learning French for several years. This fall, he will start taking Russian language but wants to continue learning Ukrainian in college, where he plans to major in Slavic studies.
Will is taking Intensive Elementary Ukrainian at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. He will put the language to use this August in Ukraine, where he will work at the Lviv Volunteer Kitchen and also teach English. As someone who is always quick to support friends and classmates in need, Will wants to provide this in-person, on-the-ground help to Ukrainians as they persevere in their brave fight against Russia.
Enikő Pálinkás
Enikő Pálinkás is currently pursuing two Master’s degrees in International and European Law at the University of Amsterdam, having enrolled in both the EU Law track and the European Competition Law and Regulation track. From September, she will also begin a Master’s in Political Science at the same university, specializing in European Politics and External Relations. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in European Studies, with a focus on European Law and Politics. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of law, governance, and European integration, with a particular focus on democratic backsliding, the rule of law, and institutional reform in Central and Eastern Europe. In parallel with her studies, she is a Democracy Rapporteur at the Our Rule of Law Foundation and contributes to research at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG).
At the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, she is enrolled in two courses: Ukraine’s State and Society with Dr. Sophia Wilson, and Tradition and Modernity: Ukraine in the 19th and 20th Centuries with Dr. Serhiy Bilenky. These courses complement her academic focus by offering deeper insight into Ukraine’s history, state-building processes, and contemporary political challenges. She is particularly interested in Ukraine’s resilience in the face of Russia’s war. As a student from Hungary, studying European law and politics, she is motivated by both academic curiosity and a regional commitment to understanding Ukraine’s crucial role in shaping the future of Europe. Alongside her academic work, she is learning Ukrainian, motivated by a strong commitment to engage with Ukrainians in a meaningful way.
Melania Parzonka
Melania Parzonka works for the Ukraine Forum and the Russia-Eurasia Programme at the London foreign affairs think-tank Chatham House.
This summer, Melania is taking the Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge course with Volodomyr Dibrova. By developing her knowledge of the Ukrainian language, Melania hopes to engage more meaningfully with Ukrainian political life in the future.
Leslie Payne
Leslie Payne is a rising sophomore at UMass Boston pursuing an independent major in Psychocultural Media Studies. She intends to incorporate interdisciplinary analysis of Ukrainian national identity through popular media. One of her first academic inquiries into Ukraine was a historical analysis of traditional food as a symbol of resilience, where she focused on Holodomor and connected her family's history to the imperialist crimes of early Soviet Russia.
Leslie lived abroad with her family in the Foreign Service until she returned to the U.S. in 2018; two of her family's posts included the post-Soviet countries of Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, so she grew up speaking Russian both in the classroom and at home. As a heritage speaker of Russian with little Ukrainian proficiency, she struggled to communicate with her Ukrainian family. She decided to take action by enrolling in the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute.
Leslie is excited to begin studying Elementary Ukrainian in Dr. Shpylova-Saeed's course, with the support of a scholarship from HURI. She aims to finally gain proficiency in the language that honors her family and be able to speak it with her grandparents. In addition to her personal and academic interests in learning the language, Leslie is eager to connect with Ukrainian culture and gain a broader understanding of her family heritage during the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute.
Greta Lin Risgin
Greta Lin Risgin recently graduated summa cum laude from the College of William & Mary with a double major in Data Science and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Greta has studied the Russian language for four years and was awarded the ACTR Russian Scholar Laureate Award. Now she is excited to branch out into a new Slavic language at HUSI, where she will take “Intensive Elementary Ukrainian.” At William & Mary, Greta conducted research with the International and Political Affairs of the Caucasus (IPAC) Lab in Tbilisi on the migration of Russian dissidents and activists to Georgia after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2025, Greta and her team presented their research, Democracy in Motion (Демократия в движении), at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference in Chicago. Participating in the Democracy in Motion project laid the groundwork for Greta’s growing interest in Ukraine and the Ukrainian language. Greta also served as Data Team Lead for the IPAC Lab, where she gained exposure in working with political and environmental foreign language data. Driven by her interest in foreign policy analysis, Greta looks forward to enhancing her data skills and establishing a broad linguistic foundation across the Eastern European region.
Andrew Romanchik
Andrew Romanchik is a student of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, Class of 2028, also pursuing a certificate in Russian, Eastern European, and Slavic Studies. With academic and professional interests in diplomacy, transatlantic relations, and international legal cooperation, Andrew intends to pursue a Juris Doctor and work in transatlantic arbitration or war crimes litigation during Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.
Andrew is studying Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge with Dr. Volodymyr Dibrova to strengthen his research and analysis in the region’s native language. He has organized pro-Ukrainian demonstrations and participated in humanitarian efforts assisting Ukrainian refugees and those in the occupied territories, grounding his academic goals in hands-on advocacy and civic engagement.
Andrew’s path reflects a deep commitment to the rule of law, post-conflict justice, and the legal frameworks that uphold international order in Eastern Europe.
Chaya Steinsaltz
Chaya is an MPhil (Master's) student in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on national identity in the Soviet Union, particularly in the lead-up to and during the Great Patriotic War. She received her BA in History, Politics, and Economics from University College London (UCL) in 2024, where she studied at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
In addition to her academic work, she is a Dahrendorf Scholar at the European Studies Centre at Oxford, where she is researching the connections and alliances between illiberal leaders in Eastern Europe and the American MAGA movement. She has been awarded scholarships by Oxford’s Global and Area Studies Department, the European Studies Centre, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and a FLAS Fellowship through the Davis Center at Harvard.
At HUSI, Chaya is studying Elementary Ukrainian to support archival research for her master’s thesis and to develop a fuller understanding of Ukrainian culture and history.
Tan Hon Jun
Tan Hon Jun is an undergraduate student from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), studying a double degree in accountancy and business (international trade). He has always had a deep interest in history and political science. His first encounter with Ukrainian Studies took place when he was 15 years old and read the book Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West by Catherine Belton the book exposes how former KGB operatives restructured the Russian state into a centralized, authoritarian power, blending security services with oligarchic wealth and using energy and corruption as geopolitical weapons. This context is crucial to understanding Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, its ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, and the full-scale invasion in 2022. Belton details the Kremlin’s strategies for undermining Western unity and sovereignty in post-Soviet states like Ukraine. The detail that stuck with him the most was the flight of pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 during the Maidan revolution. Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine in late February 2014 as his presidency collapsed amid the Maidan revolution. His escape was frantic, disorganized, and heavily reliant on Russian assistance. At one point, he was hidden in a small house near the russian border while Moscow scrambled to extract him. He was eventually picked up by russian forces and flown out. When he left the country, he only had a few thousand dollars left in the national treasury.
This summer, Hon Jun will be taking “UKRN S-131 Ukraine's State and Society” with Dr. Sophia Wilson (Associate Professor of Political Science, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and “ECON S-1317 The Economics of Emerging Markets: Asia and Eastern Europe” with Dr. Bruno S. Sergi (Faculty Affiliate of the Center for International Development at Harvard Kennedy School), to better understand Ukraine not just from the lens of the west or Russia but hearing from indigenous voices as well. He looks forward to exploring more about Ukraine with Dr Sophia Wilson and to acquiring a comprehensive understanding of Ukraine’s modern transformation. For the economics of emerging markets course, he hopes to learn more about emerging markets, the risks and benefits of investing in them, and how they improve their odds of transitioning from developing to developed country status.
For Hon Jun, studying at HUSI is an attempt to step outside his usual accounting classes, learn something new, and learn about the views of Ukraine and Russia, not just from the textbook but from actual people and experts themselves. He hopes to write a paper about whether Russia would be content after annexing parts of Ukraine, or if this is the resurrection of Russian imperialism, and the attempt to right the wrongs of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or what President Putin himself calls "The greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."
Giorgi Tsikarishvili
Giorgi Tsikarishvili is a journalist from Georgia. He is pursuing a Master’s degree in Central and Eastern European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Over the past few years, Giorgi has been covering the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russian politics for the Georgian online media outlet Tabula. He has interviewed volunteers defending Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression. Additionally, Giorgi contributed to a journalistic investigation by The Insider, in collaboration with 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, on unraveling the causes behind the so-called Havana Syndrome.
This summer, Giorgi is taking courses on Ukraine’s State and Society and Tradition and Modernity in Ukraine in the 19th and 20th Centuries, aiming to deepen his academic understanding of the country. He is particularly interested in the formation of Ukrainian national identity and the development of right-wing movements that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union. He hopes to use the knowledge gained through these courses for future academic research and writing.
Giorgi’s fascination with Ukraine began in the late 2010s while studying International Relations at the Free University of Tbilisi. His academic interest in armed conflicts, combined with a growing appreciation for Ukraine’s contemporary music scene, further intensified his engagement with the country.
Isabelle Wolpert
In 2025, Isabelle Wolpert will complete a dual degree at Boston University, earning a B.A. in History and a B.Mus. in Piano Performance while studying with pianists Andrius Žlabys and Linda Jiorle-Nagy. Her research focuses on Polish-Jewish relations, Tsarist Russia, nationalism, identity, and anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Drawing on her classical music training, she also explores the role of music and art in shaping identity from the 19th through the 21st centuries.
Isabelle’s academic interests are closely connected to her Polish-Catholic and Ukrainian-Lithuanian Jewish heritage. She has presented her research at undergraduate conferences and completed a Senior Honors Thesis on representations of anti-Semitism in 19th and 20th century Polish art.
At HUSI, Isabelle is taking Intensive Elementary Ukrainian to support her future doctoral research and deepen her connection to the Ukrainian language and heritage.
A recipient of the Kościuszko Foundation’s Year Abroad Award, she will continue her studies in 2025-26 at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before pursuing a Ph.D. in history.
Yevhen Yashchuk
Yevhen Yashchuk, from Zhytomyr, is a DPhil (PhD) student in Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford, where his dissertation explores the transimperial history of the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875-1878, focusing on the crisis’s appearance in the urban contexts of Kyiv and Lviv. Before that, he studied history in Kyiv, Prague, Lviv, Vienna, and Utrecht. Since April 2022, Yevhen has worked as a student coordinator and mentor at CEU Invisible University for Ukraine. Since November 2024, he has been a founding member of the Oxford Ukraine Hub. He is also an editor of web blogs Visible Ukraine and Peripheral Histories.
This summer, Yevhen is taking courses ‘Tradition and Modernity: Ukraine in the 19th and 20th Centuries’ and ‘Ukraine's State and Society,’ which resonate with his research interests and teaching experience. Fascinated by the complex histories of the nineteenth century, he looks forward to exploring new ways of approaching the (post-)imperial past of contemporary Ukraine at Dr. Serhiy Bilenky’s course. Intrigued by the changes the Ukrainian state is experiencing, he hopes to find the right questions to ask in Dr. Sophia Wilson’s course.
Yevhen is obviously interested in studying Ukraine because he was born and raised there. That aside, he believes that Ukraine can be an enriching case study, if looked at from the perspective of entangled contexts of Europe and the globe - in past centuries and today.