Moderated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
East European nations share myths of ancient origins, of being cultural and ethnic communities that arose before history. V. Zelensky, however, has plucked Ukraine out of the region, calling it a "new nation," whose recent revolutions have more in common with Philadelphia in 1776 or Paris in 1789 than Warsaw and Prague in 1918. The Ukrainian nation comprises men and women who have risen against tyranny and for the sake of popular sovereignty.
Is this wishful thinking? How do we know that deeper ethnic claims on identity won't assert themselves, bringing Ukraine back to "eastern Europe"? More generally: what can Ukraine teach us about how nations come together? Does democracy require nationalism; or are the two forces incompatible?
John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently directs the Institute for East European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. Connelly completed his BA at Georgetown University and PhD at Harvard University. His books include Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education (Chapel Hill, 2000), which won the 2001 George Beer Award of the American Historical Association, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews (Harvard, 2012), which was awarded the John Gilmary Shea Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association, and From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2020). He serves on the editorial boards of Slavic Review and Contemporary European History, and his reviews and essays have appeared in Commonweal, The Nation, Washington Post, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and London Review of Books. Connelly’s work has been supported by Fulbright and Marshall Foundations and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.
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LOCATION:Belfer Case Study Room (S-020), CGIS-South Concourse Level STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250312T210000Z DTEND:20250312T223000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR