In conversation with Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications at HURI. Additional comments provided by George G. Grabowicz, Dmytro Čyževs’kyi Professor of Ukrainian Literature (Emeritus), Harvard University, and Frank E. Sysyn, Director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Former Associate Director of HURI.
Books are available for purchase on the HURI Books website.
This event is organized by HURI Books, the publications program at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
This is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) and the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Andrii Portnov places Pritsak’s life and legacy in the context of Ukrainian and world historiography and illuminates the development of his scholarly interests from their emergence in interwar Poland, through the Sovietization of Western Ukraine and the perturbations of World War II, to German Oriental Studies in the 1940s and 1950s, North American Slavic studies, and to the international studies of the origins of Rus´. Pritsak’s intellectual trajectory unfolds as a combination of facing the challenges of establishing the field of Ukrainian studies in North America and engaging with influential scholars such as Dmytro Čyževskyj, Roman Jakobson, Ivan Krypiakevych, Oleksandr Ohloblyn, and Natalia Polonska-Vasylenko.
Andrii Portnov is is the founding director of the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe in Berlin, Associate Member of the Viadrina Centre of Polish and Ukrainian Studies, and Professor at the Free Ukrainian University in Munich. He is the award-winning author of numerous books on intellectual history, historiography, genocide, and memory studies in Central and Eastern Europe, including, Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (2022).