Eleonora Narvselius

Associate Professor of European Studies at Lund University, Sweden
Eleonora Narvselius
eleonora.narvselius@kultur.lu.se
Faculty Profile

Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute

April - July 2026

Supported by Einar Hansens Allhemsstiftelse with a Lund-Harvard Visiting Fellowship

Research Project

Home-Making in Displacement Among Ukrainians in Poland, Germany, Sweden, Canada and USA: Collective Memories and Re(Dis)Located Heritages in the Wake of Russian Aggression

What meaning does the collective past acquire for people displaced from their homes by war? Do they perceive parallels between their own stories and those of their hosts? Do they engage in such comparisons at all? Do they deploy their cultural heritage in ways that help them remain hopeful and imagine a future beyond displacement? Drawing on sociological, anthropological, and historical scholarship, I seek to examine how Ukrainians escaping Russian aggression mobilize their knowledge and memories of the collective past across selected host countries, each of which has specific historical connections with Ukraine. From the outset, I focus on how displaced Ukrainians address their collective past in new contexts, especially in encounters with the collective pasts of their hosts. This engagement is, arguably, not merely retrospective; rather, it is part of a broader process through which displaced individuals make their experiences legible to host societies, inscribe themselves into future-oriented narratives, and (re)imagine home. Rather than treating home-making and displacement separately, I propose viewing ‘home-making in displacement’ as a dynamic practice aimed at creating safe and controllable spaces that are not necessarily permanent, but that do not imply “stuckness” in temporariness and precarity. Home-making in displacement is understood as being shaped by inherited pasts and collective remembrance tied to other places and times. By examining these layers, the project shifts the focus from spatial dimensions of migrant home-making to the ongoing labor of engaging with the collective past among the displaced.

Biography

Dr. Eleonora Narvselius is an Associate Professor of European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She has participated in EU- and Nordic-funded research, including Horizon, COST, Erasmus+, NordForsk, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Her academic interests span Ukrainian studies, memory studies, migration studies, ethnology and anthropology. In recent years, her research has focused on the experiences of various migrant communities in Europe, and since 2022, on Ukrainian migrants. Narvselius has co-organized the Witnessing the War on Ukraine Summer Institute (WWSI) in 2022−2026. Among her key publications are Ukrainian Intelligentsia in Post-Soviet L’viv: Narratives, Identity and Power (Lexington Books, 2012; Ukrainian translation, 2025); Traitors, Collaborators, and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory: Formulas of Betrayal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, co-edited with Gelinada Grinchenko); Diversity in the East-Central European Borderlands: Memories, Cityscapes, People (Ibidem, 2021, co-edited with Julie Fedor); and Witnessing the War on Ukraine: Academic, Activist and Aesthetic Vectors of Reflection (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2026, co-edited with Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Gelinada Grinchenko and Alina Doboszewska).