# Anna Bisikalo Historian ![Anna Bisikao](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2026-09/Bisikalo_headshot_2026.jpeg?h=f1d5fe12&itok=ZKx_6YXr) email ### Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute #### August 2026 - May 2027 Supported by HURI with the Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk Fellowship Fund ### Research Project #### Communion: Survival and Revival of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, 1944-1992 As the Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow, Anna will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript. Her project tells the story of the near-death, transformation, and resurrection of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) in Soviet Ukraine and communist Poland, starting with its liquidation after WWII. Using oral histories, correspondence, memoirs and materials from state archives, the project shows how Greek Catholics on both sides of the border reimagined their ritual practices, adapted to institutional and social repression, and sustained networks of pastoral care. By the 1980s, decades of persistent worship and appeals to authority escalated into an all-out movement to legalize the UGCC in Soviet Ukraine, joining the wave of anti-communist and national independence campaigns that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the final years of the Soviet experiment. The dissertation argues that the UGCC survived its 20th century trials through a foundation of hybrid practice; inspiration from dedicated church leaders; and interpersonal networks of support. Using a transnational and comparative approach, the narrative traces individuals’ lived experience to analyze how communist state policies functioned in divergent contexts. By examining a single church across two states in a 50-year timespan, the project demonstrates how Greek Catholics dealt with similar issues in different ways, and how generational shifts in the communist experience played a major role. Finally, the dissertation reveals how the UGCC functioned internally—as a spiritual, cultural, and social home for millions of Ukrainians who did not fit into the version of communist atheist modernity they inhabited. ### Biography Anna Bisikalo is a historian of modern Ukraine and Eastern/Central Europe. Her current book project is a social history of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) under communism that explains how the church survived repression through clandestine interpersonal networks, transnational support, and meaningful cultural practices. She researches the legacies of communist atheism and Ukrainian nationalism in contemporary religious identities. In 2023-2024, with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Student Award, Anna spent 8 months exploring archives and engaging with a local Ukrainian Catholic community in southeastern Poland. Her scholarship about the UGCC in post-1956 Poland and about the 1980s movement to legalize the church in Ukraine is forthcoming in two collective volumes. Anna received her PhD from Harvard University in May 2026, and earned her bachelor's degree in International Relations and Russian & East European studies from Wesleyan University in 2017. Her undergraduate thesis centered on local feminist organizing in independent Ukraine. Broadly, Anna's research interests include the social history of authoritarianism; secular and religious morality; the politics of memory and history; and communal rites and rituals. - ## Fellowship Type [Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies](/fellowship-type/jaroslaw-and-nadia-mihaychuk-research-fellow-ukrainian-studies) - ## Fellowship Year [Fellows for Academic Year 2026-2027](/fellowship-year/fellows-academic-year-2026-2027) - ## Fields of Expertise [History](/fields-expertise/history) [History and Archives](/fields-expertise/history-and-archives) [Memory Studies](/fields-expertise/memory-studies) [Modern History](/fields-expertise/modern-history) [Religious Studies](/fields-expertise/religious-studies) - ## Role [Fellows](/role/fellows)