Narrating Everyday Life in Nazi-Occupied Kyiv: Viktoria Kolosova and Her Diary

Date: 

Wednesday, October 6, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:15pm

Location: 

Zoom Webinar and YouTube

Andrii Portnov, Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine, European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder)
Moderated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Department of History, Harvard University; Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

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Abstract

Viktoria Kolosova (1923–2010), a prominent Ukrainian literary scholar, kept a diary as a young woman in 1940–1945. Those notes (now in print by the Kharkiv Prava lyudyny publishing house) have never before been been used by scholars. In this talk, Andrii Portnov will introduce this source and put it into context of other ego-documents from Nazi-occupied Kyiv.  

About the Speaker

Andrii Portnov is Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). He graduated from Dnipro University (M.A. in history) and Warsaw University (M.A. in Cultural Studies). He defended his PhD dissertation (2005) on the Ukrainian emigration in inter-war Poland at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Lviv. In the years 2006-2010 he worked as the humanities Editor-in-Chief at the Kyiv-based journal Ukraїna Moderna. In 2012 he started lecturing on Ukrainian studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2015 he was awarded the Baron Velge Prize and conducted a series of lectures as International Chair for the History of the Second World War at the Free University of Brussels. He has conducted research and lectured at the Universities of Basel, Geneva, Potsdam, Free University Berlin, SciencesPo Paris, SciencesPo Lyon, and Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. 

The majority of his publications are devoted to the intellectual history, historiography, genocide, and memory studies in Eastern and Central Europe. He recently published a small book, Poland and Ukraine. Entangled Histories, Asymmetric Memories (Berlin, 2020), and co-edited the volume Official History in Eastern Europe (Osnabrück, 2020).

Moderator: Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Department of History, Harvard University; Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

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