Date:
Location:
Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews, UK), Steven Seegel (University of Texas at Austin), Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon (University of Pennsylvania), John Vsetecka (Michigan State University)
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Abstract
When Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022, most scholars were caught off guard. Some, however, found various ways to respond to the tragic events by engaging in the variety of academic and non-academic activities, such as volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees in Europe or foreign nationals (primarily from Africa and Asia) stuck in the Ukraine under attack; spreading the truth about the war on social media, in press, on the radio, and on television; reaching out to Ukrainian scholars at risk; countering Russian propaganda on all possible platforms; and in the process transforming their own understanding of Ukraine’s politics, culture, and society.
Our panel will bring together several scholars from different countries who will share their own experiences as academics in a time of war. The panelists include Taras Fedirko, a British Academy Research Fellow in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews in the UK; Steven Seegel, Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Associate Chair in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin; Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a Ph.D. Student at the University of Pennsylvania where she is writing her dissertation on how people of color's presence shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and post-Soviet space; and John Vsetecka, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is finishing a dissertation on the aftermath of the 1932-33 Holodomor and the 1946-47 famine in Soviet Ukraine.
About the Speakers
Taras Fedirko is currently a British Academy Research Fellow in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews in the UK. Starting in October 2022, he will be a Lecturer in Organised Crime and Corruption at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. He previously held a postdoc at the University of Cambridge and has degrees from the universities of Durham, Bologna, and the Ivan Franko Lviv National University. His current research focuses on nationalist networks of power, volunteerism, and informal economy of war in Ukraine. He is also writing a book about corruption, oligarchy, and free speech in Ukrainian journalism after the Maidan. Twitter: @peasantpedant
Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, in residence at the UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (UT CREEES). He is the author of three books, including Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013), and Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He worked as a translator for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and directed the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. Seegel has hosted nearly 90 episodes for the New Books Network, has profiled leading experts in the Slavic studies field, serves on the international board of H-Ukraine for H-Net/H-Humanities, and chairs the Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize Committee in Ukrainian Studies. Twitter: @steven_seegel
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Pennsylvania and a Penn Presidential Ph.D. Fellow. She holds an M.A. in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia from Harvard University and is a proud alumna of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. Her dissertation examines how people of color's presence shaped ideas and understandings of race, ethnicity, and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and post-Soviet space. She has become a regular commentator on Russo-Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainian, and American relations in American and international media. She is dedicated to using her expertise to educate the public on Ukrainian history and keep the war in American public discourse. Twitter: @ksvarnon
John Vsetecka is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University, where he is finishing a dissertation on the aftermath of the 1932-33 Holodomor and the 1946-47 famine in Soviet Ukraine. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Vsetecka was on a Fulbright grant to Kyiv, Ukraine, before being displaced to Warsaw, Poland, due to Russia's war on Ukraine.
In addition to his research, Vsetecka is the founder and editor of H-Ukraine (part of the larger H-Net platform), which is a site dedicated to the promotion and advancement of scholarly and intellectual content related to the study of Ukraine. Twitter: @JohnVsetecka
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