Date:
Location:
The 2024 Petryshyn Memorial Lecture by
Mayhill Fowler, Associate Professor of History at Stetson University and Director of SPREES, Stetson's Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Moderated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
Photo credit: Open Kurbas and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
About the Lecture
How can Ukrainian studies simultaneously focus inwards, on the particularity of Ukraine, and outwards, on its broader comparability with other regions, questions, and histories? This talk engages this question through the story of two actresses: Dina Pronicheva, a Jewish actress at the puppet theater in Kyiv who survived Babyn Iar, performed in Ukrainian-language theater under German occupation, and continued working long after the war; and Hanna Babiivna, a Ukrainian actress at the Berezil theater in Kharkiv whose husband was murdered in the purges, who was herself arrested and sent to the gulag, where she performed in Russian-language camp theater, and who also continued working long after her return. These two women never knew each other, and their paths, most likely, never crossed. Yet both were Soviet Ukrainian actresses, both performed in extreme circumstances, both were undeniably resilient. And both their lives, taken together, tell us Ukraine’s 20th century.
The particularity of circumstances in Ukraine shaped their journeys: war and multiple occupations, collapsed empires and new states, and state violence. Yet their stories also suggest ways to bring Ukraine into theater studies and history more broadly, by connecting with larger themes of women’s labor, the epistemology of the body, everyday life in extraordinary times, and the place of theater in extreme circumstances. Finally, these two women’s stories offer a window onto Eastern Europe not (only) as a place of lives destroyed, but also as a place of survival. To survive, to return to the stage, to speak to the audience even in times of precarity, is the ultimate act of resilience and resistance—and one that, of course, we see today in Ukraine.
About the Speaker
Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler is associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University and director of Stetson’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She is also affiliated faculty in the Program in Theater Studies at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History in Lviv. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and has held fellowships at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, the University of Toronto, and was a Fulbright scholar to Ukraine 2019-2020. She has published widely on culture in Ukraine, including her book Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017), forthcoming in Ukrainian translation this year. She is currently working on two projects: a book on women in theater in Ukraine across the long 20th century, Theatre Women: Place and Performance in 20th Century Ukraine, and a biography of the former Soviet Army Theater in Lviv, A Theater of Silence: War and Memory in Ukraine. She is the editor of Krzysztof Czyżewski’s Toward Xenopolis: Visions from the Borderland (Rochester, 2022). She also holds an MFA in Acting from the National Theater Conservatory and is a former actress.
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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Petryshyn Memorial Lecture series.
Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks in advance of the session.
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