The Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University is pleased to announce the latest volume of Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 34, The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History, contains a comprehensive collection of articles on Ukrainian historiography (originally published as book under the same title), as well as thirteen reviews on books pertaining to Ukraine from the seventeenth century to the present.
Harvard Ukrainian Studies
Vol. 34: The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History
Published by: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
September 2017
The Future of the Past brings together the insights of twenty-one historians who participated in a conference on Ukrainian historiography at Harvard in October 2013. This collection of essays proposes to rethink the meaning of Ukrainian history by venturing outside the boundaries established by the national paradigm and demonstrating how research on the history of Ukraine can benefit from both regional and global perspectives. It considers the way Ukrainian history is studied and taught outside of Ukraine, the current historiography within Ukraine, as well as the field of history in general.
The volume’s insights thus are not restricted to Ukraine; The Future of the Past also shows how studying Ukraine’s past enhances our understanding of Europe, Eurasia, and the world—past, present, and future. It reveals the need within historiography for a new genre that incorporates the strengths of multiple approaches. For Ukraine, whose internal divisions are fueled by different historical experiences, this more inclusive "new national history" could truly be transformative.
Following the Ukrainian historiography articles, thirteen book reviews consider texts analyzing topics for a period from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. The section begins with Robert Frost’s review of volume 9 book 2 of Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi’s magisterial History of Ukraine-Rus’, from the series published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. David Frick reviews Paweł Maciejko’s study of the eighteenth-century Jewish messianic movement of Jacob Frank (The Mixed Multitude).
Other reviews assess books on Ukrainian historiography and Central Europe’s “memory wars” (Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther’s A Laboratory of Transnational History and James Mark’s The Unfinished Revolution, respectively); nineteenth- and twentieth-century Galicia in transition (Börries Kuzmany’s Brody and William Jay Risch’s The Ukrainian West, respectively); representation of the “periphery" in Russian imperial cartography (Steven Seegel’s Mapping Europe’s Borderlands); collectivization and the Holodomor (Liudmyla Hrynevych’s Khronika kolektyvizatisiï ta Holodomoru v Ukraïni); representation of Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish identity in literature and biography (Andreas Kappeler’s Russland und die Ukraine and Myroslav Shkandrij’s Jews in Ukrainian Literature); activism among Ukrainian women in the post-Soviet era (Sarah D. Phillips’s Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine); a study of late Soviet Dnipropetrovsk (Sergei I. Zhuk’s Rock and Roll in Rocket City); and finally, a review of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Winter Letters and Other Poems. Please see full table of contents here.
Harvard Ukrainian Studies (HUS), the journal of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI), serves as an international forum for new scholarship in Ukrainian studies. It publishes articles, documents, reviews, and scholarly discussions in all fields of Ukrainian studies, though with a firm grounding in HURI’s traditional emphasis on the humanities. Related disciplines are also included when Ukrainian topics are treated within their framework. The editors are assisted by a distinguished international advisory board of scholars. All submissions undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review.
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E-mail: husj@harvard.edu