Jacyk Distingushed Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

September 2023 - January 2024
Supported by HURI with a gift from the Petro Jacyk Educational Foundation

HURI Research Project

The Spiritual Front in Multifaith Ukraine:  Trust and Changing the Contours of Conflict in Ukraine

“Many studies of divided societies have demonstrated that even when wars end, a new struggle begins. For Ukraine, ending the war will only be the first step in restoring the social fabric. A second challenge will be to build trust and shared understandings as to what constitutes the common good to establish a Just Peace after armed combat ceases and the work begins of addressing the trauma the war has inflicted on the Ukrainian people. My research considers the potential role religious actors, religious institutions, and everyday practices of religiosity could play in conflict mediation among Ukrainians, and what this reveals about processes of cultivating tolerance for difference, pluralism, and respect for human rights. I depart from the premise that conflict is an expected dimension of communal life. The issue is how to make disagreements and conflict manageable through mediation.” -- C.W.

Biography

Catherine Wanner is Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State University. She earned her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University before embarking on over 30 years of ethnographic and archival research in Ukraine. Her most recent monograph is Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2022), and she is the editor of the forthcoming book Dispossession: Anthropological Approaches to Russia’s War against Ukraine (Routledge, 2023). Her research has focused primarily on the politics of religion in Ukraine and increasingly on human rights and conflict mediation within the context of war. She is the convenor of the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In 2016-17, she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity.