Visiting Scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

May - December 2023
Supported by a Senior Grant from Fulbright Poland

HURI Research Project

Galicia’s Greek Catholic Clergymen on the Eve of a New Era: The Case of Mykola Ustyianovych

This project focuses on Galician Ukrainian writer, activist, and Greek Catholic priest Mykola Ustyianovych. Although a key figure of the Galician Ukrainian national movement from the 1830s through the 1860s, he has been overshadowed by more prominent activists, most importantly the members of the so-called Ruthenian Trinity (Iakiv Holovats′kyi, Markiian Shashkevych, Ivan Vahylevych). By revisiting Ustyianovych, I hope to shed light on two questions: the construction of the canon of national heroes and the difficult relationship of liberal populist priests with their conservative predecessors and superiors. Understanding these issues should allow us to rethink the received wisdoms about the Galician Ukrainian “national awakening”.

Biography

Dr. Tomasz Hen-Konarski is a researcher at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (IH PAN). He holds Magister degree from the University of Warsaw and PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2017). Apart from Florence and Warsaw, he either studied or taught in Bielefeld, Budapest, London, Lviv, and Vienna. His research interests include: Polish and Ukrainian nation building in Galicia, Catholic Enlightenment, and the Greek Catholic Church as a political institution of the Austrian Monarchy.

Tomasz is a member of two research teams: Adam Kożuchowski’s “Polish Socio-Political Concepts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century” at IH PAN in Warsaw (2021-2025, funded by Poland’s NCN) and András Fejérdy’s “Negotiating Sovereignty: Challenges of Secularism and Nation Building in Central Eastern Europe since 1780” at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest (2022-2027, funded by ERC). He published his work on Austrian, Polish, and Ukrainian topics in Acta Poloniae Historica, Austrian History Yearbook, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, European History Quarterly, and Kwartalnik Historyczny. He serves also as one of the convenors of the Assemani Seminar for Eastern Catholic History.