Shklar Fellows
Ines Garcia de la Puente received her doctorate in Slavic philology and Indo-European linguistics from the Complutense University, Madrid, in 2006. Garcia will use her fellowship tenure this fall to focus on the topic “From Kyiv to Rome along the Ladoga: Reassessing Trade Routes in Rus´,” a topic that she began researching in 2008 under a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. She aims to shed new light on the traditional interpretation of the “route from the Varangians to the Greeks” as described in the Primary Chronicle. She plans to conduct a linguistic analysis of the description of the route in the chronicle, completing an intratextual analysis of the Primary Chronicle, and then contrasting the linguistic and intratextual analyses within their historical and archeological contexts.
Robert Kusnierz is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of History, Pomeranian University, in Slupsk, Poland. He received his Ph.D. in History in 2004 from the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Lublin. While at Harvard in the fall semester, Kusnierz will study Poland’s attitude toward the Holodomor and the Great Terror in Ukraine (1932–1938) and how these events influenced Polish-Soviet relations.
Iryna Vushko received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2008 and recently completed a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. While at Harvard this fall, Vushko will be researching the topic “Enlightened Absolutism, Imperial Bureaucracy, and Provincial Society: The Austrian Project to Transform Galicia, 1772–1815.” Vushko’s work will analyze the Austrian bureaucratic modernization of Galicia between its annexation by the Habsburg monarchy in 1772 and the final settlements of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The reforms of Austrian Empire bureaucrats in Galicia were meant to replace Polish institutions with new Austrian ones and to forge political loyalty among the local Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews. Rather than promoting uniformity, these actions created new identities and reinforced existing identities that were intended to be suppressed. Indirectly, they gave rise to modern nationalism in Galicia. Vushko will analyze the long-term effects of these eighteenth-century reforms in the transformation of early modern ethnicities into modern nationalities and consequently the emergence of rival national movement in Galicia.
Mihaychuk Fellows
Rostyslav Melnykiv is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ukrainian Literature at the Skovoroda National Pedagogical University of Kharkiv. He received a Kandydat nauk in philology from Kharkiv State University in 1998. His area of interest is Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century, focusing on the 1920s and 1930s. Melnykiv will spend the spring semester at Harvard looking at the models of “ideal literature” and “ideal fiction” that participants in the literary discussions attempted to define. As Melnykiv observes, the origin of dominant aesthetic ideas, their formation, and further transformation are crucial for understanding the intellectual basis of the literary discussions and processes of the 1920s and on the whole.
Tetyana Portnova is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Historiography and the Study of Sources and Archives at Dnipropetrovsk National University. She received her Kandydat nauk in history there in 2008. During her fellowship this fall, Portnova plans to research peasantry and peasant culture in Ukrainian public discourse during the second half of the nineteenth century. She will study the social and cultural reasons behind the peasantry’s emergence, the underlying motives for that emergence, and the significance of societal notions about the peasantry for the community in which they functioned. As part of the study, Portnova plans to place the development of the Ukrainian conception of the peasantry into the broader perspective of the national movements of Central and Eastern Europe.