Shklar Fellows
Margarita Balmaceda, a long-time associate of the Institute, currently holds the position of associate professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. A specialist on energy issues, Balmaceda will spend four months (September–December 2008) exploring the topic “The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Power, 1992–2007.” Her study will explore the question why these three countries, all of which had to face the shock of suddenly changing from being energy-rich to being energy-poor, have adopted different ways of dealing with their energy dependency: Lithuania reduced its dependency through an aggressive restructuring of the economy in the early 1990s; Belarus chose not to espouse diversification goals at all until 2007; and Ukraine officially proclaimed diversification goals, but is doing little in practice.
This work is important to Ukrainian studies and energy studies in general because of the large concentration of rent-seeking possibilities in the Ukrainian energy sector, Ukraine’s significant role in transit, and because Ukraine’s situation provides the most powerful example of Russia’s use of energy as a political weapon.
Andrii Bovgyria, research associate at the Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, will spend four months (September–December 2008) at HURI. His research topic, “The Cossack Historical Narratives of Left-Bank Ukraine–Het´manshchyna: the Vision of the Past and the Construction of Identities,” concerns several aspects of the historiographic activity on eighteenth-century Ukraine. By studying copies of well-known period chronicles, manuscript marginalia and historical documents, Bovgyria hopes to reconstruct and shed light on the process of legitimatizing Cossack history: how official ideology was crystallized and how the mythology and pantheon of historical heroes was created. In addition, he will look at how Cossack historiography influenced the development of Ukrainian historical thought and the forming of a national Ukrainian identity.
Patrice M. Dabrowski is an independent scholar of history who earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1999. During her six-month fellowship (October 2008–March 2009), Dabrowski will work on the topic “Discovering the Carpathians: Episodes in Imagining and Reshaping Alpine Borderland Regions.” The project is a study of transnational history that combines tourism and preservationism, geography and ethnography, politics and culture. Dabrowski will examine the “discovery” of three distinct regions of the Carpathian mountains (including territories found in present-day Poland and Ukraine) over the last two centuries, and the concomitant development of tourism in these multiethnic yet “backward” borderland alpine territories.
Olena Haleta is an associate professor at Ivan Franko National University, Lviv. Her research on the topic “Literary Anthologies as a Means of Shaping National Literary Identity” explores the history and context of original and translated anthologies of Ukrainian literature beyond the country’s borders, and seeks to define the basic preconditions of their appearance and their influence on the literary process, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora. She will be at HURI for four months (February–May 2009).
Konstantin Jerusalimsky is an assistant professor at Russian State University for the Humanities. He will spend four months (January–April 2009) researching the topic “Muscovites in Ruthenian Lands: Social Integration, Cultural Identity, and Historical Memory (1540s – 1640s).” Jerusalimsky seeks to reconstruct the social status, cultural identities, and memory of Muscovites on Polish and Lithuanian service in the eastern Ruthenian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the 1540s to the 1640s. He hopes to come to a better understanding of the reasons and motives for flight from Russia.
Taras Koznarsky,associate professor of literature at University of Toronto, received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2001. His research topic “The Text of Kyiv, 1800s–1930s” concerns the text of Kyiv as a locus of intense cultural and ideological competition to which Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews contributed their own versions for their respective historic legacies and cultural identities. Specifically, Koznarsky will focus on how the text of Kyiv was generated and shaped from early nineteenth-century travel logs and romantic historical fantasies to the symbolically, rhetorically, and ideologically saturated corpus of the modernist and avant-garde writings of the 1920s and early 1930s. Koznarsky will be in residence September–November 2008.
Olenka Pevny currently holds the position of assistant professor at the University of Richmond. She will spend four months (September–December 2008) researching “Byzantine Imagery in Medieval Kyiv: The Church of St. Cyril of Alexandria and Modern Identity Politics,” looking at the church of St. Cyril in the broader context of middle Byzantine artistic developments. She will examine the veneration of saints and relics, female patronage, the liturgification of images, and the relationship of architectural forms to ecclesiastical requirements. Pevny will also explore the formulation of the modern significance of the church in light of modern political and national ideologies.
Fellows in Ukrainian Studies
Leonid Polyakov is former Vice Minister of Defense and currently External Consultant to Ukraine’s Parliamentary National Security and Defense Committee. During his stay Mr. Polyakov research topic will be “The Role of Ethos, Institutions, and Policy in Strengthening the National Security of Independent Ukraine”. By examining the important elements of ethos, institutions, and policy in light of national, Soviet and foreign influences, this study will help systematize understanding of these factors’ role in the national security system and identify shortcomings in each area, as well as imbalances between them. Mr. Polyakov holds a ten-month appointment jointly offered by HURI with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Fellows Program.
As recipient of HURI’s Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship in Ukrainian Studies Tamara Hundorova will be at Harvard this spring (February-May 2009). Her research project will aim to analyze cultural consciousness in the Ukrainian literary movement of “narodnytstvo” from the perspective of popular culture. In the fall of 2001 Dr. Hundovora was a Shklar Fellow at HURI writing on “Post-Chornobyl Text: Ukrainian Literary Postmodernism.”
Moshe Taube is Professor in Slavic Studies and in Linguistics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He will be a HURI Research Fellow this spring (February-May 2009). His proposed research project deals with Jewish-Christian cultural contacts in 15th century Kyiv. Prof. Taube is a long-time colleague of HURI having spent two full sabbatical years (1992-93 and 1998-99) which resulted in several publications including some papers that appeared in HUS and two monographs.