Simone Attilio Bellezza is a fellow at the School of Advanced Historical Studies, University of San Marino, and earned his Ph.D. in European social history in 2007. He will spend four months at Harvard (February–May 2008) studying the topic “The Shestydesiatnyky and the Language Question from Khrushchev’s Reform of Education to Petro Shelest’s Removal (1955–73),” focusing on the battle for the use of the Ukrainian language as a means of diffusion of culture and scientific knowledge.
Dmitrii Belkin earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen in 2000 and is an academic researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History, Frankfurt. During his four months at Harvard (February–May 2008), Belkin will research the topic “From Law to Legality: Jewish Legal Culture in Ukraine, 1905–32.” The study’s main focus will be Jewish politicians, jurists and “ordinary people” in their interrelations with Jewish society and the Russian/Ukrainian government, and will examine the continuity of Jewish legal culture in Ukraine before and after the Revolution of 1917. Belkin also plans to analyze the complex relationships informing public policy, religion, and legal practices.
Oksana Blashkiv is an academic researcher at Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University of Drohobych. She received her master’s degree in comparative literature from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University in 2002. She will be at Harvard for four months (February–May 2008) to explore the personal relationship between Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Dmytro Čyževs´kyj (1894–1977). Blashkiv will use the Jakobson archive at MIT, as well as the archives of American contemporaries and colleagues of both scholars, to trace the development of their relationship.
Brian J. Boeck received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Harvard and is an assistant professor at DePaul University. He will return to Harvard for four months (September–December 2007) to research the topic “Land of the Lost: Ukrainian Identity and Ethnicity in Kuban, 1792–2002.” Boeck plans to study Ukrainian identity and ethnicity in the Kuban region by analyzing public and private identities, linguistic and ethnic identities, passport identities and local categories, and print culture and folk culture.
Andriy Danylenko is a lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Pace University. He earned his Ph.D. in 1990 from Moscow Friendship of Peoples University. During his four-month stay at Harvard (February–May 2008), Danylenko will work on the topic “The Formation of New Standard Ukrainian in 1798: Bridging Tradition and Innovation.” Danylenko hopes to present a comprehensive survey of consecutive stages in the formation of new standard Ukrainian from late Middle Ukrainian to the early modern period, examining the place of Ruthenians and their languages (Church Slavonic and prosta mova) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and comparing the sociolinguistic situation in Galicia, Transcarpathia, and Bukovyna to that in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine in the eighteenth century.
Oksana Kis earned her Kandydat nauk in 2002 and is a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She will spend four months at Harvard (October 2007–January 2008) studying the topic “Twentieth-Century Ukraine in Women’s Memories.” Kis will examine thirty biographical interviews with elderly women (conducted in Lviv, Simferopil and Kharkiv) to reveal historical experiences, social identities, life strategies, and political loyalties of women in the context of dramatic transformations in Ukraine during the twentieth century. Her study is intended to demonstrate the efficacy of women’s oral history as a relevant and productive research method for an interdisciplinary study of the Ukrainian past.
Bohdan Y. Nebesio is an assistant professor at Brock University, having received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Alberta. He will be at Harvard for three months (September–November 2007) working on the topic “Ukrainian Film Culture of the 1920s.” Nebesio is preparing two books for publication: one, an examination of the silent films of Alexander Dovzhenko; and the other, an English-language anthology of film theory published in Ukraine during the 1920s.
Roman Podkur received his Kandydat nauk degree in 1999 from Dnipropetrovsk State University and is an academic researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. During his three-month stay at Harvard (September–November 2007), he will research the topic “Role of the Soviet Secret Police in the History of Ukraine,” examining the secondary literature on the history of the USSR and Ukraine and researching archival documents and materials regarding the role of the KGB in the history of Ukraine.
Ioulia Shukan is a lecturer at the University of Rennes and earned her Ph.D. in 2006 from the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. She will be at Harvard for four months (September–December 2007) studying the topic “Political Crisis and Biography: Trajectories of Former Communist Officials in Ukraine and Belarus in the Early 1990s.” As a contribution to the sociology of regime change in the former USSR, Shukan’s research proposes to address the change through the logic of elite continuity, the mechanisms of reconversion of resources, and of personal adaptation to the new political context. Based on oral life stories (collected mainly between 2000 and 2004 through biographical interviews), her work shows that the idea of continuity of the former communists in politics is valid for only some segments of these elites and that behind the continuity there was discontinuity in their career pathways.
Maxim Tarnawsky earned his Ph.D. in 1986 from Harvard and is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. During his four-month stay at Harvard (September–December 2007), Tarnawsky will work on the topic “The Unknown Nechui,” analyzing the writings of Ivan Nechui-Levyts´kyi, the paragon of Ukrainian realism. While Tarnawsky notes that Nechui is certainly not a modernist—he fights this tendency explicitly—he points to the author’s vehemence and passion, coupled with the ambiguity of the aesthetics and themes in his works, and argues that a far more nuanced approach is necessary to understand the mechanisms whereby Ukrainian literature crosses the historical divide from traditionalism to modernity.
Yuriy Zazulyak is a junior research fellow at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Lviv, and received his Kandydat nauk degree in 2004. He will spend three months at Harvard (February–May 2008) researching the topic “Violence, Courts, and Noble Community in Late Medieval Galicia.” His work will investigate interpersonal violence and nobles’ disputes in late medieval Galicia, based on the premise of the key role violence and litigation played in shaping the ethos and identity of members of the noble estate. The main aim of Zazulyak’s project is to approach noble violence and disputes as complex social phenomena, interpreting them as a point of intersection of different aspects of social reality.