Konstantin Akinsha is a correspondent for ARTnews magazinein Budapest, Hungary. He earned his Kandydat nauk degree in 1990 in art history, and will spend four months at Harvard (February-May 2007) to work on the topic "The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum: The Fate of the Dispersed Collection." Akinsha will study the history of one of the most significant private collections of West European art ever assembled in Ukraine and will trace the dispersal and destruction of that collection from the Bolshevik Revolution through
Jessica Allina-Pisano, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Colgate University, earned her Ph.D. in political science in 2003 from Yale University. During her four months at Harvard (September-December 2006), Allina-Pisano will research the topic "The Last Barbed Wire Fence in Europe: State Power and Economy in a Divided Village of Zakarpattia, 1945-2005." She will study how "policies intended primarily to secure state sovereignty reach beyond political life to drive or limit economic opportunities" by looking at the effects of state control on the access of rural peoples to the means of capital reproduction in two villages, Kisszelmenc and Nagyszelmenc, located next to each other but separated by the Ukraine-European Union border.
Tarik C. Amar received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2006. Amar will spend four months at Harvard (February 2006-May 2007) to work on the topic "The Making of Soviet Lviv, 1939 to 1963." His study will address the question of the making of a distinct Soviet Western Ukrainian identity by looking at how a Soviet Ukrainian Lviv was fashioned out of the prewar Polish-dominated and multiethnic Lwów.
Mark Andryczyk is an instructor in contemporary Ukrainian literature at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. He holds a Ph.D. (2005) in Ukrainian literature from the University of Toronto. He will spend four months at Harvard (September-December 2006) to conduct research on "A Community of Others: The Identity of the Ukrainian Intellectual in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Prose." Andryczyk will study the depiction of the Ukrainian intellectual throughout the history of modern Ukrainian literature. As part of his work, he will look at the re-engagement of the Ukrainian intellectual in society during the Orange Revolution, the emergence of a new generation of writers, and the recent new scholarship that has been published on the topic.
El´vis Beytullayev is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. He earned a Ph.D. in international studies at University of Cambridge in 2006. He will spend four months at Harvard (September 2006-December 2006) to work on the topic "The Crimean Political Scene in the Post-Soviet Era and Its Implications for Ukraine's Relations with Turkey and Russia." Beytullayev will examine how domestic Crimean politics have affected relations between Ukraine and Russia since Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union.
Jerzy Maćków is a professor of comparative government at the University of Regensburg. Maćków earned his doctorate in 1992 at the University of Hamburg, followed by his Habilitation in 1998 at the Armed Forces University in Hamburg. He will spend four months (September-December 2006) at Harvard to research the topic "Has the Orange Revolution Changed the Ukrainian Political System? The Democratization of Post-Communist Authoritarianism." Maćków's work will investigate whether the Orange Revolution brought about significant democratization to the authoritarianism that has been characteristic of Ukraine's government since independence. In doing so, he will focus on two questions: 1) whether in the wake of the Orange Revolution new aspects of national identity emerged that have facilitated the implementation of a democratic reform agenda in Ukraine; and 2) whether the political elite has altered its attitude to law and politics regarding the opposition in order to create a functioning constitutional state.
Vladimir Melamed completed his graduate studies in modern East-Central European history at the Ukrainian Studies Institute, National Academy of Ukraine, Lviv, in 1995. Currently he is an independent scholar based in California and is a consultant for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. He will spend four months at Harvard (September-December 2006) to study "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Interwar Eastern Galicia, 1918-1939: Ukrainian Perspective, Jewish Perspective." Melamed plans to investigate a number of aspects of Ukrainian-Jewish relations within the context of the interwar Polish state. The topics include the Lviv pogrom of November 1918; the Jewish-Polish compromise of 1925; anti-semitism in Polish institutions of higher learning, and similar topics, and the reaction to these events within Ukrainian and Jewish societies in accordance with their perceptions, stereotypes, and past experience.
Tatiana Oparina is associate professor in history at Novosibirsk Pedagogical University where she has been on the faculty for the last fifteen years. Oparina will spend four months at Harvard (February-June 2007) to work on "Russian-Ukrainian Ecclesiastical Contacts and the Problem of the 'True Faith' from the end of the Time of Troubles (1613) to the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654)." The project will investigate the views of the Moscow Patriarchate on Kyiv-style piety, Kyivan theology, the problem of "heresy" in Ukrainian texts, and divergences in canon law practices in a period when Muscovy was becoming more closely familiar with Ukrainian religious practices and falling under their influence.
Johannes Remy is lecturer in Russian and East European Studies at the Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki. He received his Ph.D. in history in 2000 from the same institution. Remy will come to Harvard for four months (February-May 2007) to work on the topic "Ukrainian Nationalism and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s" which will comprise two major parts: first, the formation of Ukrainian national mythology; second, the political programs of Ukrainian activists, their positions on the Polish insurrection (1863-1864), and the government's policies in relation to the Ukrainian movement.
Steven Seegel earned his Ph.D. in history in 2005 at Brown University. For the past year, he has held the position of lecturer at the University of Tennessee. He will come to Harvard for four months (August-May, 2006) to research the topic "Cartography and the Representation of Modern Ukraine." His work looks at the strategic use of the discourse of historical/geographic science and racial/ethnolinguistic categorization to represent a modern Ukraine between the Russian and Habsburg empires, as well as the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Ihor Zhuk is the director of the Leopolis Project and the curator of the Collection of Visual Materials at Ukrainian Catholic University. He received his Kandydat nauk degree in art history in 1989 from the Moscow School of Industrial and Applied Art. A longtime colleague of HURI, Zhuk will return to the Institute for four months (February-May 2007) to conduct further work on the Leopolis Project. During his stay at Harvard, Zhuk will draw on material housed at Harvard to assemble blocks of textual and visual data, and compile new e-documents for this complex hypertext and visual resource of valuable art objects and historically significant architecture found in Ukraine and dating from the Neolithic period to the present. Zhuk's work at Harvard will result in a thoroughly elaborated art history database of over 2500 objects to be used as a teaching and research tool by mid-2007.