Preserving HURI’s History: Identifying, Systematizing, and Digitizing Archival Materials
With its foundation in 1973, the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University changed the pre-existing paradigm of Eastern and Central European studies and later tremendously contributed to the transformation of the humanities and social sciences in post-Soviet Ukraine. Its history also opens new perspectives on the intellectual history of Ukrainian diaspora, international relations, and academic and cultural politics at the time of the Cold War and its aftermath. Identifying and systematizing diverse sources related to HURI’s history - including but not limited to institutional and personal documents, correspondence, oral interviews, press releases, and debates - shall provide new possibilities for researching and understanding several key issues in the history of Ukrainian and North American academia.
Ostap Sereda received his Ph.D. in Comparative History from the Central European University (Budapest) in 2003. During 1994-2015 he was at the department of modern history of the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Lviv (Ukrainian Academy of Sciences); since 2015 he has been an Associate Professor of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. He also lectures as a recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University. In 2012 Sereda was one of the recipients of the Shklar Research Fellowship at HURI. His publications deal with the political discourses and cultural practices of nationalism in 19th-century Austrian Eastern Galicia, and with cultural politics and musical theater in Russian-ruled Kyiv in the second half of the 19th century.