Research Programs

Support for scholarly research activities is a major focus of the Ukrainian Research Institute. The Institute provides office space, technical facilities, and access to Harvard's unique resources to researchers -- including HURI Associates at Harvard and other area institutions and Visiting Scholars from throughout the US and foreign countries, with an increasing number from Ukraine.

The Institute has sponsored a number of major research projects, including the first exhaustive study of the Famine of 1932/33 and the Project on the Millennium of Christianity in Rus'-Ukraine.

HURI is engaged in collaborative projects with other area studies centers at Harvard, a number of American and foreign institutions, and, increasingly, with academic institutions in Ukraine. For more information on research and academic programs, contact Dr. Lubomyr Hajda.

Educational and Training Programs

Instructional programs in Ukrainian studies are conducted primarily through the Departments of History and Slavic Languages and Literatures, whose faculty are closely associated with HURI. The Seminar in Ukrainian Studies organized by the Institute may be taken for credit by graduate students. HURI organizes the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute annually in conjunction with the Harvard Summer School.

Students with a special interest in Ukraine benefit from consultation with the Institute's academic adviser, as well as with resident faculty, Associates, and Visiting Scholars, especially those from Ukraine. Special programs are organized for the Institute's Student Affiliates, while more advanced Graduate Student Fellows are provided with study space, computer access, and other resources of the Institute. HURI administers a number of graduate student fellowships and awards prizes for student research papers on Ukrainian topics.

Since Ukraine's independence, the Institute has organized a number of programs to enhance familiarity with Ukraine among non-academic professionals in various fields -- business, journalism, government service, and others. The Mid-Career Training Fellows Program offers such professionals a course of individual study, consultations with specialists in Ukrainian fields, access to Institute programs and Harvard libraries, and study space. Problems relevant to contemporary policy analysis, business, trade, and like issues have been the subject of specialized Intensive Summer Seminars for practitioners. Longer and shorter briefing programs on current affairs are organized by arrangement with interested parties.

Seminars and Conferences

The weekly Monday Seminar in Ukrainian Studies is HURI's major forum for scholars and graduate students to present the results of their research and subject them to rigorous discussion. Topics presented encompass all disciplines that touch on Ukrainian studies—history, linguistics, literature, art, anthropology, sociology, economics and political science; and includes the Ukraine-Turkey Series in co-sponsorship with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Since its inception, the Ukrainian Research Institute has organized over fifty major conferences, colloquia, and symposia. Such recent include the following:

• Yushchenko’s Ukraine: An Interim Assessment (2005)
• Ukrainian-Russian Gas Crisis and Its Aftermath (2006)
• Clockwork Orange: Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution Comes Full Circle?
  (Fall 2006)
• Ukrainian Modernism in Context, 1910-1930 (2007)
• Reassessing Post-Soviet Energy Politics: Ukraine, Russia and the Battle for Gas (Spring 2008)
• The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present (Fall 2008)
• Poltava 1709: Revisiting a Turning Point in European History (Fall 2009)
• Undoing Ukraine’s Orange Revolution? The First Presidential Year of Viktor Yanukovych (2010)
• The Ukrainian Famine in the History of Genocide (2012)

HURI maintains three perpetual memorial lecture series: the Vasyl and Maria Petryshyn Memorial Lecture in Ukrainian Studies (held every year), as well as the Zenovia Sochor Parry and the Bohdan Krawciw Memorial Lectures (held every other year).