New Perspectives on Jewish History and Memory in Ukraine
As academic experts in East European Jewish history, our panelists will share insights into Ukrainian nation-building, Polish, Soviet, and Russian politics in Ukraine, and anti-Jewish violence in the context of the current situation and contemporary Jewish life in Ukraine.
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
PDT: 11:00 a.m.
EDT: 2:00 p.m.
UK: 7:00 p.m.
CET: 8:00 p.m.
Israel: 9:00 p.m.
The webinar will include a 45-minute discussion followed by a 15-minute Q&A, in which you can ask questions submitted during the broadcast.
Prof. Natalia Aleksiun is a Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro College, New York. She is the incoming Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. A member of the TJHTalks Scholar’s Advisory Council, she holds doctoral degrees from Warsaw University, Poland, and NYU, U.S. She published Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950 and co-edited two volumes of Polin examining Holocaust memory and Jewish historiography. Professor Aleksiun specializes in the social, political, and cultural history of modern East European, Polish Jewry, and the Holocaust. Aleksiun has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews, the Holocaust, Jewish intelligentsia in East-Central Europe, Polish-Jewish relations, and modern Jewish historiography. Her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust was published in 2021. Currently, Prof. Aleksiun is completing a new book about Jews in hiding in eastern Galicia during the Holocaust and is a senior fellow at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw.
Prof. Elissa Bemporad is a Professor of History and Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is a two-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (2013 IUP), and Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (2019 OxfordUP). Elissa is the co-editor of two volumes: Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (2018 IUP); and Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is currently completing the first volume of the Comprehensive History of Soviet Jews (forthcoming with New York University Press) and at work on a biography of Ester Frumkin.
Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler is a historian and associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University where she also directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2011) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2012) and the University of Toronto (2012-2013). She was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine from 2019 to 2020 and is an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History in Lviv. Her first book, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017) tells the story of the making of Soviet and Ukrainian theater through a collective biography of young artists and officials in the 1920s and 1930s. Her current book project Comrade Actress: Soviet Ukrainian Women on the Stage and Behind the Scenes, re-thinks theater in Ukraine in the 20th century through a focus on its women. She was a faculty member with the International Summer School of the Social Sciences from 2013 to 2019, held in many cities throughout Ukraine, has taught in summer schools of Jewish history and culture in Lviv and Kharkiv, and is a member of the organizing committee of the Danyliw Seminar in Ukrainian Studies. She is also a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York.
Dr. Marta Havryshko is an Associate Researcher at the Department of Contemporary History at the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. She is a Babyn Yar Interdisciplinary Studies Institute director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. She was recently evacuated from Ukraine with her nine year-old-son to Hamburg, where she received an emergency fellowship at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and is now a visiting professor at Basel University. Her research interests focus on gender, sexuality, and violence during World War II and the Holocaust, feminism, nationalism, and militarism. Dr. Havryshko has published extensively about women in the Ukrainian nationalist underground movement and during the Holocaust. Currently, she is developing her book project on sexual violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine.
Dr. Vladyslava Moskalets was a Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a grantee of the Ludmer Program by the Jewish Galicia and Bukovina Organization in 2011-2012. In 2013-2017 studied at the joint doctoral program of UCU and the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Jagiellonian University (Krakow), working on the dissertation Jewish industrial elites in Drohobych and Borislav, 1860-1900. Vladyslava received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 in Krakow. Vladyslava was an external collegiate at the Doktoratskolleg Galizien program (University of Vienna) in 2013 to 2016. Since 2016, she has been teaching courses related to Ukrainian and Jewish history of the 19th century, consumption history, and Hebrew. At the Center for Urban History, Vladyslava is conducting a research project on the urban elites of Lviv in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The study identifies urban elites by their economic status and standing in society and traces the links between them and specifics of social mobility.