Exiled Scholars, Emigres, and the Growth of Ukrainian and East European Studies in North America during the Cold War
Friday, December 1, 2023 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1P98 SR2
This talk by Ostap Sereda, Ph.D. will deal with academic culture and identity politics of Ukrainian and East European exile scholarship in North America after the World War II, institutional and intellectual history of emerging Ukrainian studies in North American universities, and the influence of the “Cold War university” on academic mapping and conceptual understanding of Eastern Europe.
The main focus is on the history of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI) that since its foundation at the turn of the 1970s challenged both the paradigm of Russian and East European Studies in American universities and ethno-centric tradition of the Ukrainian immigrant scholarly institutions. It became an interesting factor of the international relations, academic and cultural politics at the time of the Cold War and its aftermath, and later tremendously contributed to the transformation of humanities and social studies in post-Soviet Ukraine. The talk will present initial results of the research in the archives of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute that reveal an extensive network of scholars and politicians involved in Eastern European studies in North America.
Ostap Sereda received his Ph.D. in comparative history from the Central European University in 2003. He teaches modern history at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and at the Central European University in Vienna. In March 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sereda became the program director of a transnational academic project, the "Invisible University for Ukraine". His publications deal with the political discourses and cultural practices of nationalism in nineteenth-century Ukraine. His current research project is on the institutional history of Ukrainian studies in North America in the time of the Cold War.
Email: [email protected]