History: Russia’s War on Ukraine, Part II
A video-recording of the second instalment in this series, chaired by Professor Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History), and featuring Associate Professor Olga Bertelsen (Tiffin University), Associate Professor Oxana Shevel (Tufts University) and Professor Serhy Yekelchyk (University of Victoria, British Columbia), speaking on the theme of ‘History’ (29 April 2022).
Speaker bios
Olga Bertelsen is an Associate Professor of Global Security and Intelligence at Tiffin University’s School of Criminal Justice and Social Sciences (Homeland Security & Terrorism Program). Educated at the Medical State University (Ukraine), Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania (United States), Penn State University (United States), and the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), she has published widely on Soviet/Russian operations of ideological subversion, political violence in the USSR, and the methods and traditions of the Soviet/Russian secret police. She is the author of The House of Writers in Ukraine, the 1930s: Conceived, Lived, Perceived (2013), and the editor of three anthologies of archival KGB documents (2011; 2016) and two collections of scholarly essays entitled Revolution and War in Contemporary Ukraine (2017) and Russian Active Measures (2021). Her new book, In the Labyrinth of the KGB (Lexington Books, 2022), focuses on KGB covert operations targeting Ukraine’s intelligentsia and the Ukrainian and Jewish diasporas.
Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University where her research and teaching focuses on Ukraine and the post-Soviet region. Her current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states and religious politics in Ukraine. Her research interests also include comparative memory politics and the politics of nationalism and nation-building. She is the author of award-winning Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region. Shevel’s research appeared in a variety of journals, including Comparative Politics, Current History, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Nationality Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Slavic Review and in edited volumes. She is a member of PONARS Eurasia scholarly network, a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She currently serves as President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).
Born and educated in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, Serhy Yekelchyk received a PhD from the University of Alberta. He is the author of seven books on modern Ukrainian history, Stalinism, and Russo-Ukrainian relations. His monograph Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford University Press, 2014) was the recipient of the Best Book Award from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies and its Ukrainian translation in 2019 received a special diploma of the Lviv Book Forum. Yekelchyk’s most recent publication is the second, much expanded edition of his popular book about the Euromaidan Revolution and the Russian aggression in Ukraine, Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020). A professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk is current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies.
This special series of online events is co-hosted by:
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- Melbourne Eurasianist Seminar Series at the University of Melbourne
- Ukrainian Studies Foundation in Australia
- Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand
A recording of Part I: Resistance (Dr Olga Boichak, Dr Roman Horbyk, Prof. Marko Pavlyshyn) can be accessed here.
A recording of Part III: Propaganda (Prof. Natalia Chaban, Dr Julie Fedor, Dr Robert Horvath, Dr Volodymyr Kulyk) will be published soon.
Part IV: Solidarity will take place on Friday 16 September 2022, at 5:00pm Melbourne AEST (8:00am London; 9:00am Berlin/Warsaw; 10:00am Kyiv) and will feature:
- HE Nina Obermaier (the EU Ambassador to Aotearoa New Zealand);
- Prof. Michèle Knodt (TU Darmstadt),
- Dr Olesya Khromeychuk (Ukrainian Institute London),
- and Prof. Zdisław Mach (Jagiellonian University).
For more information, email felicity.hodgson@unimelb.edu.au.