Serhy Yekelchyk: Writing the Nation. The Ukrainian Historical Profession in Independent Ukraine and the Diaspora. Stuttgart and Hannover: Ibidem press 2022. ISBN: 9783838216959

 

Serhy Yekelchyk analyzes the uneasy post-Soviet transition in Ukrainian historical writing. He discusses the challenge of transcending not just Soviet ideological dogmas, but also the “Soviet” way of understanding historical processes and human actions. Two major factors have been influencing this transition: contacts with the Ukrainian diaspora and the “rediscovery,” also facilitated by the diaspora, of long-suppressed Ukrainian historical scholarship from the early twentieth century. However, the diaspora was more than the keeper of pre-Soviet historical narratives. By the early 1990s, it had professional historians practicing modern historical approaches, which also made an impact on the Ukrainian historical scholarship. Yekelchyk explores the application of Post-Colonial theory to Ukrainian and diasporic writing on the central problem of Modern Ukrainian history, that of nation building. He also highlights new—transnational and cultural-history—approaches to the study of Ukrainian history.

One of the book’s most important conclusions concerns the global character of present-day Ukrainian historiography, with scholars originally from Ukraine and those of non-Ukrainian background playing an increasingly prominent role in the West, and Ukrainian-based historians actively participating in Western projects, publications, and debates.

Born and educated in Ukraine, Serhy Yekelchyk obtained his PhD in Russian and East European History from the University of Alberta, Canada. He has taught and conducted research at Harvard, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Monash University, the University of Alberta, the Central European University, and the Institute of Ukrainian History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Since 2014, he is Professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria.

Yekelchyk has published seven single-authored 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 biennial 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 Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020)—the second, much expanded edition of his popular book about the Revolution of Dignity and Russian aggression in Ukraine. Yekelchyk is current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies and Associate Editor of Harvard Ukrainian Studies.ABOUT THE AUTHOR