Harvard announces 2001-2002 Shklar Fellows in Ukrainian Studies


by Ksenia Kiebuzinski

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Seven scholars from Ukraine, Poland and the United States have been selected as the first recipients of the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Fellowships in Ukrainian Studies at Harvard University. The first Shklar Fellows, who were selected through an international competition, will begin their residency at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in the 2001-2002 academic year.

These scholars boast a wide range of academic experience and research interests in anthropology, history, political science and literature. They include: Laada Bilaniuk (department of anthropology, University of Washington); Oleksander Halenko (Institute of Political and Ethno-National Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine); Aleksandra Hnatiuk (Center for Studies on the Classical Tradition, Warsaw University); Tamara Hundorova (Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine); Volodymyr Kravchenko (department of Ukrainian studies, Kharkiv State University); Volodymyr Kulyk (Institute of Political and Ethno-National Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine); and Stephen Shulman (department of political science, Southern Illinois University).

Prof. Roman Szporluk, director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, noted: "This is a most impressive group of scholars. All of us at the institute look forward to their arrival at Harvard University. I am sure that for every one of them the time spent here as Shklar Fellows will be a significant chapter in their intellectual biographies. I am also sure that by interacting with Institute associates and a broader Harvard community they will make us aware of the important work that is being done in the area of Ukrainian studies elsewhere in the world."

"For the institute, and also on behalf of the current and future Shklar Fellows, I thank and salute Eugene and Daymel Shklar for their most generous and imaginative gift," Prof. Szporluk added. "The establishment of the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Fellowships in Ukrainian Studies is a major event not only in the history of the institute and of Harvard, but also a development of great importance for the international community of scholars in Ukrainian, Slavic and East European studies broadly defined."

The Eugene and Daymel Shklar post-doctoral fellowship program, first announced in November 2000, provides support for scholars in Ukrainian studies to perform research at Harvard and to complete publication projects. Each of this year's fellows will write a book-length manuscript for future publication on subjects concerning Ukraine's history and the continuing development of its political and cultural identity.

While in Cambridge, the Shklar Fellows are expected to participate fully in the intellectual life of the Harvard community, including interactions with Harvard faculty, graduate students and undergraduates. They will also make use of the extensive resources of the Harvard University Library, which holds the triple honor of being the oldest library in the United States and the world's largest academic library, and includes the largest collection of Ukraine-related books and other library materials outside Eastern Europe.

Among the projects to be undertaken by the Shklar Fellows are two studies on Ukrainian literature and one on Ukrainian language.

Ms. Hundorova, a principal research fellow at the Institute of Literature in Kyiv, will be analyzing the cultural reality of Ukraine and its correspondence to the post-modern condition in the aftermath of the Chornobyl disaster. More specifically, she will consider how the Chornobyl accident, when read as a cultural and apocalyptic "text," serves as a metaphor of postmodern consciousness as it developed in Ukraine during the 1990s in the works of writers such as Volodymyr Dibrova, Oksana Zabuzhko, Yurii Andrukhovych and Bohdan Zholdak.

Ms. Hnatiuk, associate professor at Warsaw University, will also be considering through the prism of literature the transformation of Ukrainian cultural identity. Her study, however, will look at the transformation of Ukrainian national identity throughout the 20th century and its relationship to notions of Europeanness. She will particularly focus on the place of Ukrainian culture in the East-versus-West debate in the works of writers from the 1920s, 1930s and 1990s.

Also interested in questions of identity, but from an anthropological and sociolinguistic point of view, Ms. Bilaniuk, assistant professor at the University of Washington, will be preparing a manuscript that analyzes the contemporary sociocultural processes in Ukraine through the paradigm of language. Her work studies variations in language ideology in Ukraine, and how regional, historical, ethnic, gendered and other social dimensions help shape these beliefs.

The issue of nation-building and state-building will be the subject of two separate studies in the field of political science. Mr. Shulman, assistant professor at Southern Illinois University, will be continuing his investigation of the sources of, and obstacles to, nation-building in Ukraine. He will investigate economic, demographic and cultural factors, as well as foreign influences, affecting Ukrainian nationhood. Ultimately, his study will attempt to identify the main obstacles facing Ukrainian leaders seeking to construct a strong and unified nation.

Mr. Kulyk, research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethno-National Studies in Kyiv, will be preparing a manuscript that analyzes the competing discourses of those elite groups of writers, dissidents, Rukh leadership and party nomenklatura, who determined the evolution of the Ukrainian state idea during the period 1986 to 1991. He will investigate how the elites presented and publicized their discursive ideas, and how these ideas led to the emergence of independent Ukraine, as well as to the state's incomplete democratic transformation.

Of a more historical nature will be the studies proposed by Messrs. Kravchenko and Halenko.

Mr. Kravchenko, who is a professor at Kharkiv State University, will work on a book on the role of the historic region known as "Ukraine of Free Communes" (Slobidska Ukraïna), whose center is Kharkiv, in the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation during the period 1750 to 1850. He will focus on the administrative, political, social, economic and cultural changes of this region in the course of its integration into the Russian Empire, and how these changes affected both its regional and national self-identity.

Mr. Halenko, senior researcher and Candidate of Sciences at the Institute of Political and Ethno-National Studies in Kyiv, will use Harvard's Byzantine and Genoese resources to complete his study on the political, economic, and social and demographic layout of the Ottoman province of Kefe (Kafa in Crimea) based on two extant tax-registers for this province from the first half of the 16th century. His study, which will include graphic and cartographic materials, accompanied by the transcription of these tax-registers, will help contextualize the Turkish or Ottoman heritage in the history of Ukraine.

The post-doctoral fellowships are funded through a series of annual grants to Harvard University from the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Foundation, a charitable organization incorporated in California. The foundation is not only dedicated to promoting Ukrainian studies and culture, but also supports outcome-based educational, cultural and health-care programs in Ukraine, Puerto Rico and other areas of the world.

Eugene Shklar, a first-generation Ukrainian-Canadian and an alumnus of Harvard University (class of 1972), together with his wife, Daymel, established the fellowship program in recognition of the generation of his parents, who strove to preserve Ukrainian culture and heritage in the diaspora. This same generation, through a fund drive guided by the late Stephan Chemych, founder and former president of the Ukrainian Studies Chair Fund, helped to raise an endowment at Harvard to support three professorial chairs, the Ukrainian Research Institute, library acquisitions and a significant publishing program. The Shklar Fellowship program carries on the charitable spirit of past generations, as well as marks the philanthropic potential of a younger generation which, thanks to the efforts of their parents and grandparents, continues to be deeply interested in the future of Ukraine.


Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 27, 2001, No. 21, Vol. LXIX


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