Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute announces program for 2003 (01/26/03)

Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute announces program for 2003

by Yuri Shevchuk

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - For most people summer is a quieter season associated with vacations, travels, leisure and a much slower pace. Not so for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). For eight weeks from late June to mid-August the usually quiet, and dignified HURI transforms into the noisy and bustling HUSI, shorthand for the Harvard Ukrainian Summer School, the world's oldest continuously operating university-accredited summer program in Ukrainian studies. The summer is still four months away but HUSI-2003 course offerings have already been announced so that everybody interested can plan their studies at Harvard well in advance. This coming summer the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute - June 23- August 13 - will offer seven courses: three content courses (literature, history, politics), a new advanced graduate seminar, and three levels of intensive language. Students will have a unique opportunity to work with three senior faculty who are scholars in the forefront of their respective fields: George Grabowicz teaching "20th Century Ukrainian Literature: Rethinking the Canon," John-Paul Himka - the history course "Modern Ukraine," and Alexander Motyl - the political science course "Theorizing Ukraine: Politics, Theory and Politcal Theory."

Prof. Grabowicz has held the Dmytro Cyzevskyj Chair of Ukrainian Literature at Harvard since 1982. His provocative, groundbreaking studies - whether on the poet Taras Shevchenko as mythmaker or the re-examination of literary historiography in general - promise to challenge students' assumptions and indeed make them "rethink the canon" of Ukrainian literature. His present position as editor-in-chief of the leading Ukrainian intellectual journal, Krytyka, has placed him in a position to observe current developments at close range.

"Modern Ukrainian literature," explained Prof. Grabowicz, "has always been a barometer of cultural and political life. Arguably, this was most pronounced in the 20th century where under the impact of Soviet totalitarianism - and the various responses to it - Ukrainian literature was split into several competing, and to all appearances incompatible, canons and historical narratives: the pre- (or non-) Soviet, the Soviet and the anti-Soviet (émigré and dissident)." This course will pose some new questions, and give some tentative answers, as it reconsiders the major Ukrainian literary phenomena of the 20th century.

Prof. Himka assumed the Ukrainian History professorship at the University of Alberta in 1984, following the death of renowned historian Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky. Just as his predecessor did Prof. Himka has examined a broad range of issues related to Ukrainian nation-building, producing three monographs and numerous studies on late 19th century Galicia. More recently, he has directed his attention to the complex picture of Ukraine under Nazi occupation and stands as an insightful and erudite analyst of Ukrainian-Jewish relations during that period.

"We are going to toy with a new approach to Ukrainian history," said Prof. Himka." Instead of looking at the Ukrainian movement of the 19th century as the product of the previous historical development of the Ukrainian people, we will do an epistemological inversion and imagine that all previous Ukrainian history is the product of the 19th century Ukrainian movement. Not that the things that the great Ukrainian historians narrated did not happen, but that the particular set of connections and omissions that they constructed as Ukrainian history was not necessarily something that existed independently of their mental structure." Among some of the central themes of the course are, for example, the development of the Ukrainian idea since 1800, its metamorphoses as a result of the international crises of 1914-1920 and influences exerted on it by the Central European discourse of the inter-war period, the Stalinist terror and the famine of 1933, Ukraine and the second world war, the emergence of independent Ukraine and the state of the Ukrainian idea in the North American diaspora. Against the backdrop of this description, Prof. Himka's endnote - "Not a course for intellectual sissies," - sounds more like a challenge than a dissuasion.

Prof. Motyl's interest in politics goes back at least as far as the early 1970s, when he was a founding member of the New York-based Committee in Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners and editor of the radical (for that time) student magazine Novi Napriamy. Since then Prof. Motyl has established himself as a leading political theorist of Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, authoring seven monographs on the subject. His theoretical writing is augmented by practical experience in the field and with a keen interest in Ukrainian history, particularly the ideological origins of Ukrainian nationalism. Prior to accepting a political science professorship at Rutgers University, Prof. Alexander Motyl was the associate director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Prof. Motyl noted that "Theorizing Ukraine" is about using social science concepts and theories in the study of Ukraine. The course is premised on the view that how the researcher chooses to conceptualize a topic is the single most important step toward studying it. The next most important step is forming a theory. The course challenges both hermeneutic and historical approaches to Ukraine, claiming that the self-understandings of historical actors are far less important than the understandings of researchers, and that the question of "what really happened" in history can only be answered with, and through, a conceptual framework and theory developed by the researcher. The focus, in other words, will be on how you think about Ukraine and not about how Ukrainians think about Ukraine."

In keeping with its commitment to innovation and the expansion of its curricular offerings, the HUSI will offer for the first time an interdisciplinary advanced graduate seminar "Studying Twentieth Century Ukraine: Theory, Methodology, Identity," co-taught by Professors Grabowicz, Himka and Motyl. The seminar will focus on the present state of literary theory, cultural studies, history and political science, their interaction and the problems such an interdisciplinary approach raises. Topics treated will be the uses of history and the tools we have for the recovery of the past, the nature of historical and cultural revisionism, the various social and artistic manifestations of nationalism and communism, the uses of ideology and cultural politics, and the range of articulations of post-modernism and post-colonialism.

In her message to students posted on the new HUSI website, Halyna Hryn, Ukrainian Summer School director, writes, "We are particularly fortunate this year to welcome a select and distinguished faculty. Language instructors Volodymyr Dibrova, Alla Parkhomenko and Yuri Shevchuk all trained at Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and have over 20 years of experience in second-language pedagogy; Volodymyr Dibrova and Yuri Shevchuk presently work for the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, while Alla Parkhomenko develops modern approaches to assessment and communicative teaching techniques for the British Council in Ukraine. Their participation in this year's Ukrainian Summer Institute cannot but maintain HUSI's position as the premiere intensive Ukrainian-language program in North America."

For application materials, contact Patricia Coatsworth, Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, 1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge MA 02138; phone, (617) 495-7833; fax, (617)495-8097; e-mail, [email protected].

For detailed information on the program, course descriptions, faculty bios, cultural events, course syllabi, alumni's opinions and much more visit HUSI's brand new website located at http://www.huri.harvard.edu/husi.html.

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