Kostyantyn Bodnarenko
Students and faculty of the 2014 Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute in front of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies.
CAMIBRDGE, Mass. – The Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) will hold its 45th annual session beginning on Monday, June 20, at Harvard University’s main campus here on the banks of the Charles River.
The program will run for seven weeks through Friday, August 8, and will offer three courses. Participants will have an unparalleled opportunity to learn from some of today’s leading scholars in Ukrainian studies and will also have opportunities to meet and interact with leading contemporary Ukrainian political, cultural and social activists.
The program and the course offerings are intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who are concentrating in Ukrainian studies or who wish to broaden their educational experience. The program is run jointly by the Harvard Summer School and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI), and has been in existence since 1971. Participants will live in Harvard University housing and will have full access to all of the university’s facilities including its libraries, museums and athletic complexes. At the end of the program they will receive credit for their courses from Harvard University
This summer’s courses include “Ukrainian for Reading Knowledge,” which will be taught by Volodymyr Dibrova, a preceptor with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. This eight-credit language course is designed primarily for graduate students in the humanities and social sciences who wish to acquire a reading knowledge of Ukrainian for research purposes.
Michael S. Flier, Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology at Harvard University and director of HURI, will again teach “Ukraine as a Linguistic Battleground,” which offers a thorough exploration of the Ukrainian language in linguistic, historical, sociolinguistic, anthropological and political terms.
“Society, Culture and Politics in Modern Ukraine” will be taught by Serhiy Bilenky, a lecturer at the Political Science Department of the University of Toronto. This four-credit course focuses on the history of modern Ukraine through the study of its society, culture and politics since the late 18th century. Ukraine will be analyzed from a territorial concept, consisting of the historical experiences of major communities such as Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and Russians, and will examine how Ukrainians, despite enormous difficulties, have become the dominant group in the formation of contemporary Ukraine. Students will also look at the various social, economic and regional divides that permeate contemporary Ukraine; its multicultural cities; communism; soccer; and Ukraine as a “bloodland.”
HUSI is the only program of its kind in North America offering six weeks of intensive accredited university instruction in Ukrainian studies. It has graduated about 1,500 participants, many of whom have gone on to play significant roles in Ukrainian scholarship, as well as in the ongoing development and enrichment of Ukrainian culture and life both in the diaspora and in Ukraine itself.
Launched during the height of the Soviet Union’s drive to eliminate all things Ukrainian – including art, culture, folk memory, history, language, religion and society – and to supplant them with the idea of a single Soviet entity with a single history, memory and purpose, and bound together with a single Russian culture and language, HUSI was originally tasked with keeping Ukrainian culture, history, language, and literature alive among the descendants of Ukrainian settlers in North America and the rest of the diaspora by teaching these as academic disciplines in the Western liberal arts tradition while maintaining the highest educational standards of the best universities of the world.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine regained its independence, HUSI attracted many students from Ukraine who were anxious to establish contacts with their Western counterparts, to experience the Western university system, and to take courses and have access to archival materials that simply were not available in Ukraine.
In the past few years there has been a noticeable trend among serious students of Ukrainian studies to attend HUSI, and many of the course offerings have been retooled to reflect this change. Last year’s student body, for example, was 89 percent graduate or post-doctoral students, several of whom were either working on theses or preparing to teach undergraduate courses in the fall.
In addition to students applying from the United States, this year applications have been received from students in Ukraine, Canada, Poland, Estonia, Russia and other countries.
The deadline for the Harvard Summer School registration, housing and full tuition payment is Monday, May 18. Late registration will begin on Tuesday, May 19, and will continue through the beginning of the summer session.
Further information about the program and the application process is available on the HUSI website: www.huri.harvard.edu/husi.html. Additional questions may be directed to Serhiy Bilenky, HUSI program coordinator at 647-687-4953 or by e-mail at [email protected].