The Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) will hold its 46th annual session at Harvard University’s main campus on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. It is the first of its kind in the world and is recognized for its many contributions to Ukrainian studies. This year’s program will run for seven weeks beginning on Saturday, June 18, and running through Saturday, August 6, and will offer three courses. It is run jointly by the Harvard Summer School and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).
Participants will have an unparalleled opportunity to expand their knowledge of contemporary Ukraine; to learn from some of today’s leading scholars in Ukrainian studies; and to have the chance 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. Participants will live in Harvard University housing and will have full access to all of the university’s many research and instructional facilities, including the largest Ucrainica collection outside of Eastern Europe, its many other libraries, museums, athletic complexes and language resource centers. 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, who is a preceptor with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. This eight-unit 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.
George G. Grabowicz, Dmytro Cyzevskyi Professor of Ukrainian Literature at Harvard, will teach the four-credit course “Revolutionary Ukraine: Avant-Garde Literature and Film from 1917 to the Euro-Maidan of 2014,” which will cover the major Ukrainian literary, cinematographic and cultural developments of the 20th and early 21st centuries. There will be a special focus on modernism and the depiction of revolution in literature, drama and film; Stalinism; Socialist Realism; the Holodomor; World War II; the Thaw; émigré literature; dissent; independence; decolonization; and the discourses of populism, neo-modernism, and post-modernism
Finally, “Society, Culture and Politics in Modern Ukraine” will be taught by Serhiy Bilenky, a lecturer in 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; Ukraine as a “bloodland”; and soccer.
HUSI is unique in that it is the only program in North America offering seven weeks of intensive accredited university instruction in Ukrainian studies. It has graduated more than 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 in 1971, 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, 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; many of the course offerings have been retooled to reflect this change. Last year’s student body, for example, was primarily composed of graduate and post-doctoral students, as well as professionals, a number of whom were either working on theses or were preparing to teach undergraduate courses in the fall.
In addition to applications from the United States, the bulk of this year’s applications have been from Ukraine.
The deadline for the Harvard Summer School registration, housing and full tuition payment is Thursday, May 12. Late registration will begin on Tuesday, May 17, and will continue through Wednesday, June 22. (Late registration fee: $200 in addition to all other registration fees.)
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 Tamara Nary, HUSI administrator, at 617-495-3549 or by e-mail at [email protected].