KSE Online summer school
Memory and Conflict studies

About the speakers:

• • Serhii Plokhii is Mykhailo S. Hrushevskyi Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University. He is also a Director of Ukrainian Research Institute. Research interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author of, among others, The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present (HURI, 2021); Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Basic Books, 2018); and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2015). His books have won numerous awards, including the Ballie Gifford Prize and the Shevchenko National Prize (2018).

• • Yuriy Gorodnichenko is an economist and Quantedge Presidential professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Gorodnichenko is also a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor. Gorodnichenko was the Chairman of the International Academic Board at Kyiv School of Economics. Gorodichenko is a co-editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics. 

• • Marci Shore is Associate Professor at Yale’s University Department of History.  Her research focuses on the intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of “The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe”, and “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution”. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, a history of phenomenology in East-Central Europe “Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth”.

• • Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts, current President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS), and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. Her current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; church-state relations in Ukraine; the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas; and memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe, 2011.

• • Michael Kofman serves as Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA and as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. His research focuses on the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy.

• • Dr Rory Finnin is University Associate Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He launched Cambridge Ukrainian Studies in 2008. He is former Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies (2014-18). Rory Finnin’s primary research interest is the interplay of literature and national identity in Ukraine. Finnin received his PhD (with distinction) in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He also holds Certificates from the Harriman Institute and from the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. He is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Ukraine 1995-97) and a native of Cleveland, Ohio. 

• • Omer Bartov is Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author of nine books. His recent publications include Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007), Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, and Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022). Bartov’s novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, will be published in 2023.