Olena Palko

Dr. Olena Palko is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Basel, working on her new research project, “Red Tower of Babel: Soviet Minorities Experiment in Interwar Ukraine,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia in 2017 and holds a degree of “Candidate of Sciences” from the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her first book, Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) received the 2021 Prize for the Best Book in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, the 2023 Alec Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies from the British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (2023), and the Honorable Mention of the Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies (ASEEES) (2022). She is also a co-editor of an edited collection Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth Century (McGill Queens University Press, 2022), and Ukraine’s Many Faces. Land, People, and Culture Revisited (transcript-Verlag, 2023). Olena Palko is a co-convener of the BASEES Study Group for Minority History.