REESOURCES. Rethinking Eastern Europe

Amplifying voices, individual experiences, and perspective from below

Sharing reflections on learning and teaching about Eastern Europe

Bridging academic and public audiences

Creating a collaborative space for learning about history and culture

Decentering the curriculum of Eastern Europe by diversifying primary sources

Themes

Formats

Periods

The themes we offer aim to help European history students and scholars extend the scope of their understanding and knowledge.

Architecture Art Chornobyl Commemoration Culture Displacement Dissent Empires Everyday Life Gender Heritage Holocaust Industry Infrastructure Labor People Soviet Travel Urban Space Violence War

We organize the materials of the Education Platform around five main formats: primary sources, thematic modules, courses, syllabi, and reflections.

Primary Sources Modules Online courses Syllabi Reflections

The significant historical period with which the Educational Platform is concerned is European modernity, which we divide into decades between the mid-19th century and the early 21st century.

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Experiencing Borders and Resettlement in Postwar Lviv: Everyday Practices

Growing Up in Skala: A Galician Shtetl Seen through a Teenager’s Eyes

The excerpts presented here are drawn from the memoirs of Fanya Gottesfeld, a Jewish girl from the Galician town of Skala, who survived the Holocaust. In her recollections, she revisits her youth, which unfolded in interwar Poland. Her account bears a distinctive quality: at the onset of the Holocaust, she was eighteen years old—old enough to perceive and record the events unfolding around her, yet still young enough for her reflections to remain free from the hardened frameworks of political dogma or inherited prejudice. Her memories can be interpreted through five overlapping contexts—cultural, economic, political (interethnic), and ethical. The following analysis engages with each of these dimensions to reconstruct the anthropological perspective of...

‘Fashion Show’ in late Soviet Pokrovsk, photo by Mykola Bilokon

This image, taken by Mayak photojournalist Mykola Bilokon, shows a woman on a catwalk demonstrating some of the clothing manufactured by ‘Rainbow’ sewing factory in Krasnoarmeisk (today’s Pokrovsk), in the Donetsk region. The woman is dressed in a floral print, dagger-collared, button-down dress and woollen, belted, armless cardigan and wears a contemporary backcombed hairstyle and makeup. An audience made up of different generations of Pokrovsk residents watches the show. Their clothing and hairstyles also demonstrate the changing fashions of the 1970s and 1980s. While some women in their 40s and 50s (born in Stalinist 1930s and 1940s) wear knee-length, possibly homemade, patterned floral dresses and headscarves, some younger members of the audience wear...

Privatization and Economic Transformation in the Post-Soviet Space: The Photo Archive of the Druzhkivka Newspaper Okno, 1990s

The photographs presented here from the archives of the newspaper Okno [literally “window” — tr.note] document the creative work of its editorial staff, who sought to critically reflect on the realities of Ukraine’s economic transformation in the 1990s through artistic and allegorical means. Founded in 1994 by local entrepreneurs, the newspaper positioned itself in opposition to the old communist nomenclature, which still retained control over local government bodies and capitalized on the widespread disappointment and confusion following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The founders of Okno were the insurance company ASKO-Donbas Pivnichny (established in 1991) and its affiliated printing company PrimaPress. The emergence of the paper ended the local authorities’ monopoly over...

Leisure Time of Workers through the Eyes of a Soviet Dissident: Oleksa Tykhyi on Reading Practices

Oleksa Tykhyi (1927–1984) was a rural teacher who worked near the Donbas town of Druzhkivka. In 1956, he was sentenced to seven years in a Mordovian labour camp for criticising the Soviet invasion of Hungary. There, he took part in a rebellion against the prison administration and spent a year in solitary confinement. While in the camp, he met many dissidents, including Levko Lukiyanenko, with whom he became friends. After returning to Ukraine in 1964, Tykhyi was banned from intellectual work and forced to leave teaching, taking up manual labour instead — a common path for Soviet dissidents. Most of his journalistic articles were written during this period: “Reflections on the Ukrainian Language...

“Bringing Education to a Remote Corner”: A Competition Photograph by Marko Zalizniak, 1929

Marko Zalizniak (1893–1982) was a rural amateur photographer best known for his images from the front lines of World War I and for documenting collectivization in the villages of what is now the Pokrovskyi District of Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. The opening of a primary school in his home in the Romanivskyi khutir in 1927 can be seen as a prologue to his 1929 competition photograph, which will be discussed below. The following year, the residents of the khutir decided to construct a separate school building at their own expense. The new school opened in 1928, timed to coincide with the 11th anniversary of the October Revolution. Soon afterward, the Soviet authorities took the...

Victoria Donovan

Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St. Andrews. She works at the intersection of heritage studies, urban history, visual anthropology, and the public humanities. Her current research, exploring entangled colonialisms and industrial extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian East, has resulted in a wide variety of outputs, from academic and non-fiction writing, exhibitions, archives, community workshops, to artistic practice.

Dmytro Bilko

A local historian and cultural studies scholar, museum curator. His curatorial projects include: "The Gene of Defiance: Chronicles of Ukrainian Resistance in Donetsk Region from the First Half of the 20th Century to 1991", "Marko Zalizniak: A Photo Enthusiast's Diary", and "Ecology on Camera" (co-curator), within the framework of the Un/Archiving Post/Industry. Since February 2022, Dmytro Bilko has been serving in the Ukrainian Defense Forces.

Julia Elena Grieder

PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Basel. She is part of the SNSF-Prima research project, "Red Tower of Babel: Soviet Minorities Experiment in Interwar Ukraine" under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Olena Palko at the University of Basel. Her academic focus lies in minority history and nationality policies, with a particular emphasis on the Soviet Union and Ukraine.

Viktor Drozdov

Historian, Associate Professor of the Department of History and Methods of Teaching it at Izmail State University of the Humanities, Chairman of the Danube Historical and Memorial Commission. His research interests include the politics of memory, historical regionalism, historical urbanism, and the history of Stalinism. Currently, he is working on the monograph "Soviet Memory Policy in the Annexed Ukrainian Territories in 1939-1953".

Nadiia Pastukh

Anthropologist, folklorist, and oral historian. She is a member of the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Ukrainian Association of Oral History. In recent years, her research interests have been related to oral history and folklore studies of the experience of the "difficult past" (collectivization, deportation, imprisonment, famines, and the Holodomor, the Holocaust, wars, the Resistance Movement in the twentieth century) and the "difficult present"— the Russian war against Ukraine in the twenty-first century.

Nadia Skokova

Historian, researcher at the Center for Urban History. Her research interests include Jewish politics and public space in Austrian Lviv; self-government as an instrument of civil society in dialogue with the state authorities; perception of the Ukrainian question in Jewish public discourses of the interwar period; rethinking the institution of violence and the prehistory of the Lviv ghetto.

Pavlo Yeremeev

Historian, Associate Professor of the Department of Eastern European History at the School of History, and Associate Professor of the Department of Ukrainian Studies at the School of Philosophy of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Research interests: history of religion, history of Eastern Europe in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, intellectual history, historiography.

Orest Kostiv

Historian, guide lecturer at the National Museum of History of Ukraine. Research interests: history of late Soviet Ukraine, cultural and social history, history of everyday life, memory politics and historical policies, urban history, history of radio broadcasting.

Olena S. Dmytryk

Dr Olenka Syaivo Dmytryk received their PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Their work focuses on Ukraine and is located at the crossing of social movements studies, the histories and theories of sexuality and gender, and visual culture studies. Their current research aims to better understand the role of the Internet in sustaining or limiting sexual and gender dissent in Ukraine.

Nadiya Chushak

nadia chushak is a professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and is an activist, educator, and anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Their research centers around the culture of memory, nostalgia, and post-socialism, with a particular focus on identity politics, memory, feminism, and queer theory and practice.

Tetiana Zemliakova

Tetiana Zemliakova is an intellectual historian of modern disciplinary knowledge and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute. Her first book project, Building Schools: the American Research University and the Birth of Modern Political Science (1850–1910), is a study dedicated to the intersection between the institutional development of modern research universities and the rise of academic disciplines in Germany and the US.

Guillaume Lancereau

Guillaume Lancereau is a historian of nineteenth-century Western Europe and Russia, with a particular interest in intellectual and political history. He defended his thesis on the historians and historiography of the French Revolution (1881-1939) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and worked at the European University Institute as a Max Weber Fellow.

Olena Palko

Dr. Olena Palko is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of Basel, working on her 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.

Paul R. Huard

Teacher at Ashland High School, Oregon, USA, participant in Curriculum Development Project: On Ukraine, organized by the Davis Center of Harvard University in partnersip with the Center for Urban History in 2024. Author of the lesson/unit plan on Dealing with the Weight of the Past: The Rise of the Maidan and the Fall of Lenin’s Statue.

Olha Martynyuk

Researcher at the University of Basel, worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Candidate of Historical Sciences (2017). Guest lecturer at the University of Zurich and the University of Basel. Her research interests include the history of transport, ecology, urbanism, gender, and political everyday life.

Viktor Krupyna

Historian, Candidate of Historical Sciences (2005), Researcher at Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Dr. Krupyna defended his PhD thesis on the Russian White Movement in Ukraine in 1917-1920. His research interests include political and social history of Ukraine in 1945-1991, Ukrainian nomenclature, history of everyday life.

Daniel Pruess

Daniel Pruess began his bachelor's degree in history at the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2022. His main research interest is cultural history and the history of everyday life in the (post-)Soviet space(s) and societies. His latest researches covering the political and cultural interactions between Ukrainian diaspora and their host nations and societies in the 20th century.

Taras Nazaruk

Head of digital history projects at the Center for Urban History. From 2016 to 2024, he worked on a digital encyclopedia of the history of Lviv. Since 2022, he has been developing the Telegram Archive of the War, which is also a topic of his PhD research at the University of Hagen. Apart from social media archiving practices, his research interests also include a history of Soviet cybernetics and early computer networks.

Olha Petrenko-Tseunova

PhD in philology, literary scholar, lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, editor. Historical columnist for the Ukrainskyi Tyzhden (Ukrainian Weekly), contributor to the magazines Verbum and Krytyka. Author of scientific publications on Ukrainian literature and culture. Research interests: narrative identity, urban studies, Prague School of Poetry, Ukrainian Baroque.

Anna Chebotarova

Sociologist, doctoral research fellow at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. Her academic interests include: cultural heritage studies, collective memory studies, Holocaust memory, Jewish heritage in East-Central Europe, oral history and qualitative methods of sociological research.

Oleksii Chebotarov

Ph.D., historian, postdoctoral researcher at University of St. Gallen and associate doctoral fellow at the University of Vienna. Currently, he is working on the postdoctoral project "The Border River Zbruch: A Socio-Cultural and Environmental History, 1900-1939." His research interests include migration and borderland studies, Jewish, Ukrainian, environmental and digital history.

Ihor Petriy

Historian, Research Secretary of the Scientific Library of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Research interests: history of Lviv and Eastern Galicia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, diary and memoir literature of Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe.

Sonya Bilocerkowycz

Professor and Author of On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine (Ohio State University Press, 2019), winner of the Gournay Prize for a debut essay collection. Sonya’s work has appeared in New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, Colorado Review, Guernica, and other journals. Currently, she is the Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York, and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.

Maria Mayerchyk

Anthropologist, Editor-in-chief of Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies. Dr. Mayerchyk's research interests include decolonial option, queer and feminist epistemologies, East European studies, emigration and diaspora studies, and critical folklore studies. She teaches courses on queer, gender, and feminism, also folklore, and Ukrainian culture in Germany, Canada, and Ukraine.

Maria Sonevytsky

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard Collеge, USA. Professor Sonevytsky’s research focuses on post-Soviet Ukraine, where she has pursued interests including folklore revivals after state socialism and the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on the revival of rural musical repertoires. Author of the book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019).

Masha Shpolberg

Film and media scholar specializing in global documentary, Russian, Central, and Eastern European cinema, ecocinema, and women’s cinema. Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard Collеge. Author of the book Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers’ Unrest.

Gregory B. Moynahan

Associate Professor of History at Bard Collеge, USA. Author of the book Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899-1919 (2013, Anthem Press/London). Prof. Moynahan's research interests include history of the social sciences, systems theory, and computing/cybernetics in the two Germanys

Małgorzata Mazurek

Associate Professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University. Prof. Mazurek's recearch interests include history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in the twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish studies. She is author of the book Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010).

Iryna Skubii

Historian, PhD, Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at University of Melbourne (Australia). Dr. Skubii research interests include history of consumption, material culture, and the environment during the Soviet famines in Ukraine. She is the author of the monograph Trade in Kharkiv in the Years of NEP: economy and everyday life and a number of articles on the history of consumption, materiality, famines, and animal history in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1940s.

Siobhán Hearne

Historian of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and currently based at the University of Manchester in the UK. Dr. Hearne's research broadly focuses on histories of gender, sexuality, and medicine. She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (2021). She is also one of the editors of the collaborative digital history project Peripheral Histories?

Elżbieta Kwiecińska

PhD, Historian, Associate Professor of History at the University of Warsaw. Research interests: methodology and history of historiography, the intellectual, cultural and social history of Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Ashkenazi Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries with a special emphasis on nation-building processes and studies of colonialism. In her research, she adopts the perspective of global and transnational history.

Roman Liubavskyi

Historian, Associate Professor at the Department of History of Ukraine at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, where he is working on the monograph "Socialist Cities in the Ukrainian SSR: Idea, Realization, Heritage."

Oleksandr Cheremisin

Doctor of History, Professor at the Department of History, Archeology and Teaching Methods at Kherson State University, where he is curently working on a monograph on the topic: "The Chronicle of Kherson in the Dimensions of the Russian-Ukrainian War".

Olha Zarechnyuk

architect, the architectural editor of Lviv Interactive; author of the architectural description of buildings. She also leads architectural city walks. Academic interests: architecture and city planning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, architectural heritage, history of architectural conservation and restoration.

Volodymyr Sklokin

historian, Associate Professor at Department of Modern Ukrainian History of Ukrainian Catholic University. Most recent book Imperial Identities in the Eighteenth Century Ukrainian History, ed. by Vadyn Adadurov and Volodymyr Sklokin [In Ukrainian] (Lviv, 2020). Research interests: history of Ukraine and the Russian Empire during the long 18 century, intellectual history, theory and history of historiography, public history.

Oksana Kuzmenko

folklorist, doctor of sciences in philology, leading researcher at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Research interests: historical poetics of folklore, dynamics of folklore tradition, methodology of conceptual analysis of verbal folklore texts, integral interdisciplinary study of folklore, oral history, ethnolinguistics.

Oksana Hodovanska

historian, senior researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, senior lecturer at the Department of History, Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage at the Lviv Polytechnic National University. Research interests: history of Ukrainian migration, everyday history, local history, protection of cultural heritage.

Nazar Kis

historian, researcher at the Ivan Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Dr. Kis research interests include: History of Galicia at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, mass politics, political mobilization, public history, politics of memory.

Olena Betlii

Historian, Candidate of History (2004), Associate Professor at the Department of History of the National University "Kyiv Mohyla Academy". Her research focus includes social history of Kyiv during the First World War and the Revolution; discourse practices in the European environment; policy of identities in the context of EU integration processes. She lectures courses on urban studies, on mental maps of European space, and the history of CEE countries of 1989-2007

Julia Malitska

PhD, Historian, project researcher at the Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Malitska studies entangled histories of nutrition, biopolitics and environment in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2017, she has been a lecturer at the Institute of History and Contemporary Studies, where she is teaching a number of courses in the subject of history.

Anastasia Kholyavka

head of the Urban Media Archive project at the Center for Urban History (2022 – present). A coordinator of "Cafe philosophique Lviv", a co-founder of the Kontur media, an editor of the MediaLab. Research focus covers the theory of design, the theory of art, current art practices.

Oksana Kis

historian and anthropologist, head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, a co-founder and a vice-president of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. Prof. Kis' research interests include Ukrainian women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, gender transformations in post-socialist countries.

Marta Havryshko

historian, Research fellow of the Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the NAS of Ukraine. Her research interests include the history of sexual violence in war, the history of gender and of women, the history of nationalism and feminism, the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust, oral history, and memory studies.

Iryna Starovoyt

PhD in Philology, an associate professor at Culturology Department of UCU, a member of the Executive Council of Ukrainian PEN.

Olena Stiazhkina

PhD in History, professor, a research fellow at the Department of the History of Ukraine in the second half of the 20th century, at the NASU Institute of History, member of the Ukrainian Association of Female Researchers of Women’s History.

Halyna Bodnar

historian, PhD, Associate Professor at the Hrushevskyi Department of Recent History at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University, author of a book about Lviv. Everyday life of the city through the eyes of migrants from villages (1950/80s) (Lviv: Publishing House of Ivan Franko Lviv National University, 2010).

Mariana Baidak

historian, research fellow at the Social Anthropology Department, at the Institute of Ethnography of the NAS of Ukraine, member of the Ukrainian Association of Female Researchers of Women’s History, author of the book “War as a Challenge and an Opportunity: Ukrainians in the First World War” (2021).

Andrij Bojarov

media artist, researcher of Lviv and Ukrainian Avant-garde, independent curator and architect. Andrij Bojarov is a translator and editor of Piotr Łukaszewicz’s monograph on the Lviv association of artists “artes”.

Vlodko Kostyrko

an artist, art critic, curator, art collector, and interior designer. Author of paintings, graphic art, collages, assemblages, installations, environments, and street art.

Piotr Słodkowski

art historian working at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Słodkowski’s research focuses on Polish and Central European art of the 20th century in relation with contemporary thought in the humanities. He is the author of the book “Modernizm żydowsko-polski. Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski a historia sztuki” (2019).

Krzysztof Swirek

sociologist and lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, editor of ‘View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture’. In 2018 he published a book: Teorie ideologii na przecięciu Marxizmu i psychoanalizy (Theories of ideology at the junction of Marxism and psychoanalysis).

Vasyl Kosiv

Doctor of Arts, Associate Professor of graphic design at the Lviv National Academy of Arts. Author of the book “Ukrainian Identity in Graphic Design 1945–1989” (Kyiv: Rodovid, 2019), which won the Grand Prix of the Lviv Book Forum in 2019, as well as the Grand Prix of the Ukrainian national Book of the Year 2019.

Yulia Kovalenko

PhD, program coordinator at the International Human Rights Documentaries Festival Docudays UA, member of the Union of Film Critics of Ukraine. Co-author of the online-cource "Amateur Film-Making: History of Visual Modes and Creative Practices".

Oleh Chorny

director, screenwriter, media artist. Member of the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Film Academy and the Nomadic University for Art, Philosophy and Enterprise in Europe. Co-author of the online-cource "Amateur Film-Making: History of Visual Modes and Creative Practices".

Iryna Sklokina

historian, a researcher at the Center for Urban History. She has participated in several collective international projects on historical memory and cultural heritage. At the Center for Urban History Iryna Sklokina’s research focus is on historical heritage, in particular, industrial and Soviet heritage of Kharkiv and Lviv.

Anna Onufrienko

a film expert from the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center, culturologist, journalist, co-curator of exhibitions about the 1920s film and art. Co-director of films “Atomograd. Editing the Utopia,” “Intervision. Lviv,” a program coordinator of retrospect film programs. Co-author of the online-cource "Amateur Film-Making: History of Visual Modes and Creative Practices".

Małgorzata Radkiewicz

PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Audio Visual Arts at the University of Krakow. Her research interests and publications focus on gender representation in film and media as well as on much wider category of cultural identity. In her last book: "Faces of queer cinema" (2014) she analysis selected films dealing with the issue of queer, but also sexuality and gender.

Oksana Dudko

historian, coordinator of the Lviv Interactive project (2011-2016), researcher at the Center for Urban History (2016-2021). Petro Jacyk Post-Doctoral Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at University of Saskatchewan. Research interests: history of violence, history of the Great War and the Revolution, history of theatre, cultural history, theatre and exhibition curatorship.

Christoph Mick

Professor of History at the University of Warwick (UK). The author of Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt: Lemberg, 1914-1947 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010). He is currently working on a transnational history of the cult of the Unknown Soldier in inter-war Europe.

Sofia Dyak

historian, researcher, director of the Center and the head of the Foundation in Ukraine. Dr. Dyak’s research interests include post-war urban recovery and transformation in Eastern Europe, heritage infrastructures and practices in socialist cities, and their legacies. She is preparing a manuscript with the preliminary title "New Lives in Old Cities: Postwar Lviv and the Power of Accommodation.

Theodore R. Weeks

Professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where teaches courses in modern world, European, and Russian history. He also teaches at the College of Europe, Natolin (Warsaw). His research interests include nationalism, ethnic relations, antisemitism, and, more recently, the history of technology. He is presently working on a history of radio in interwar Poland (1920-1939).

Piotr Rypson

art historian, curator, critic, historian of literature and visual culture, museum expert. Associate Professor at the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology (New Media Department) and curator at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Author of 11 books and over 200 articles on art, information architecture, visual communication and literature.

Timothy R. White

teaches urban and modern U.S. history as an Associate Professor at New Jersey City University, in Jersey City, NJ. He has scholarly interests in the dynamics of neighborhood change, post-industrial cities, and theatrical history, which led him write “Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater” (2015) for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

John Paul Himka

is a professor emeritus in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta (Edmonton). He is author of four monographs on “Ukrainian history: Socialism in Galicia” (1983), “Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century” (1988), “Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine” (1999), “Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians” (2009).

Tarik Cyril Amar

Assosiate Professor of the Koç University College of Social Sciences and Humanities. His research interest are modern history of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the culture of the Cold War; Russia in global history.

Natalia Aleksiun

professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She specializes in the social, political, and cultural history of modern East European Jewry and have written extensively on the history of the Jewish intelligentsia in East Central Europe, Polish-Jewish relations, modern Jewish historiography, the history of medicine, and of the Holocaust.

Serhy Yekelchyk

professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria and current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies. Professor Yekelchyk is the author of six books on Ukrainian history and Ukrainian-Russian relations, including Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (OUP, 2007), which has been translated into five languages.

Elissa Bemporad

professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Elissa Bemporad' research interests are Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe in modern times, mass violence, gender, and trauma, antisemitism and Jewish responses to (and involvement in) violence under the Soviet regime.

Joanna Lisek

a literature scholar, translator and faculty member of the Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław, where she teaches Jewish literature and culture as well as the Yiddish language. Her research interests focus mainly on Jewish poetry and the role of women in Yiddish culture.

David Fishman

professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary, teaching courses in modern Jewish history. Dr. Fishman also serves as director of Project Judaica, JTS’s program in Ukraine, which is based at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy University. He directs its Jewish Archival Survey, which publishes guides to Jewish archival materials in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Eugene M. Avrutin

professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Illinois. He is the author and co-editor of several award-winning books, including Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia and The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town. His most recent book is Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin.

Marcin Wodziński

historian, head of the Department of Jewish Studies, Wrocław University. His special fields of interest are Jewish material culture and the social history of Jews in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, especially history of Hasidism and Haskalah. His publications include more than 100 articles in Polish, English, Hebrew, French, and Czech; ten books (one of them co-authored) and six volumes co-edited.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

a professor of Jewish Studies and Jewish History at Northwestern university of Chicago. He taught at different schools, including Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Jerusalem University and Harvard. He is author of over a hundred of academic articles and six books.

Ivanna Cherchovych

historian, researcher at the Center for Urban History, where she is implementing education projects and works on her research project about women’s experiences of urban spaces in Galicia in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Joshua Shanes

Professor of Jewish Studies; Director, Arnold Center for Israel Studies. Joshua Shanes' research interests focus on Central and East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically turn-of-the-century Galicia and the rise of Zionism as a countermovement to the traditional Jewish establishment. His first book, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia appeared with Cambridge in 2012.

Karolina Szymaniak

professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, researcher, editor, translator. Her research focus lies at the intersection of modern Jewish literature and culture, Polish-Jewish literary and cultural relations, memory policy, theory of modernism and Avant Garde, women’s literature and Translation Studies.

Valentyna Shevchenko

historian, senior research fellow at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. At the Center for Urban History, Valentyna participates in the project implementation "24.02.22, 5 am.: Testimonies from the War". Her research interests: historical urban planning, socio-economic history of Ukraine of the 19th and early 20th century, Ukrainian context of the First World War.

Roksolyana Holovata

historian, history editor of the Lviv Interactive project and researcher at the Center for Urban History, a PhD student in the Ukrainian Catholic University (Faculty of Humanities) and in the University of Wroclaw (Institute of Art History). Her PhD thesis covers urban changes in Halych suburb in Lviv, its sociotopography, and perception of space in the long 19th century.

Oleksandr Makhanets

historian, researcher at the Center for Urban History. The research interests include media history, digital archives, photography, cinema, amateur film practices, digital humanities, social history, and visual studies. Oleksandr is the one of the authors of the online-course "Amateur Film-Making: History of Visual Modes and Creative Practices".

Natalia Otrishchenko

sociologist, researcher, leads the Urban Media Archive's "Urban Stories". Her areas of academic interests include methodology and methods of sociological research, oral history, projective methods, urban sociology, spatial and social transformations after the state socialism. The author of the online-course "Neighbours and Strangers: Introduction to the Sociology of the City".

Bohdan Shumylovych

historian and art historian, researcher at the Center of Urban History. He has received a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2020). The main focus of his work is media history in East Central Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as media arts, visual studies, urban spatial practices, and urban creativity. Author of the online-cource "How to understand and read visual media?"

Anna Muller

PhD, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies, Director, Women in Learning & Leadership. Author of the books: If the Walls Could Speak. Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland (2017) and An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918–1996) (2023).

Mayhill Fowler

Historian, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stetson University. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2011). Author of a book Beau Monde on Empire's Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (2017). Author of the online course Money and the Muse: An Introduction to Cultural History. Dr. Fowler research interests are: theater history, cultural history, Jewish history, gender history, borderlands, transnational teaching.

Vladyslava Moskalets

Ph.D., historian, researcher at the Center for Urnan History, senior lecturer at the Department of History of the Ukrainian Catholic University, coordinator of the Jewish Studies program. Research interests: Jewish history of Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, history of consumption, women's studies, Yiddish and linguistic diversity.

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News

Ghetto in Lviv: Space and Everyday Life

New digital publication on Lviv Interactive

29.10.2025

August Work Schedule of the Center for Urban History

30.7.2025

Publications of Invisible University for Ukraine Students on the "REESOURCES" Educational Platform

17.2.2025

Thinking with the City

Video story on the 20th anniversary of the Center for Urban History

30.12.2024

Partners and support

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FAQ

How to cooperate with the Educational Platform?

We invite university instructors, Ph.D. students, and all history lovers to participate in the development of the Platform and the use of its resources in teaching and learning about Central and Eastern Europe.

How to get materials from the Educational Platform?

You can get digital materials by registering and creating your own account or by sending a letter to edu@lvivcenter.org After that, you can freely download materials from our resources.

Can I become the author of an educational module or share my own sources with the Educational Platform?

We will be happy to work with researchers who have experience working with archival and private collections and have had direct access to sources or hard-to-reach archives. Please contact edu@lvivcenter.org with proposals for cooperation.

What are the conditions for using the resources of the Educational Platform?

We adhere to the Creative Commons license for the use of copyright objects (CC BY-NC-ND). It means we allow users to upload content and share it with others, as long as they give credit to the authors and don’t use these materials for commercial purposes.