Mayhill Fowler

Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler is a historian and associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University, where she also directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2011). She was a Mihaychuk Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2012) and the Petro Jacyk Fellow at the University of Toronto (2012-2013). Her first book, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017), tells the story of the making of theater both Soviet and Ukrainian through a collective biography of young artists and officials in the 1920s and 1930s. Her book project War Stories: Theater on the Frontlines of Socialism investigates how societies explain war and entertain soldiers through the story of PrykVO, the theater of the Carpathian Military District (or former Soviet Army Theater) in Lviv. A third research project, Comrade Actress: Soviet Ukrainian Women on the Stage and Behind the Scenes, re-thinks theater in Ukraine over the long 20^th century through a focus on its women. She was a faculty member with the International Summer School of the Social Sciences from 2013-2019 and a member of the organizing committee of the Danyliw Seminar in Ukrainian Studies from 2014-2019. She is a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York. She holds a master’s degree in Acting (MFA) from the National Theater Conservatory (2000) and a BA in Slavic Languages from Yale University (1996).

Dr. Fowler is affiliated with the Center through research and teaching. She works with the Center on the Research Focus “Urban Cultural Infrastructures: Creators, Managers, Audiences in the Modern City” through her book project, War Stories: Theater on the Frontlines of Socialism. She is also engaged in the educational programs at the Center. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Center in 2011, she taught a course in cultural history at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She has taught at the Center’s summer schools in Jewish history and culture in 2013 and 2016, and she contributes to the online course programming with her 2021 course “Money and the Muse.” In her teaching at Stetson University she uses the materials from the Urban Media Archive and Lviv Interactive, and she seeks to connect students in Ukraine and in the US through educational experiences. She was a Fulbright Research Scholar based at the Center for Urban History and Ivan Franko National University in Ukraine 2019-2020. She can be found at the Center every summer.

Research interests: theater history, cultural history, cultural infrastructures, Jewish history and culture, gender history, borderlands, transnational teaching

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Documents (5)

Excerpt from a 2013 interview with Lviv Puppet Theater actress: War, Gulag, Space Race

This is an excerpt from an interview with an actress in Lviv made in 2013. This actress talks about her wartime experience under German occupation and touches on the various cultural institutions she attended during the war. She went to the Lviv Opera Theater, run 1941-1944 by famous actor and director Volodymyr Blavatsky, who had worked with Kurbas’ Berezil and created a name for himself in avant-garde theater in Poland. He left for the west in 1944. She notes Lesia Kryvytska, an actress who worked in interwar Poland, Nazi-occupied Lviv, and then settled at the Maria Zankovetska Theater in postwar Lviv. She also mentions studying ballet at the Opera’s dance studio. Her mention...

Excerpt from a 2013 interview with an actress, in Lviv: War, Power, Gender

This is an interview with an actress in Lviv who narrates her experience of World War II serving in the Red Army and her start in professional theater in Lviv. First, she tells us about her experience in the war: she served in Stalingrad as a communications operator and was deaf for 10 days from shelling. Her unit served with the First Ukrainian Front all the way to Lviv, where she ends up staying for the rest of her life. Note she never returns to any mention of her family again, so we can presume they did not survive the war. Her description of the war reveals the role that women played in...

Excerpt from a 2012 interview with a female theater director: from Lviv to Moscow and back again

This is an excerpt from an interview with a theater director, one of the only women to work her way up through a male-dominated cultural sphere. She worked at several theaters in Lviv and became well-known in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. This source tells us about late Soviet theater, and the cultural world in general, and the different circulations and pathways between Lviv and Moscow. She mentions Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” (actually at the 20th, not 22nd Party Congress) and the cultural opening that happened in the 1950s and 1960s. Note that she applied to theater school in Kyiv, but was not accepted - because she auditioned with verse by dissident poet Lina...

Excerpt from a 2013 interview with a lighting designer: Connections between the military and the theater, and between Moscow and Lviv

This is an excerpt from an interview with a lighting designer in Lviv in which she talks about her mother, Tatiana Zorina, who for many years was the zavlit, or literary director, at the Theater of the Carpathian Military District on Horodotska Street in Lviv. This theater, called by locals simply PrykVO, was a Russian-language theater under the management of the Ministry of Defense that operated in Lviv from 1954 until the Soviet collapse. The theater continued, in various forms, under various state institutions, shifting and changing, until becoming today’s Teatr Lesi. Several interviews from the UMA collection linked here reveal the history of this fascinating theatrical institution. Tetiana Zorina, as the source...

Family Correspondence from the World War I (Ivan and Ivanna Blazhkevych), 1917

Family correspondence of Ivanna Blazhkevych with her husband Ivan, who fought in the ranks of the Austrian army during the First World War.

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Related courses (1)

Money and the Muse: An Introduction to Cultural History

Culture is one of the most complicated concepts, and yet we use the word all the time. This course is about how to think about culture, introducing you to the field of cultural history. Through this exploration into cultural history you will learn how to analyze and articulate how people ascribe meaning to various ideas, objects, and practices.

Modernism and Pogroms: Culture and the Arts in the East Central European Borderlands, 19th-21st centuries

In our mini-course we will explore cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jews (Ukrainians, Poles, Russians) in the borderlands of the Habsburg and Romanov empires. This is interaction that may have been conscious or unconscious, and may have involved encounter, appropriation, negotiation, exchange and destruction.

Money and the Muse: A Toolbox for Analyzing Culture

This mini-course introduces you to a field: cultural history. Cultural historians question how to analyze, articulate, and define how people ascribe meaning to various ideas, objects, and practices. You’ll acquire a “toolbox” of analytic frames useful for research in any field of study or cultural practice. For our “case study” of cultural history, we will delve into the history of the arts in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union from the late Imperial to the Stalinist period. This is not a comprehensive course on the arts in Russia or the Soviet Union, by any means. Rather, we will focus on the world of the arts by examining social, political and economic structures as...

Mayhill Fowler

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