Ohio State is expanding its course offerings related to Ukraine and bringing Ukrainian scholars and guests to campus this coming academic year. Monitor this page for additional events as the year unfolds.
Academic Year 2024-25 Ukrainian Courses
First-year Ukrainian Language
PhD student Mykyta Tyshchenko will be offering first-year Ukrainian this year Tuesdays through Fridays from 4:10-5:05 PM. Students, employees, and Program 60 are all welcome! Tyshchenko hails from Ukraine himself and is currently writing his dissertation about Ukrainian film. Undergraduates should sign up for this four-credit course using the class number 36265 while graduate students can use 36264. In autumn the course meets in Hagerty Hall 062. Ласкаво просимо!
Introduction to Ukrainian Culture
In spring semester, Dr. Alisa Lin will teach Slavic 2345.20, Introduction to Ukrainian Culture on Wednesdays and Fridays, 12:45-2:05 PM. Dr. Lin has written about Ukrainian Cossacks on the OSU Origins site: listen or read here. This will be Dr. Lin’s second time offering the course which fulfills the requirements for a Foundation course in Literary, Visual & Performing Arts in the New GE and is a Literature/Diversity Global Studies course in the Legacy GE. Stay tuned for registration details!
Collaborations with Ukrainian Scholars
CSEEES is participating in several exchange programs for Ukrainian scholars. Dr. Maksym Kolesnikov arrives on September 15 to spend time with colleagues and students on the Columbus and Wooster campuses through a BridgeUSA program. During his month-long visit, Dr. Kolesnikov, an agronomist from Dnipro, Ukraine, will give two Cultural Connections talks that will be accessible in person and online. OSU is also participating in the Ukrainian Non-residential Scholar program that has been hosted by Indiana University over the past several years. A scholar will be matched with an Ohio State mentor for the academic year and receive a library access, opportunities for collaboration and professional development, and a stipend. Expanded now to include additional universities in the BTAA, the program supports scholars and institutions of higher education in Ukraine who have shown resilience in spite of the violence of war.
Upcoming Events About Ukraine
Kalbouss Lecture "De-occupying the Archive: Art as Liberatory Practice" with Dr. Victoria Donovan (U. of St. Andrews)
Monday, September 9, 3:00-5:00 PM, Thompson Library Room 165
Check back soon for more details.
Abstract: If as Achille Mbembe reminds us archives are infrastructures of colonial epistemic violence, Soviet industrial archives in Ukraine deal in specialist kinds of epistemic imperialism. Industrial archives, and the celebratory words and images of extractivist practice they contain, manifest as the institutionalised and thus ‘authoritative’ meaning of these places. This epistemic reduction can be understood as what Asiya Bazdyrieva calls the ‘resourcification’ of Ukraine, its reduction in the economic and cultural imaginaries to a set of resources to be plundered and exchanged for profit. The looting and destruction of archives, libraries, and museums is part of Russia’s continuing campaign to control Ukraine’s epistemic infrastructures, asserting hegemony over the meaning of its cultural space.
This paper looks at the ways in which artists from Ukraine have resisted (re-)colonial epistemic violence, through engaging industrial archives, confronting and dismantling their infrastructures of epistemic occupation. Analysing specific artistic practices and products, I ask how archives of the occupied and destroyed territories, including heavily industrialised spaces such as Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, and Soledar, can be reconstituted through community-led practice.
Workshop: "Engaged Scholarship, Decolonial Futures?" with Dr. Victoria Donovan (U. of St. Andrews)
Tuesday, September 10, 12:00-1:30 PM, Research Commons (18th Ave Library)
During this workshop with Dr. Victoria Donovan we will discuss her research with communities in Ukraine’s Donbas region and specific questions about scholarly accountability, activism, and challenging imperial knowledge production. Materials will be pre-circulated to those who register for this catered lunch-time event. Regional expertise not required.
Have questions? Please email Dr. Jennifer Suchland at suchland.15@osu.edu.
Reading and Discussion with Novelist and Poet Dr. Oksana Lutsyshyna (U. of Texas, Austin)
Sunday, September 29, 3:00 PM at Two Dollar Radio in German Village
Please join the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (CSEEES) at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters in German Village for a special reading with Oksana Lutsyshyna as we celebrate her latest book, Ivan and Phoebe.
Ivan and Phoebe spotlights the uproarious generation that led the Ukrainian independence movement of 1990; from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule, it investigates the difficulties and absurdities of societal change and the families that change with it. She will discuss the Revolution on the Granite (1990) in Ukraine, and life in Ukraine on the border of the two epochs - the Soviet era and the era of Independence.
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, and poet. For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, she was awarded Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). She teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures at the University of Texas at Austin.
More events will be announced as they are scheduled!