Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1917: Lessons for Today
Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 31, 2025 to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Serhiy Bilenky. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
When the powers of Europe were at their prime, present-day Ukraine was divided between the Austrian and Russian empires, each imposing different political, social, and cultural models on its subjects. This inevitably led to great diversity in the lives of its inhabitants, shaping modern Ukraine into the multiethnic country it is today. Despite being subjected to different and conflicting power models during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ukraine was not only imagined as a distinct entity with a unique culture and history but was also realized as a set of social and political institutions. The story of modern Ukraine is geopolitically complex, encompassing the historical narratives of several major communities – including ethnic Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Russians – who for centuries lived side by side.
Bilenky will argue that there are a few key lessons we all can learn from studying Ukraine in the “long” nineteenth century.
Serhiy Bilenky is a visiting assistant professor at Columbia University and Editor-In-Chief of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (since 2023). He also has been Programs Director of Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute since 2015. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, he graduated from Kyiv National Shevchenko University, from which he also received his Candidate of Sciences degree (1997). He received his PhD in History from the University of Toronto (2007). Bilenky taught courses on Russian, Ukrainian, and East European histories at the University of Toronto, Columbia University, and Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. Among his publications is “Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations” (Stanford University Press, 2012) and “Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905” (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He’s also the editor of the selected writings of the leading 19th-century Ukrainian intellectuals “Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov” (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2014). His most recent book is “Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914” (McGill-Queen’s University Press and CIUS Press, 2023) – a multidisciplinary history of Ukraine during the “long” 19th century.
