UKR-TAZ

As announced last fall, a group of prominent historians are launching what may be the largest scholarly mega-project in Ukraine’s history.

With initial funding from Ukrainian billionnaire (and oligarch) Viktor Pinchuk and support from the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Ukrainian History Global Initiative‘s list of advisors and researchers reads like a “who’s who” of Ukrainian academe. It features not only several of the leading historians of modern and contemporary Ukraine — Serhii Plokhy, Yaroslav Hrytsak, and Timothy Snyder among others — but also leading period/area specialists (Christian Raffensberger writing on diplomacy in medieval Rus’, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern on Jewish history in Ukraine, Frank Sysyn on the Cossack era, Daniel Beauvois on Black Earth, Yuliya Yurchenko on inequality, and Phillips O’Brien on “wars for Ukraine”), world-renowned scholars not known for their work on Ukraine (such as environmental historian John McNeill and archaeologist David Wengrow), and well-known figures in arts and letters including Yuval Harari, Fareed Zakaria, Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum, “forensic architect” Eyal Weizman, Ukraine-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, and renowned Ukrainian poet Serhii Zhadan.

Some 50 of the project’s 90 scholars are Ukrainians, and the planned three-year collaborative research project will result in scholarly as well as popular texts in English and Ukrainian on almost every aspect of Ukrainian history: from deep prehistory through Rus’ and the Cossack state to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, with plenty of attention to wars of the past and the present, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, regional distinctions, and culture and the arts. If it succeeds in its goals, many of the topics discussed on this blog will have an additional, and hopefully authoritative, set of references to cite and refer to.

Further information can be read at the Ukrainian History Global Initiative web site.