Ukrainian Studies
Berkeley is home to a rich and vibrant community of scholars with strengths in many relevant fields of Slavic history, religion, language, and literature.
- Founded in 1901, our department was one of the first of its kind in the U.S. Over the years, it has remained in the vanguard of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies because of its breadth of coverage and interdisciplinary approach to the field. Ours is generally regarded as the top-ranked Slavic department in the country. Generations of its graduate students now serve as globally recognized intellectuals, regional experts and faculty members of universities throughout the world.
- The Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is the university’s focal point for students and faculty who conduct research and teaching on the geographic region of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Currently, the Institute has 45 core Berkeley faculty members and over 100 affiliated graduate students.
- The University Library’s Slavic collection is among the largest in the United States.
- The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life has important holdings documenting the life of Ukrainian Jewry both before and after World War II, including tens of thousands of historical photographs of Ukrainian Jews in the Roman Vishniac archive.
In recent years, we have seen a significant demand for specific faculty expertise in Ukrainian language, history, and literature as well as growing enthusiasm among Berkeley faculty and students for enhancing our strengths in this area. The department recently hired a new Ukrainian language lecturer, Nataliia Goshylyk, and is set to officially add Ukrainian to its major and minor tracks for East European languages and cultures.
A $3 million gift from the Open Society Foundations has enabled The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures to launch a year-long campaign to secure matching funding to endow a chancellor’s chair of Ukrainian studies. The creation of this new faculty position would enable us to enrich these offerings by adding courses spanning a diverse range of topics in Ukrainian cultural history, literary studies, and politics and allow us to offer these courses on a more regular basis.
News
Berkeley prepares to build premier Ukrainian Studies program (Berkeley News | Sep. 23, 2024)
Rescuing dissent: Inside the yearlong mission to bring prominent Putin critics to UC Berkeley (Berkeley News | Oct. 23, 2023)
Berkeley Talks: Economists on what it’ll take to rebuild Ukraine (Berkeley News | February 24, 2023)
In Ukraine, Berkeley experts are shaping the legal fight against war crimes (Berkeley News | Feb. 21, 2023)
With defiance and solidarity, Berkeley’s Ukrainian scholars respond to invasion (Berkeley News | Feb. 25, 2022)
Statement of solidarity with Ukraine (Slavic languages and Literatures | February 2022)
2024 Classes
Advanced Readings in Ukrainian
Ukraine: History, Identity, Society, and the Environment
Post-Soviet Cultures | After Socialism Post-Soviet Cultures of Eurasia
UC Berkeley Ukrainian Culture Events 2022-2024
March 10, 2022
“The Legacies of Ukrainian Culture” (Panel with Alex Averbuch, Vitaly Chernetsky, Mayhill Fowler, Alisa Lozhkina, hosted by Harsha Ram, Sponsored by Townsend Humanities Center and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Apr 4, 2022
“Poetry in a Time of War: Voices from Ukraine and Russia” (Panel and Poetry reading hosted by Irina Paperno and Polina Barskova; poetry by Yevgenia Belorusets, Boris Khersonsky, Marianna Kiyanovska, Lyuba Yakimchuk, and Serhiy Zhadan; second session w/ Lyn Hejinian, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Maria Stepanova) Sponsored by Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, ISEEES, Department of European Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, German Historical Institute Washington, and the Division of Arts and Humanities.
Oct 10, 2022
Marika Kuzma: “Voices from Ukraine: An Exploration of Composers and Poets from the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day”
March 15, 2023
Andriy Kurkov: “Reading and Writing in War-time Ukraine,” ISEEES lecture
Oct 23, 2023
Tamara Hundorova: “Writing, Disease and Heterotopia of Lesia Ukrainka: Towards a New Cultural Identity,” Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Nov 20, 2023
“Writing in a Time of War: A Conversation with Ukrainian Historian and Novelist Olena Stiazhkina” (w/ John Connelly, Amelia Glaser, Taras Tsymbal) Panel, ISEEES
February 29, 2024
Serhii Plokhii, “The Return of History: The Ruso-Ukrainian War Through the Eyes of a Historian,” ISEEES
March 15, 2024
Olenka Pevny (Cambridge University)
“The visual and architectural forms of Rus’, their Byzantine inheritance, and their re-presentation in early seventeenth-century Kyiv.” (Slavic Dept. graduate seminar)
April 12, 2024
Robert Romanchuk (Florida State University)
“Oral-traditional epic in premodern Ukraine: from bylina to duma.”
Fall 2024:
September 9
Harsha Ram, “Ukrainian in Form, Caucasian in Content.” Russia’s First Anti-Imperialist Novel: Vasily Narezhny’s The Black Year, or the Mountain Princes”
October 7
Marianna Kiyanovska: poetry reading in conversation with Polina Barskova, her translator into Russian.
MARIANNA KIYANOVSKA is a writer, translator, and literary scholar. She is the author of nine books of poetry and one collection of short stories. She has also translated six single-authored volumes of poetry (from Polish and Belarusian). Kiyanovska is a recipient of prestigious awards, including the Kyiv Laurels Literary Festival Prize (2011), the Shevchenko National Prize(2020) and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2022) for the poetry book The Voices of Babyn Yar. She is a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine and the Ukrainian PEN. In 2014, Forbes Ukraine named her one of the top ten most influential writers working in Ukraine today. She lives in Lviv.
November 4
Serhiy Bilenky
Ukraine, Imperial Urbanism, and the Challenges of Modernity”
SERHIY BILENKY is a historian of Ukraine and research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta and the author of Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914, and Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations
The tragic events unfolding in Ukraine place a special burden of responsibility on those of us who teach the languages and cultures of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Some of us were born in the region; all of us have long-standing ties to friends, family-members, and scholars living there. As citizens, educators, and scholars we unequivocally condemn this war unleashed by Russian forces on Ukrainian territory. We stand with the Ukrainian people in this hour. We express our solidarity with the citizens of neighboring states – from Belarus, Poland, Moldova, the Baltic, Central Asia, and the Caucasus – who stand for peace, freedom, and the right to resist domination by any world power. We offer our support to those in Russia who oppose this act of aggression, one that risks plunging the post-Soviet region, and with it the entire world, into a global crisis. We stand in solidarity with our students from the region who are devastated by these events and are ready to support them.
(The Department does not speak for the University or the campus as a whole.)