Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His most recent book is Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe (Routledge 2019). He is a former fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (01.04.2022 – 30.06.2022) and is currently John S. Saden Visiting Professor at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University.
Imperial Russia saw the nation as the sea into which all the other Slavic cultures flowed. The idea persists today not only in Russia’s attitude towards its neighbourhood, but also in the way eastern Europe is studied in the West. A Ukraine scholar pleas for institutional reform.
Vienna’s hosting of Ukrainian artists and writers recalls the days of the fin de siècle, when the city was a magnet for intellectuals seeking freedom from Tsarism. But despite strong historical affinities, subtle barriers to solidarity with the Ukrainian exiles remain.