Roundtable Discussion Di 30 Nov 2021 | 16:00–17:30

The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies

Roundtable Discussion with Uilleam Blacker (University College London), Rory Finnin (University of Cambridge), Mayhill Fowler (Stetson University) and Bohdan Tokarsky (University of Potsdam)

Online event

Damaged painting “Rozstril v Mezhyhiri” (“Execution in Mezhyhiria”, 1927) by Vasyl Sedliar, one of the Boichukist artistis. Provided by courtesy of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NKhMU), Kyiv, inventory number ZhS-2495.

As a starting point, this virtual event will feature the presentation of Bohdan Tokarsky’s study “The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies”, which has been recently published in the Essay series of the Forum Transregionale Studien. The participants of the roundtable will then go on to discuss together the salient questions that this work raises, including the place of Ukrainian (Soviet) modernism in the study of global modernisms and Soviet studies, the fascinating relationship between tradition and innovation, past and future in this modernism, as well as the legacy of the Ukrainian Soviet culture of the 1920s in post-Soviet Ukraine, among others.

Bohdan Tokarsky’s “The Un/Executed Renaissance” is Essay No. 8 in the open access Essay series “Essays of the Forum Transregionale Studien” and the first issue that was published in the framework of EUTIM.

The event will take place virtually via ZOOM. In order to receive the login details, please register at office(at)trafo-berlin.de.

Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. 

Rory Finnin is University Associate Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is the Founding Director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies (2008-2018); former Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies (2014-18); and former Chair of the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES) (2011-18).

Mayhill Fowler is a historian and associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University, where she also directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2011). She was a Mihaychuk Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2012) and the Petro Jacyk Fellow at the University of Toronto (2012-2013). She was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine 2019-2020 and is an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History in Lviv and a member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York.

Bohdan Tokarsky works at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Potsdam as part of the research project “Europäische Zeiten / European Times – A Transregional Approach to the Societies of Central and Eastern Europe” (EUTIM). He has been a 2020/2021 Prisma Ukraїna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Bohdan Tokarsky completed his doctoral work as a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where he also taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies.