Between the Local and the Global: Unpacking Environmental History of Ukraine
From 09:00 AM to 06:00 PM EET
Between the Local and the Global:
Unpacking Environmental History of Ukraine
Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia, Bulgaria, 25-26 September 2024
The EnvHistUA Research Group is pleased to inform that the conference “Between the Local and the Global: Unpacking Environmental History of Ukraine” will be held on 25-26 September 2024 at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), Sofia, Bulgaria.
The significant impact of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war on the environment of Ukraine has consequences far beyond the borders of the country which have gained visibility locally and globally. Scholars and practitioners across diverse disciplines have undertaken various projects intended to document environmental destruction and have organized a number of events. The media reports about the devastating impacts of everyday hostilities on flora and fauna, soil and water. NGO and state institutions collect data to recognize Russia’s actions towards nature as an act of ecocide. This unprecedented interest has brought the topic of Ukraine’s environment and ecological crises to the forefront of global media and scholarship. The Kakhovka dam disruption by the Russian military has uncovered deeper historical contexts of ecological issues. Unravelling current and similar historical relationships stand as the primary objective of environmental historians seeking to elucidate the complexity of the engagement of human with the surrounding environment.
EnvHistUA Research Group is organizing this scholarly conference in order to advance and consolidate the environmental history of Ukraine as a research field and address related challenges. The event aims to bring together scholars to discuss epistemological aspects and practical implications of researching and writing environmental histories of Ukraine that go beyond the realm of disasters and catastrophes. An imperative aspect of this endeavour involves writing, rethinking and diversifying the existing historical narratives about Ukraine’s environment. Our starting point is to expose, conceptualize and analyze the multifacetedness of nature–culture, human/society – environment interactions and developments through time and across Ukrainian lands. Secondly, we place great emphasis on transnational, trans-imperial, transborder, and global nexuses Ukraine’s environments were a part of. This epistemological approach holds the potential to unveil hitherto untold narratives, thereby enriching the fabric of history. Finally, the event engages with the question of what environmental history can offer to Ukrainian and European studies, as well as global studies, and vice versa. This knowledge is invaluable in addressing present and future environmental challenges sustainably and responsibly.
If you have any questions, please contact us via email envhistua.official@gmail.com.
ORGANIZERS
EnvHistUA Research Group:
Dr. Anna Olenenko, Khortytsia National Academy, Ukraine; University of Alberta, Canada
Dr. Julia Malitska, Södertörn University, Sweden
Dr. Oleksii Chebotarov, University of Vienna, Austria
Local conference coordinator
Olga Nyagolova, Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS), Bulgaria
Agenda
Guided Tour in Sofia
For those who arrive to Sofia earlier we offer to join 2-hours walking tour in the city center.
Our guide, scholar from National Archaeological Institute with Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Petar Parvanov will meet you in front of the Hotel Niky at 17-00.
Don't forget to take a bottle of water, phone to take pictures of historical Sofia and your curiosity!
Opening Disscussion
Welcome messages from the Organizers and Partners:
Diana Mishkova, Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, Bulgaria
Julia Malitska, Södertörn University, Sweden
Oleksii Chebotarov, University of Vienna, Austria
Anna Olenenko, University of Alberta, Canada; Khortytsia National Academy, Ukraine
Session 1: Narrating Landscapes
Chair: Oleksii Chebotariov
Presenters:
Igor Serdiuk, How to Write an Environmental History of the Hetman Region? Source Base and Promising Methodologies
Iryna Papa, Ukrainian Landscapes in 1711 Through the Eyes of a Danish Diplomat
Discussant: Tetiana Perga
Lunch
We will have lunch at UGO Restaurant.
Find the restaurant on Google Maps.
Keynote Lecture by Marianna Szczygielska
"Colonial Creatures and Imperial Beasts: Global Animal History in Eastern Europe"
Writing a global history of animals requires special attention paid to the frameworks of coloniality and imperiality. These two forms of domination are intertwined but they manifest differently in environmental histories of any given region. Far too often more-than-human histories set in Eastern Europe fall between the cracks of the global East/West or South/North divides that structure knowledge production. This lecture will address the epistemological tensions between the colonial and the imperial using the example of captive animal management in Poland at the turn of the twentieth century. Asian elephants and European bison will serve as companions to the reflection on writing global animal history from a local perspective of Eastern Europe. As representatives of charismatic megafauna, these animals inspired colonial longings, anti-imperial resistance, and national sentiments. Historically contingent ideas about exotic and Indigenous species are bound up with global dimensions of wildlife trade, species conservation, and cultural politics practiced at the edges of empires. Recognizing the limits and ambivalences of the colonial/imperial archives can aid environmental historians in situating localized interspecies relations within the global arena without losing the grasp of the specificity of the semi-peripheral context.
Speaker: Marianna Szczygielska
Moderator: Julia Malitska
Session 2: Cultivating Nature
Chair: Anna Olenenko
Presenters:
Vladyslav Hrybovskyi, Seasonal Rhythms of the Location of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Noghais and Crimean Shepherds in the Great Meadow
Anthony Amato, The Great Hutsul Plow-Up: Nature, Culture, or What?
Discussant: Laura Kuen
Welcome Dinner
We would like to invite all participants to Welcome dinner to Moma Restaurant, well-known for its traditional Bulgarian cuisine and wine.
Find the restaurant on Google Maps.
Session 3: Contested Waterscapes
Chair: Anna Olenenko
Presenters:
Dzhulietta Avanesian, Changing the Dnipro: Discussions on the River Modernization in Imperial Periodicals
Illia Malyk, Understanding River History: Modern Ukrainian Historiography
Discussant: Volodymyr Kulikov
Session 4: Extractivism and Environment
Chair: Julia Malitska
Presenters:
Kristina Hook, Ecological and Educational Gaps in Ukrainian Human-Environmental Relations: Enduring Impacts of Moscow’s Extractive Policies and the 1930s Ukrainian Holodomor
Volodymyr Kulikov, In the Service of Resources: Extractive Company Towns in Eastern Ukraine Across Twentieth-Century Political Regimes
Kseniia Lopukh, Ecological Economics and the Contribution of Ukrainian Intellectuals S.Podolynskyi, S.Ostapenko, and V.Vernadkyi
Discussant: Iryna Zamuruieva
Lunch
We will have lunch at UGO Restaurant.
Find the restaurant on Google Maps.
Session 5: Cleaning up Environments, Struggling with Nature
Chair: Oleksii Chebotariov
Presenters:
Anastasiia Khovtura, The Struggle for Cleanliness: Waste Management in Kharkiv at the Turn of the 19th and 20th centuries
Tetiana Perga, An Unequal Struggle: Gophers in Ukraine amid Soviet Modernization and Totalitarian Regime
Discussant: Marianna Szczygielska
Session 6: Land and Agriculture
Chair: Anna Olenenko
Presenters:
Iryna Zamuruieva, A Field from afar
Discutant: Kristina Hook
Speakers and Participants
Anastasiia Khovtura
V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University
Anastasiia, PhD in history and archaeology, currently is a lecturer at the Department of History of Ukraine at the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. She graduated from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in 2017 and got a master degree in history. In 2017-2021, she completed postgraduate studies at the School of History at the Department of History of Ukraine. In 2021, she defended her thesis on the topic: "The formation and modernization of the social infrastructure of provincial cities of Left Bank Ukraine (late 18th - early 20th centuries)".
Anna Olenenko
University of Alberta; Khortytsia National Academy
Anna Olenenko currently is a PhD Candidate (Media and Cultural Studies) at the University of Alberta, a Regional Representative of Ukraine and a member of Board of the European Society for Environmental History, a co-founder of the EnvHistUA Research Group. She graduated from Zaporizhzhia National University in 2007 and got her Candidate of Sciences in History degree from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2013. Anna’s research interests are related to the environmental history of Ukraine, especially the Steppe region, and animal studies. The latest publication is a chapter (co-authored with Stefan Dorondel) “In Quest of Development: Territorialization and the Transformation of the Southern Ukrainian Wetlands, 1880–1960” in A New Ecological Order. Development and the Transformation of Nature in Eastern Europe. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022, pp. 65–86, and a chapter “Camels in European Russia: Exotic Farm Animals and Agricultural Knowledge” in Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally. Berghahn, 2023, pp. 151–173.
Anthony Amato
Southwest Minnesota State University USA
Anthony Amato is a professor in the Social Science Department at Southwest Minnesota State University, USA. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He is the author of two books: The Carpathians, the Hutsuls, and Ukraine: An Environmental History (2021) and The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority among Ukraine’s Hutsuls (2024). He is the editor of two other books: Conservation on the Northern Plains: New Perspectives and Draining the Great Oasis: An Environmental History of Murray County, Minnesota. Over the years, he has also authored more than a dozen articles, essays, and reviews on environmental history.
Diana Mishkova
Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia
Director
Diana Mishkova is Professor of History and Academic Director of the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, Foreign Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Areas of specialization: modern and contemporary history of Eastern Europe.
Dzhulietta Avanesian
Independent Researcher
Dzhulietta Avanesian is an independent researcher, member of the Y. Novytskyi Zaporizhzhia Scientific Society. She graduated from Zaporizhzhia National University in 2007. She is currently working on her PhD thesis titled 'The Newspaper "Ekaterinoslavskie Gubernskie Vedomosti" (1838-1918) as a Source for Studying the History of the Ekaterinoslav Region". Her research interests include source studies of Southern Ukraine, oral history, urban studies, borderland studies, regional studies, and environmental history. Her latest publication is an article titled "Historical Development of the City of Katerynoslav on the Pages of the Newspaper "Ekaterinoslavskie Gubernskie Vedomosti" in the journal Dnipro Clio: A Collection of Articles Dedicated to the Memory of Professor H.K. Shvydko (1944–2022), edited by B.O. Halya, H.L. Pervyi, and V.O. Vasylenko. Dnipro: Gerda, 2023.
Igor Serdiuk
Poltava V.G. Korolenko National Pedagogical University
Igor Serdiuk is a PhD, professor of the Department of History of Ukraine at the Poltava V.G. Korolenko National Pedagogical University, researcher of the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences. Research interests include historical demography; social history of the Hetmanate; childhood history; history of ideas, quality of life, history of medicine. Igor is an author of two individual and several collective books. The book "Little Grown Up: Child and Childhood in the 18th century Hetmanate" was awarded the Ivan Franko International Prize (2020). He is a co-editor of the scientific portal historians.in.ua, member of the International Association of Humanitarians and the Ukrainian Society of History Researchers of the 18th century.
Illia Malyk
Khortytsia National Reserve
Illia Malyk has a master degree in history. He graduated from Zaporizhzhia National University in 2023. He defended his master’s paper on the topic: "Problems of environmental history in Ukrainian historiography 1991–2022". His research interests include oral history, river studies, regional studies, and environmental history. Her latest publication is a thesis titled "Dnipro’s reedbed as a place of ecological interactions (through the prism of personal narratives of the beginning of the 21st century)" in HistUkrainika: materials of the international scientific conference Kyiv: Faculty of History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, 2023.
Iryna Papa
Ukrainian Catholic University; Ukrainian-Scandinavian Center
Iryna Papa is a Danish language teacher and History lecturer. She obtained two master's degrees: from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv in 2011 and Aarhus University in Denmark in 2013. She also completed PhD program at UCU in 2020. Currently, Iryna Papa is working on her PhD thesis about Just Juel and his travel to Petrine Russia in 1709-1711. Furthermore, she also teaches Danish at the Ukrainian-Scandinavian Center in Lviv and works as a freelance translator. Iryna recently completed the first Ukrainian translation of the historical novel “The Fall of the King” by the Danish Nobel Prize laureate Johannes Jensen. This translation will be soon published by Yakaboo Publishing. In addition to this, Iryna Papa is cooperating with the Center for Urban History in Lviv. She is the author of the article “Georg Brandes about Lviv” (on a famous Dane's visit to Lviv in 1898) for the project “Lviv Interactive” (LIA). Now she is collecting material for the new publication on the image of Lviv in the Danish newspapers during the First World War.
Iryna Zamuruieva
Independent Researcher
Iryna Zamuruieva is an artist and independent researcher. Through writing and photography, she explores human-environment relationships at different scales. Recently Iryna has been writing about Adonis vernalis and her kin-region, curating Climate Art Labs, researching eco-feminism in Ukraine, exploring feminist approaches to landscape photography and militarised landscapes. In her current fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Iryna researches political ecology of land relations in Ukraine, focusing on rapeseed. She works on climate and land policy at a sustainability charity in Scotland. Her writing has been published in the Commons, Open Democracy, Korydor and Scottish Left Review amongst others.
Julia Malitska
Södertörn University
Julia Malitska, PhD in History, is a senior researcher at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden, co-founder of the EnvHistUA Research Group. She is an author of a book “Negotiating Imperial Rule: Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Steppe” (2017), which is her doctoral dissertation. Between 2019–2022, Malitska conducted her postdoctoral project on the history of vegetarian social activism in the late Russian empire. She has published on different aspects of the topic in peer-reviewed scholarly journals such as Media History and Global Food History. She is a co-editor of an edited volume “Consumption and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russia in the Twentieth Century” (together with Magdalena Eriksroed-Burger and Heidi Hein-Kircher) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Malitska’s current project entitled “To Eat or Not to Eat: Human Health, Scientific Knowledge and the Biopolitics of Meat in Eastern Europe in 1860s–1939,” financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), deals with the intertwined histories of food, scientific knowledge, and animals in the late Romanov empire and early Soviet Union.
Kristina Hook
Kennesaw State University (School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development)
Dr. Kristina Hook is Assistant Professor of Conflict Management at Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development. She is an anthropologist specializing in civilian protection and war-related environmental harm. She has conducted multiple years of fieldwork across 33 sites in Ukraine since 2015, with a forthcoming book on the Ukrainian Holodomor and Russia-Ukraine relations. Supported by fellowships from Fulbright, NSF, NEH, DAAD, USAID, and others, her research has been widely published (Small Wars and Insurgencies, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, etc.). She is also a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
Kseniia Lopukh
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Kseniia Lopukh is a PhD in Economics, and an Associate Professor at the Department of Economic Theory, Macro- and Microeconomics at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The author of more than 50 publications. Her research interests are Monetarism, monetary policy, Ukrainian economic thought, and gender economics. She is a member of The European Society for the History of Economic Thought and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Laura Kuen
Czech Academy of Sciences
Laura Kuen is a visual and environmental anthropologist working on human-animal relations in western Ukraine. Laura studied cultural anthropology and environmental humanities at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society. She is currently doing her doctorate on contemporary smallholder-pig relations in Transcarpathia at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences. Laura also worked as a documentary filmmaker and co-curated exhibitions on urban environmental history, global food chains and more-than-human coexistence. Her current exhibition Land.schafft.Klang explores ecoacoustic dimensions of biodiversity loss in Bavarian agricultural landscapes.
Marianna Szczygielska
Czech Academy of Sciences
Marianna Szczygielska is a feminist historian of science. She brings queer and decolonial approaches into reflection on human-animal relations. She graduated from the Central European University in Budapest and authored a doctoral dissertation on zoological gardens. Szczygielska published on the nexus of scientific knowledge, animals, and society in journals such as Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Environmental Humanities, History and Technology, Centaurus, Cultural studies, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, and Kultura Współczesna. Szczygielska is an associate editor of the Humanimalia journal. She currently works at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Oleksii Chebotarov
University of Vienna
Oleksii Chebotarov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Eastern European History, University of Vienna and a co-founder of the EnvHistUA Research Group. He coordinates Swiss-Ukranina academic projects at the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St. Gallen and curates digital history projects at the European Association of Jewish Studies and the Center for Urban History in Lviv. He taught at the University of St. Gallen, Ukrainian Catholic University, University of Vienna and University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Cultural Theory from the University of St. Gallen in 2021. He is currently completing his first book, “Jews from the East, Global Migration, and Habsburg Galicia in the Early 1880s,” and working on a research project about the border river Zbruch.
Tetiana Perga
Institute of World History of National Academy of Science of Ukraine; TU Berlin
Tetiana Perga received her Ph.D. degree from Kyiv State University named Taras Shevchenko, Kyiv, Ukraine. She has been working at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for more than 30 years. She is a DAAD fellow in IOS Regensburg (2018), and in Heidelberg University (2022), Volkswagen Foundation research fellow in Heidelberg University (2022- 2024). She is a member of the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH), Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem Research Group in Jewish environmental history. Her main research interest is environmental history.
Vladyslav Hrybovskyi
Mykhailo Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Dr. Vladyslav V. Hrybovskyi is a Senior Scholarly Researcher in Mykhailo Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine. His academic interests include social history of the Noghais, Zaporizhzhia Cossacks, peoples of the North Caucasus, the Volga region, and Kazakhstan; men’s groups as a specific form of social organisation of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and peoples of the Eurasian steppe in the early modern period. Vladyslav is an author of more than 200 works published in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Poland. His latest publications is an article "Turkic-speaking population of the Steppe Frontier between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate in the 15th - first half of the 15th centuries", in The Tatars in Lithuanian history and culture in the 14th –21st centuries: recent research. A special issue of “Lithuanian History Studies”. Vol. 14. Edited by Dr. Galina Miškinienė. Vilnius, 2023. P. 29–49.
Volodymyr Kulikov
The Ukrainian Catholic University
Volodymyr Kulikov is a historian holding a position as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin (until September 2024), where he teaches a course (among others) on Environmental History in CEE&Eurasia. His area of expertise lies in the business and economic history of Eastern Europe. His major works focus on the history of entrepreneurship and enterprises, natural resources, and industrialization in the Russian Empire and Ukraine. He is working on a book project, “Forging Industrial Capitalism in Eastern Ukraine, 1870-1917: The Role of Company Towns,” to be published by Routledge.
Organizers and Partners
Location details
Centre for Advanced Study Sofia will be the venue for the full two days of the conference.
The address is 7B Stefan Karadzha St, entr. 3, fl. 2, apt. 23, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria.
Address: Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, ulitsa "Stefan Karadzha", Sofia, Bulgaria
Hotel
We booked rooms for all speakers and participants in Hotel Niky.
The hotel is located in the central part of Sofia, near the main shopping street Vitosha Blvd. In one way the boulevard leads to the administrative, cultural and business center of the city where you can see the National Art Gallery, National Theater, churches and many more, and the other way takes you to National Palace of Culture.
Adress: Sofia Center, Neofit Rilski St 16, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria
Find the hotel on Google Maps.
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