Research Programs, Educational and Training Programs, Seminars and Conferences

Research Programs

Support for scholarly research activities is a major focus of the Ukrainian Research Institute. The Institute provides office space, technical facilities, and access to Harvard's unique resources to researchers -- including URI Associates at Harvard and other area institutions and Visiting Scholars from throughout the US and foreign countries, with an increasing number from Ukraine.

The Institute has sponsored a number of major research projects, including the first exhaustive study of the Famine of 1932/33 and the Project on the Millennium of Christianity in Rus'-Ukraine. URI is the host institution for the long-running project on Archives in the former Soviet Union and more recently, the ArcheoBiblioBase project on Ukraine and Russia (Dr. Patricia K. Grimsted, project director). The Institute also houses the office of the Harvard Ukrainian Business Initiative (Janet Hunkel, US director).

URI is engaged in collaborative projects with other area studies centers at Harvard, a number of American and foreign institutions, and, increasingly, with academic institutions in Ukraine. For more information on research and academic programs, contact Dr. Lubomyr Hajda.

Educational and Training Programs

Instructional programs in Ukrainian studies are conducted primarily through the Departments of History and Slavic Languages and Literatures, whose faculty are closely associated with URI. The Seminar in Ukrainian Studies organized by the Institute may be taken for credit by graduate students. URI organizes the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute annually in conjunction with the Harvard Summer School.

Students with a special interest in Ukraine benefit from consultation with the Institute's academic adviser, as well as with resident faculty, Associates, and Visiting Scholars, especially those from Ukraine. Special programs are organized for the Institute's Student Affiliates, while more advanced Graduate Student Fellows are provided with study space, computer access, and other resources of the Institute. URI administers a number of graduate student fellowships and awards prizes for student research papers on Ukrainian topics.

Since Ukraine's independence, the Institute has organized a number of programs to enhance familiarity with Ukraine among non-academic professionals in various fields -- business, journalism, government service, and others. The Mid-Career Training Fellows Program offers such professionals a course of individual study, consultations with specialists in Ukrainian fields, access to Institute programs and Harvard libraries, and study space. Problems relevant to contemporary policy analysis, business, trade, and like issues have been the subject of specialized Intensive Summer Seminars for practitioners. Longer and shorter briefing programs on current affairs are organized by arrangement with interested parties.

Seminars and Conferences

The weekly Monday Seminar in Ukrainian Studies is the Institute's major forum for senior scholars and graduate students to present the results of their research and subject them to rigorous discussion. Since its inauguration, the Seminar has offered almost six hundred presentations. Topics presented encompass all disciplines that touch on Ukrainian studies -- history, linguistics, literature, art, anthropology, sociology, economics and political science.

Over thirty major conferences, colloquia, and symposia have been organized by the Ukrainian Research Institute since its inception. Thematically these have ranged from examinations of The Ukrainian Religious Experience (1977) to Peasant Society and Culture in Eastern Europe (1992), and from Hasidism: Continuity or Innovation? (1982) to The Military Tradition in Ukrainian History (1994). Four major conferences were devoted to economic issues, while others focused on the history of Ukrainian book printing, Ottoman Turkish sources for the history of Ukraine and the Black Sea region, and the Ukrainian experience in the United States. Recent conferences (1996 and 1997) commemorated the fifth anniversary of Ukrainian independence. In November 1998 URI held a two-day conference of emerging Ukrainian-American writers. In April 1999, a confernce entitled The Belarus Factor: Implications for Russia, East-Central Europe and the West, funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation and sponsored jointly by URI and the Davis Center for Russian Studies, was held at Harvard University with scholars and diplomats from numerous countries. Since 1994 the Institute has held the annual Maria and Vasyl Petryshyn Memorial Lecture in Ukrainian studies. In many cases, conference proceedings and special lectures have been published, either in their entirety or as individual papers.