Description

This event will celebrate two recently published books on the 19th century Ukraine: “Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s” by Johannes Remy (2016) and “Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905” by Serhiy Bilenky (2017).

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier. Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on topics that are absent from current discourse including: Ilarion Vasilchikov’s alliance with Ukrainian activists in 1861, the forged revolutionary proclamation used to deport Pavlo Chubynsky (who is known today as the author of the Ukrainian national anthem), and the 1864 negotiations between Kyiv activists and the Polish National Government. Brothers and Enemies is the first systematic study of imperial censorship policies during the period and will be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Kyiv was an important city in the European part of the Russian empire, rivaling Warsaw in economic and strategic significance. It also held the unrivaled spiritual and ideological position as Russia’s own Jerusalem. In Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands, Serhiy Bilenky examines issues of space, urban planning, socio-spatial form, and the perceptions of change in imperial Kyiv. Combining cultural and social history with urban studies, Bilenky unearths a wide range of unpublished archival materials and argues that the changes experienced by the city prior to the revolution of 1917 were no less dramatic and traumatic than those of the Communist and post-Communist era. In fact, much of Kyiv’s contemporary urban form, architecture, and natural setting were shaped by imperial modernizers during the long nineteenth century. The author also explores a general culture of imperial urbanism in Eastern Europe. Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands is the first work to approach the history of Kyiv from an interdisciplinary perspective and showcases Kyiv’s rightful place as a city worthy of attention from historians, urbanists, and literary scholars.

Description

A featured event for Holocaust Education Week presented by the cultural service of the French Embassy, the Goethe Institut Toronto, the Austrian Embassy, the Alliance Française, in collaboration with the CEFMF (Centre d’études de la France et du Monde Francophone) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, with the support of the EUNIC Cluster Fund.

Entrance free

This event will be held in English. Please follow the registration link above for a full program.

With millions of pages of historical documents, photographs and film recorded by perpetrators, victims and rescuers, along with thousands of hours of recorded testimony from survivors as well as perpetrators, the Holocaust is the most documented case of genocide in the world. Yet much remains unknown, awaiting discovery.

This year’s program sheds light on untold stories, new research, and marginalized histories of the Holocaust. Holocaust Education Week 2018 creates a platform for them to be heard and understood, expanding the familiar picture and leading us to a more robust and complex understanding of the multidimensional nature of the Holocaust.

The postwar trials, the opening of the Red Cross archives through the International Tracing Service, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe which enabled scholars to access Soviet-era holdings, all contributed to new insights into the complexity and context of how the Holocaust unfolded. Yet even with access to these extensive collections, much remains unknown, awaiting discovery.

In partnership with the Neuberger Center and Holocaust Education Week, the Toronto EUNIC cluster (Goethe Institute, Alliance Française, Austrian Forum, Istituto Italiano) and the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World (CEFMF) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy are working to cast light on lesser-known narratives of the Holocaust, gathered through original and innovative archival work.

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Event description:

As part of the events related to the 100th Anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s Independence in 1918, CERES is hosting a talk on events in contemporary Slovakia with one of the region’s leading experts.

Speaker: Milan Nič, Senior Fellow, German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), Berlin
Milan Nič is a senior fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin and outgoing head of Europe program at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is also non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
His expertise includes the EU, Central Europe and the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), European security, the Western Balkans, EU and NATO enlargement, and transatlantic relations.
Nič began his professional carrier as a broadcaster at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty covering the transition period in Central and Eastern Europe. He was later program director at the Pontis Foundation, adviser to the High Representative/EU Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Miroslav Lajčák, and senior adviser to the Deputy Foreign Minister of Slovakia in the government of Iveta Radičová (2010-2012). In 2010, he co-authored a book of essays on the EU and Slovak foreign policy with Tomas Valasek, Balazs Jarabik, Jana Kobzova, and others.
Nič earned his MPhil from the Charles University in Prague, his MA at the Central European University in Budapest, and also studied at the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

CERES

Chair: Robert C Austin

Description

During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity.

Jan Raska’s Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees’ anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada’s Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada.

By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.

Jan Raska, PhD is a historian with the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Halifax.

Description

Making and Re-Making Europe: The Czech and Slovak Contribution Draft Agenda

Conference Patron: The Cvachovec Foundation

7 – 9 November 2018

In honour of the celebration in 2018 of the founding of Czechoslovakia, remembering fifty years since the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, and the events of 1989 and after, the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy will hold a two-day conference to mark these important anniversaries and give visibility to the contribution of Czechs and Slovaks in Europe and North America. The conference combines academic panels, films and a graduate student conference.

November 7

Pre-conference events:

2:00-4:00 pm – Slovakia: Big Dreams and Fears of a Small Country – Milan Nič

4:00-5:15 pm – Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada – Jan Raska

Conference opening:

5:30 PM Evening Cultural Event
Havel and Underground Culture.
Michael Kilburn, Endicott College, Beverly, Massachusetts. Paul Wilson, Writer and Translator.
Michael Žantovský, Václav Havel Library, Prague, Czech Republic.

Dramatic Readings from Tom Stoppard’s “Rock and Roll” and Václav Havel’s “Protest”

Two Photo exhibits are open to the public in Cloister of the Munk School for viewing throughout the conference.

Description

Pension reform is all over the news in contemporary Russia. This talk will look at another period in which pension reform was a ‘hot topic’: the postwar years. During the Second World War, the Soviet government’s spending on pensions and other social welfare benefits tripled, yet, most pensions were far from enough to meet the cost of living and pensioners remained some of the poorest members of Soviet society. This talk will place pension reform within the Soviet state’s larger economic project of improving living standards by increasing the real value of money in ordinary citizens’ hands, a project that began in the late Stalin years but came to fruition under Khrushchev in 1956.

Kristy Ironside is an Assistant Professor of Russian History at McGill University. She is currently writing a book on the role of money in the pursuit of prosperity in the postwar Soviet Union. She has published articles on the Soviet welfare state, lotteries, taxation, and fundraising in Kritika, Slavic Review, the Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Europe-Asia Studies, and the Journal of Social History. She recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post on pension reform in contemporary Russia.

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Five years ago Ukraine erupted in massive protests that came to be known as the Euromaidan. What’s changed and what hasn’t in the time that has passed? A panel of international and Canadian experts look at the key issues from a variety of perspectives.

Marta Dyczok is Associate Professor at the Departments of History and Political Science, Western University, and Adjunct Professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She has published five books, including Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Broadcasting through Information Wars with Hromadske Radio (2016) Ukraine Twenty Years After Independence: Assessments, Perspectives, Challenges (co-edited with Giovanna Brogi, 2015), Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience (co-edited with Oxana Gaman-Golutvina, 2009), articles in various journals including The Russian Journal of Communication (2014), Demokratizatsiya (2014), and regularly provides media commentary. Her doctorate is from Oxford University and she researches mass media, memory, migration, and history.

Olexiy Haran is Professor of Comparative Politics at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (UKMA). In 1991 93, he was Dean and organizer of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the re-born Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Since 2002, he has served as Founding Director of the UKMA School for Policy Analysis, and since 2015 as Research Director at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a leading Ukrainian analytical and sociological think tank. He is the co-editor of Constructing a Political Nation: Changes in the Attitudes of Ukrainians during the War in the Donbas (2017), Ukraine in Europe: Questions and Answers (2009), Russia and Ukraine: Ten Years of Transformation (Moscow 2003) and several other books. Also, he is a frequent commentator in Ukrainian and international media.In winter 2013-2014, Prof. Haran was a member of the Council of ‘Maidan’ movement. As a political scientist he spent several weeks at the frontline nearby Mariupol, Luhansk, Avdiivka, and Donetsk airport. He is a member of Public Council under Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and a member of Washington-based Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS-Eurasia).

Dr. Olga Onuch (DPhil Oxford 2010) is a Senior Lecturer [Associate Professor] in Politics. She joined the University of Manchester in 2014, after holding research posts at the University of Toronto (2010-2011), University of Oxford (2011-2014) and Harvard University (2013-2014). She is an Associate of Nuffield College (Oxford) and of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Onuch was also a Research Fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard) in 2017. Onuch’s comparative study of protest (as well as elections, migration & identity) in Eastern Europe and Latin America has made her a leading expert in Ukrainian and Argentine politics specifically, but also in inter-regional comparative analysis. Her book “Mapping Mass Mobilizations” (2014, reviewed in Europe-Asia Studies), explores the processes leading up to mass protest engagement in Ukraine (2004) and Argentina (2001). She is the author of several scholarly articles (in Journal of Democracy, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, GeoPolitics among other journals), book chapters, and policy briefs.

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In his presentation, Uzbekistan’s Ambassador to the United States and Canada, Javlon Vakhabov, will discuss significant economic, political, and social reforms in Uzbekistan, as well as prospects for close partnerships in Canada.

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Yuri Andrukhovych is among the most popular writers in Ukraine today. He is the author of the best selling novels, Recreations, The Moscoviad, Perversion, The Twelve Rings and others. The event will include a book launch for his most recent collection of essays in English, My Final Territory, University of Toronto Press, 2018. Also available will be his most recent Ukrainian novel, Kokhantsi iustytsii (The Darlings of Justice).

Description

N.B.: This event will be presented in French.

De Gaulle, le Québec et le Canada: un bilan historiographique 50 ans après /
De Gaulle, Quebec and Canada: An Historiographic Review 50 Years Later

Il y a 50 ans, lorsque de Gaulle a crié à Montréal “Vive le Québec libre”, il a semé la consternation en France, au Canada et seuls les indépendantistes et les nationalistes québécois semblent avoir apprécié son discours. Depuis, l’historiographie s’est chargée de décortiquer les raisons de son discours, ainsi que l’histoire plus large des relations France-Québec sous de Gaulle et les conséquences pour le Québec, de sa présidence. Les avis sont partagés, encore aujourd’hui, concernant la vision de de Gaulle sur le Québec et de ses projets, planifiés ou non, pour ses cousins d’outre-mer. Par contre, l’historiographie récente des relations franco-québécoises, a souligné un élément consensuel entre les chercheurs; celui de l’impact fondamental de de Gaulle sur la redécouverte de la France au Québec, mais aussi au Canada à travers les enjeux de la francophonie au sein même de la jeune diplomatie canadienne. Nous aborderons cette redécouverte à travers un bilan historiographique qui témoigne de la richesse de cette histoire.

When de Gaulle came to Montreal fifty years ago and shouted ‘’Vive le Québec libre’’, he spread dismay among the French and Canadian populations, and only the independentists and nationalists from Quebec seemed to have appreciated his words. Since then, historiography broke down the reasons for his speech as well as the wider historical ‘’France-Québec’’ relationship while de Gaulle was in power and the consequences of his presidency for Quebeckers. To date, opinions remain divided as to what de Gaulle’s vision and future projects for Quebec (his overseas cousins) were, whether these were planned or not. However, the recent historiography highlighted that there was a consensus on one element between the researchers; that being de Gaulle’s fundamental impact on the rediscovery of France in Quebec and in Canada, through what was at stake for the Francophony, within the young Canadian diplomatic circle itself. We will discuss this rediscovery through a historiographical review which testifies to this history’s richness.

Description

Although the tragedy of the Holodomor (the Great Famine) of 1932-33 figures prominently in public discourse and scholarship in Ukraine today, its gender dimension remains understudied. This talk is based predominantly on an analysis of personal narratives of female survivors of the Holodomor, which allows exploring peculiarities and controversies of women’s experiences of survival under the genocidal circumstances. It focuses on women’s coping strategies and life-saving practices under conditions of total starvation. It also exposes a spectrum of women’s agency aimed to protect family possessions and food supplies from violent expropriations by authorities. The social characteristics, motivations, and roles of local female perpetrators of the famine will be discussed as well.

Dr. Oksana Kis is a historian and anthropologist, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (in Lviv). She obtained her academic degree “kandydat nauk” (Ph.D. equivalent) from Ivan Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2002. In April 2018, she completed her habilitation (“doctor nauk” degree). Since 2010, Dr. Kis has served as a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History. She is also a co-founder and a vice-president of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. Oksana Kis is an Editor-in-Chief of the academic web-site Ukraina Moderna. Her research interests include women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, and gender transformations in post-socialist countries. Dr. Oksana Kis will be at CERES in October-November 2018.

Description

In light of recent developments in Ukraine toward establishing a unified Ukrainian Orthodox Church, coupled with the ecclesial conflicts between Constantinople and Moscow, this book’s appearance is very timely. In his presentation, Prof. Denysenko will provide an overview of the history of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine from the early twentieth century to the present. He will touch upon the dynamics of church and state in the attempts to restore an authentic Ukrainian religious identity in the contemporary Orthodox churches, and how these dynamics have played out in the current movement to overcome the divisions among the three Orthodox Churches in Ukraine. This book launch is the second in a series of events looking at Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity and the question of autocephaly hosted by the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies; the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine; the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; and the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.

Description

Prof. Brenneis’s talk is based on her recent book, Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (2018). It delves into a little-known subject of the cultural legacy of Spaniards deported to the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen during World War II.
Sara Brenneis is an associate professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts who specializes in Spanish historical, literary and cultural studies. Her research examines representations of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Franco dictatorship and the Spanish transition to democracy. In addition to Spaniards in Mauthausen (U of Toronto Press, 2018), she published Genre Fusion: A New Approach to History, Fiction, and Memory in Contemporary Spain (2014) and is the co-editor of Spain, World War II, and the Holocaust: History and Representation, (forthcoming, the U of Toronto Press).
 

Description

Lost in Transition: What’s Next for the Left in Post-Soviet States
Protests, political activism and the growth of social and political movements have been a defining feature of the Russian political landscape during the 1990s. With the arrival of Vladimir Putin in 2000, political activism declined, only to be brought back to life after the contested parliamentary election of 2011. Since then, the Russian political landscape has become diverse with groups ranging from pro-Western liberals to hard-line nationalists and left-wing Marxists. This presentation offers an overview of the transformation of the non-systemic left-wing political movements in post-Soviet Russia, paying particular attention to the formidable revival of these movements since the late 2000s and the structural impediments to their further participation in the political system. This case study is part of a bigger ongoing book project that provides insights into the factors undermining the development of the left-wing politics and the consolidation of the leftist forces in the post-soviet states.

Elena Maltseva is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada. Elena holds a PhD degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto (2012). Her current research focuses on left-wing politics in post-Soviet states, social security reforms, labour issues and regime stability in post-communist countries.

Description

From whatever subject position we “indigenize”, we are always indigenizing something–something deeply entangled with colonial processes. What has this meant in the case of New France? As early modern spatial or political phenomenon, it was elusive even to contemporaries. As historiographic artifact, it has been naturalized in startlingly different ways. Efforts to recreate the lived experience and vantage points of Indigenous polities have been ongoing for decades now; in recent years, they have been deeply enriched by deliberate, community-based cultural revitalization projects. But the politics of cross-cultural knowledge remain complex, and play out differently in France, the United States, Quebec, and elsewhere in Canada. Efforts to dismantle colonialist understandings of New France are correspondingly fractured. Still, they have been fruitful, and shed important light on the workings of the early modern empires.

Trained as both a historian and an economist, Professor Desbarats is a founding member of the French Atlantic History Group.  Her research and writing concerns mainly the history of the early modern colonial state, particularly its financial aspects.  In both her teaching and writing, she has a deep interest in decolonizing French imperial history, beginning with narratives relating to New France.  She has published historiographic pieces on that topic in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française and the Journal of Early American History.  Her attempts to understand “early modern” indigenous vantage points have led her to think differently about the financing of empires, and the history of economic thought itself.  Canada’s seventeenth-century playing-card currency appears less as a picturesque footnote known only to monetary specialists, and more of a window into technologies of imperial violence and expansion.  Such themes are explored in her SSHRC-financed book- in-progress, “Money and Empire in New France.” In the same spirit, she is also co-writing, with Allan Greer, New France: A Concise History, under contract with Oxford University Press.
In cooperation with the Jesuit Archives in Montreal, and with graduate students Fannie Dionne and Sandra-Lynn Leclaire, she is also engaged in a pilot project to identify, transcribe and digitize early modern iroquoian/French language material written down by Jesuit missionaries