The talk will focus on the activities of a privately funded institute of historical scholarship in Lviv. Dr. Sofia Dyak, director of the Center, will discuss the two primary areas of the Center’s work – research and public outreach projects – to explain both how such an institution developed in Ukraine, and the challenges facing it in the future. Dr. Dyak will also address the larger question of the meanings of “public history”: how to prevent history from being abused for political ends in contemporary Ukraine; how to offer fresh intellectual impulses and promote scholarly exchanges; how to offer young Ukrainian researchers opportunities to do advanced, internationally recognized work in their own country and thus address the issue of the “brain drain” emigration of qualified scholars; how to go beyond academia and participate in contemporary society in productive cooperation with public and cultural institutions. Special attention will be paid to the use of technology in realizing “public history” and the digital history projects realized at the Center.

Dr. Dyak holds a PhD in Sociology from the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), an MA in History from the Central European University (Budapest), and a BA in History from Lviv University. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, and a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Her current book project, (Re)imagined Cityscapes: Lviv and Wroclaw after 1944/45, focuses on rebuilding, heritage, and urban space in the postwar socialist space. Her talk will focus on the work of the Center for Urban History, both as a research institution, and as a vehicle for shaping public discourse on history and memory in a region where such debates are greatly politicized. She will also cover the challenges of negotiating between public history and scholarly research, and academia East and West.