Dr. Skubii’s research aims at broadening and rethinking our understanding of the Holodomor from a material perspective. She will discuss the importance of material items and commodities in saving children’s lives, both within their families and in orphanages. By focusing on children’s consumer goods, she will examine the mechanisms of distribution and allocation of consumer goods, as well as the spaces and practices of consumption by children in 1932-1933.

Dr. Iryna Skubii is an Associate Professor at Department for UNESCO “Philosophy of Human Communication” and Socio-humanitarian Disciplines at the Petro Vasylenko Kharkiv National Technical University of Agriculture. Her research interests include economic and social history, gender studies, consumption and materiality, and history of childhood in early Soviet Ukraine. She holds a Ph.D. degree from Karazin National University (2013). In 2016, Professor Skubii was a fellow of the German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians and undertook research at Ludvig-Maximillians University in Munich. In 2016-2017, she won research grants from the Shevchenko Scientific Society in America and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. In 2017, Professor Skubii published her monograph “Trade in Kharkiv in the years of NEP (1921-1929): between the economy and everyday life.”