About the Speaker

Rory Finnin is the author of Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity, which presents a timely new cultural history of the Black Sea region and offers us vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons.

Finnin is Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. He launched the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme in 2008. He is also co-organizer of the Disinformation and Media Literacy Special Interest Group at the University of Cambridge. In 2015 he won a Teaching Award for Outstanding Lecturer from the Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU), the representative body for all students at the University.

Finnin has appeared on such media outlets as BBC, CNN, Sky News, and Al Jazeera. His commentary has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post,  Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Times, The New Yorker, and Newsweek, among other periodicals.

His new book, Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (2022), is a winner of the 2023 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies and a winner of the 2023 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Best Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2023 Raphael Lemkin Book Award.

Finnin is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a graduate of Georgetown University (BA) and Columbia University (PhD). In 1995-97 he served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. He lives with his family in Cambridge, England.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

Main sponsor: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS); Co-sponsors: Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, and Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.