July 28, 2022
UofT pathways for Students Impacted by the War in Ukraine.
5 May 2022
The Petro Jacyk Non-Resident Scholars Program will bring together Ukrainian scholars, public officials, advanced PhD students, and public intellectuals in Ukraine to participate in regular virtual seminars moderated by a member of the University of Toronto faculty on a common theme related to the war and the rebuilding of Ukraine. The goal of the seminar will be for scholars, intellectuals, advanced PhD students, and/or practitioners to complete and present on a scholarly/artistic/or public policy related project. Successful applicants will receive an honorarium of $3,000 CAD for their participation in the seminar as well as virtual access to the University of Toronto Libraries.
Application process: Please send a CV and one-page cover letter outlining the proposed project to jacyk.program@utoronto.ca. Please indicate in your cover letter your current location (do not specify the city if you prefer not to do so). Deadline: June 30
24 March 2022
Dr. Oleksandr Zaitsev, Professor at the Department of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv and short-term researcher with the Petro Jacyk Program, was interviewed by Croatian media outlet Heretica. You can read the full interview here.
3 March 2022
CERES Coordinating Committee Member Professor Tanya Richardson prepared a list of resources on Ukraine for her students and the broader public. We are pleased to shared these resources with you here.
25 February 2022
CERES Statement on Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine violates international law, the principles of national self-determination that have governed global politics for a century, and any sense of human decency. Our support and sympathy go out to Ukrainians in the homeland, to our faculty, staff, and students of Ukrainian nationality and descent, and to Russian nationals who oppose this grotesque action and the dictator who launched it.
CERES and the Petro Jack Program for the Study of Ukraine urge democratic states to provide immediate military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, to prepare for the arrival of Ukrainian refugees, and to recognize an eventual government-in-exile as the only legitimate representative of the Ukrainian people.
CERES was founded in 1963 in part to aid Central European dissident movements resisting Soviet oppression, and today we provide scholarly support for Ukrainian democrats around the world. Russian tanks and helicopters will not extinguish the flame of Ukrainian nationalism; on the contrary, they are its oil. To paraphrase Yeats, we know their dream, enough to know they will dream and die. Now and in time to be, wherever blue and yellow are worn, are changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.
Randall Hansen, CERES Director
To help Ukraine through donations, please see the list of organizations that accept them here
13 October 2020
On behalf of the Petro Jacyk Coordinating Committee, we write to express our sadness at the passing of Oleh Havrylyshyn. Oleh was a member of the Coordinating Committee and an extremely active participant in the life of the Program. He enlightened all of us with his with his wisdom and years of experience promoting economic reform in Ukraine — as representative of the International Monetary Fund and Deputy Minister of Finance in Ukraine. We will miss him greatly. For the New Pathway article on Dr. Oleh Havlylyshyn, please click here.
24 September 2019
On September 20, 2019, CERES had the honour of hosting Alisa Sopova for a lecture entitled “War in the Backyard: What Everyday Life in Eastern Ukraine Looks Like.” Ms. Sopova is a journalist from Donetsk and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at Harvard University in the Regional Studies program that focuses on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. As a native of Donetsk, Ms. Sopova was in a unique position to cover the outbreak of violence in the region and the ensuing war from a nuanced and knowledgeable perspective. She has continued her work more in depth in her current studies, focusing on everyday coping strategies employed by residents in the frontline communities.
In her lecture at CERES, Ms. Sopova aimed to clarify the realities of life on and around the frontlines of the conflict and describe the nuances of the situation that for various reasons are often missing in the news media. She explained that the images we see most often tend to focus on the most horrifying images of destruction, leading to a one-dimensional view of the conflict, but that the situation on the ground is more varied, and the signs of conflict further from the frontlines are often more subtle. While towns directly on the frontlines and areas that were hit by heavy shelling have suffered from physical destruction, emigration, difficulty accessing basic supplies and services, and crumbling infrastructure, the signs of the conflict in other areas are often less overt. There are areas that look much like they did before the outbreak of war, and the evidence of the conflict is found in people’s horrific memories and stories instead. Everybody has been deeply affected by the conflict, and it has left significant emotional and psychological scars. It has also created tensions between people in heavily hit areas and those in areas that have suffered relatively little damage, and it has led to the development of an active black market and smuggling industry. What unites the people living in the war zone, however, is a commitment to maintaining the normality of life to the greatest degree possible, which allows people to feel like they have not been affected or defeated at all.
By Daniela Bouvier-Valenta
CERES MA Student
17 September 2019
Professor Robert Paul Magocsi’s revised and expanded third edition of the Historical Atlas of Central Europe will be presented at St. Vladimir’s Institute on Monday, September 30 at 7 pm. More information on the event can be found here.
30 May 2019
The Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine is pleased to announce that the 2019-2020 Petro Jacyk Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Ukrainian Politics, Culture, and Society has been awarded to Dmitry Halavach, a historian of the Soviet Union, Russian Empire, and East-Central Europe. His research interests include nationalism, imperial governance, and the impact of war on society. He received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019. His dissertation Reshaping Nations: Population Politics and Sovietization in the Polish-Soviet Borderlands, 1944-1948 is a transnational history of the experience of a European borderland with the Soviet communism, nationalism, and Nazi occupation. As a Petro Jacyk postdoctoral fellow, he will be working on turning his dissertation into a monograph and teaching a course on the history of modern Ukraine. Before coming to Princeton Dmitry received MSc in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, MA in Political Science from the Central European University in Budapest, and an undergraduate degree from the Belarusian State University in Minsk.
30 May 2019
The Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine will be pleased to welcome the 2019-2020 Visiting Scholars to the Munk School:
Dr. Mykola Riabchuk, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Nationalities’ Studies, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw and Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
Dr. Svitlana Nyzhnikova is an Associate Professor at Department for History of Ukraine at the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. She holds a Ph.D. degree from Karazin National University (2017). Her research interests include history of education, holocaust studies, women’s history and gender studies in the Russian empire and Soviet Union.
Ms. Magdalena Gibiec, a PhD student of History at the University of Wroclaw (Poland) and an intern at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University (Ukraine). Ms. Gibiec is currently working on the project “Behind the Scenes of Functioning of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists on Emigration in the Light of Correspondence (1929-1938).”