Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Collegium Carolinum, Prague Branch
and Faculty of Arts, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University Ústí nad Labem
would like to invite you to a lecture:

Dr. Martin Rohde (Halle):

Images of Ukrainian Science
in the 20th and 21st Centuries
 

In the early 20th century, Ukrainian scholars based at Shevchenko Scientific Society in the Habsburg Empire, invented the idea of a Ukrainian “national science”. In my talk, I will discuss this travelling concept in different spaces throughout the 20th century, with glimpses in the 21st century and the recent situation. I will focus on political epistemologies embraced by institutions and scholars, which embraced and shaped this concept.

When introduced in Habsburg Lemberg/L’viv, Ukrainoznavstvo (‘Ukrainian Studies’) was already a travelling concept with its intellectual roots in the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire. In the following decades, the  discipline and its genealogy circulated between different spaces, which I will sketch out: the Ukrainian lands of the Habsburg Empire and its follow-up states; the Ukrainian diaspora in Central and Western Europe, as well as in Northern America (since the late 1940s); the Soviet Union (with an emphasis on the so-called “Ukrainization” of the 1920s, its violent end and the image of Ukrainian science in the post-war Soviet Union);  independent Ukraine, which draw selectively from the previous traditions. Given the current relevance, I will particularly focus on exploitation of scholarly discourses and the mobilization of scholars in times of war.