Resilience: Rethinking Ukrainian (Women’s) History

This event is the keynote lecture for the International Graduate Student Symposium – Ukrainian Studies “New Perspectives in Ukrainian Studies: Interdisciplinary Insights”

Oksana Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist, a Cornerstones Visiting Chair in History at the University of Richmond and a senior research fellow and a head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (in Lviv). She is a president of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History. She explored Ukrainian women’s experiences of survival and resistance under extreme historical circumstances, including in times of the Holodomor (Great Famine 1932-33), in the Ukrainian nationalist anti soviet underground in the mid 20th century and in the Stalin’s Gulag, as well as gender transformations in post-socialist countries. Her recent book Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag was published within the Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies in 2021. She was a recipient of several academic awards, research grants and scholarship, including Fulbright research fellowship at Rutgers University (2003-04) and Columbia University (2011-12) and the Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Professorship at the University of Alberta (2013-14).

The International Graduate Symposium is co-sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Holodomor Education and Research Consortium at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta; John Yaremko Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto; Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the University of Toronto; the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World; the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto.