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7:00 PM

The War in Europe

Panel Discussion | A Conversation

  • Goethe-Institut Boston, Boston, MA

  • Language English
  • Price admission free, please register

Panel War in Europe Liudmyla Kurnosikova© private/ Askold Melnyczuk©Hunan/Marcie Shore©Rostyslav Kostenko/ Serhii Plokhii©Kristina Conroy

Panel War in Europe Liudmyla Kurnosikova© private/ Askold Melnyczuk©Hunan/Marcie Shore©Rostyslav Kostenko/ Serhii Plokhii©Kristina Conroy

  On the eve of the third anniversary of the bloodiest war in Europe in eighty years, we'll reflect on how we got here, where we stand now, and what might be required in the aftermath--for the United States, Europe, and of course, Ukraine. Three of the world's leading authorities on Ukraine will assist us in exploring these matters. Serhii Plokhii, Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, will offer an update on the current situation in Ukraine, along with relevant background on the war; Professor of Modern European Intellectual History at Yale University Marci Shore will examine the intellectual framework that enabled the war, together with its impact and implications for Ukrainian, and European, culture. Economist Liudmyla Kurnosikova, currently a McCloy Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, will speak about plans for the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine. The panel will be moderated by writer and editor Askold Melnyczuk, University of Massachusetts Boston.
This panel discussion marks the publication of a special issue of Ireland's leading literary journal, Irish Pages, guest-edited by Askold Melnyczuk, on the topic of The War in Europe.
Copies of Irish Pages will be available for sale.
In collaboration with Irish Pages, the Transnational Literature Series supported by the independent bookstore Brookline Booksmith, AGNI, The Boston University Center for the Study of Europe,  Arrowsmith Press, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US .
 

Serhii Plokhii©Kristina Conroy Serhii Plokhii©Kristina Conroy

Serhii Plokhii interests include the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on Ukraine. He is the author of, among others, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (W.W. Norton, 2023); Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters (W.W. Norton, 2022); The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present (HURI, 2021); Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W. W. Norton, 2021); Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: American Airmen behind the Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance (Oxford University Press, 2019); Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Basic Books, 2018); and The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2015). His books have won numerous awards, including the Ballie Gifford Prize and the Shevchenko National Prize (2018).
 

Marcie Shore©Rostyslav Marcie Shore©Rostyslav

Marci Shore is professor of history at Yale University and a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. She is on leave in 2024-2025 at the Munk School for Global Affairs at University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in March 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book project about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled In Pursuit of Certainty Lost:Central European Encounters on the Way to Truth.
 

Liudmyla Kurnosikova© private Liudmyla Kurnosikova© private

Liudmyla Kurnosikova is currently pursuing a Master in Public Administration as a McCloy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her academic focus centers on the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, with a particular emphasis on fostering investment. Before joining HKS, she worked as a senior manager in management consulting, operating across Europe and Central Asia, with her primary base in Germany. Liudmyla holds an M.Sc. in International Economics and Economic Policy from Goethe University Frankfurt, along with two separate bachelor’s degrees in Economics from the University of Goettingen and Philology from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
 

Askold Melnyczuk©Hunan Askold Melnyczuk©Hunan

Askold Melnyczuk has published four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), was the first commercially published novel in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Others have been cited as an LA Times Best Books of the Year and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, will appear in 2025. A book of essays and selected non-fiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Matters More than Ever will appear from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2026. A co-edited anthology of contemporary Crimean Tatar literature is forthcoming in 2025. He has also edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel-prize winning poet Derek Walcott and is co-editor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. Founding editor of Agni Magazine and Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University and Harvard and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2024 he edited a special issue of Irish Pages, Ireland's leading literary journal, on The War in Europe.