Denys Shatalov graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk National University in Dnipro, Ukraine (BA in History of Ukraine, 2011). There he also received his MA degree (2012) and PhD degree (2016) in History of Ukraine, with a dissertation on the history of the “Cossack Myth”.
Since January 2015, he has been a Research Fellow at the “Tkuma” Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies (2015-2019, 2022 – present), and the Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine Museum (2015-2019), both institutions based in Dnipro. He was a Visiting Fellow of the ‘Prisma Ukraïna–Research Network Eastern Europe’, Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) in 2019, and ‘Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration and Memory’ Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) in 2022/2023.
Denys Shatalov is the author of Uyavlennia pro kozatstvo (Notions about Cossacks. Ukrainian Cossacks in social opinion of the second half of the XVIII – the first half of the XIX c.) (Dominanta Print, Dnipro, 2017). Currently, Dr. Shatalov is preparing for publication his second monograph, Pokozachennia Halycyny (Turning Galicia to Cossacknes), on the problem of the adoption of the Cossack Myth in the historically non-Cossack region of Western Ukraine.
His main research interests are everyday notions about the past, their shaping and functioning in society. In his work he concentrates on issues of WWII and Holocaust memorialization and commemoration, and its representations in the USSR and Ukraine; and the history of the “Cossack Myth” in Ukraine in the 19th and 20th centuries as a crucial part of the modern Ukrainian national identity. Among his other interests are Ukrainian vernacular practices of photography of the Soviet era.