Individual projects

How long can elites maintain a high social status? How quickly can ordinary people move up the social ladder? Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes (1986) show that the income advantageous or disadvantageous of ancestors has disappeared in three generations. Nevertheless, Gregory Clark and colleagues (Clark, 2014; 2015), using surname records and historical data, find that elites retain a high social status for centuries with a probability close to one. Using Gregory Clark’s innovative approach, my study attempts to answer these and other related questions by analyzing the mobility of Ukrainian lineages during the 19th-21st centuries on the territory of modern Ukraine, Russia, the former USSR and the Russian Empire. Preliminary calculations show that holders of Ukrainian noble surnames were two times overrepresented in the State Duma of the Russian Empire. Were they able to maintain their high social status during two world wars, the October Revolution, and the formation and collapse of the USSR? Did the Communist Party and national independence facilitate the social advancement of individuals having common Ukrainian lineages? The answer to these questions will not only complement existing research but also reassess the history and logic of those turbulent events that we are witnessing today.

The proposed project examines Mykhailo Drahomanov’s political and intellectual role in the formation of modern Ukraine in the 19th century. It analyses Drahomanov’s interpretation of socialism within the broader traditions of Western European utopian socialism (Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen) and Russian revolutionary thought (Herzen, Ogarev, Lavrov, Kropotkin, Plekhanov), tracing the evolution of his ideas in response to shifting political and social conditions. Often referred to as a “second Herzen,” Drahomanov played a key role in adapting socialist thought to Ukraine’s stateless condition, advocating for federalism, cultural autonomy, democratic socialism, and anarchism. The novelty of the project lies in situating Ukrainian modernity within broader European debates on socialism and nationalism, challenging the dominant nation-centred narratives by demonstrating Ukraine’s integration into European intellectual and political discourses. Additionally, the project reconstructs Drahomanov’s intellectual networks by analysing his correspondence with European and Ukrainian thinkers, highlighting his role in shaping the Ukrainian national movement within the wider socialist and federalist traditions of 19th-century Europe.

Based on archival documents, including previously unused ones, this project examines the mass forced emigration from the Ottoman Empire resulting from the Greek Revolution of Independence (1821–1829). The aim is to study the Greek refugees' everyday life and their adaptation to new living conditions in the southern regions of the Russian Empire, specifically in Odesa, Chișinău, and the surrounding areas (modern-day Ukraine and Moldova). The objectives consist of exploring government actions in organizing special commissions to assist refugees, reviewing the activities of these institutions as instruments of Russian policy on the Greek issue, analyzing the successes and failures of refugee accommodation, and depicting the everyday lives of individuals who found themselves in difficult circumstances as refugees, inc. the conditions in their homeland that forced them to flee, family histories, and their financial and human needs in the new context. The focus is on the activities of the special commissions, created to oversee the refugees' stay: the Committee for Assistance to the Constantinople Greeks arriving in Odesa, and the Odesa and Chișinău Greek Auxiliary Commissions. The relevance of this study is underscored by the growing number of refugees due to ongoing military conflict in Europe, underlining the need for a historical retrospective on such social shifts.

The growing attention to the study of everyday history, microhistory, human emotions and personal perception of events is a characteristic feature of modern historical science. The daily life of the First World War in various aspects (refugees, economic difficulties, famine, public sentiment) became the subject of active study in Western European countries, in Poland and in Ukraine. The proposed scientific project is dedicated to one of the spheres of human life in war conditions. The subject of the study is celebration practices in conditions of total war, their peculiarities depending on the region, the state and the particular community. The main/central task is to find out exactly how the First World War changed the festive practices of the warring nations, their social and individual perception, which of these practices faded into the background, and which continued to be celebrated even despite the war situation. Attention will also be paid to regional, ethno-national and other differences in the celebration of holidays in these years. The geographical boundaries of the project will cover Ukrainian, Polish and Bulgarian lands. The basis for the implementation of the study is the involvement of so-called ego-sources (diaries, as well as memoirs, letters, etc.), as those that directly convey the public atmosphere, the emotions of the participants and the circumstances of the celebration of holidays.

What are the effects of the full-scale war on the relation between feelings of belonging to the Ukrainian political nation and to one’s own ethnic community? In this research, I am chiefly interested in identity transformations of ethnic minorities as a result of external shock. An important factor in my qualitative research is the role of the kin-state, and to what extent ethnic minorities’ political identities are shaped by the presence or absence of kin-state politics. Thus, to account for the role of kin-state politics, I want to focus on two border regions of Ukraine, which feature varying degrees of cross-border exchange between neighbouring states, their ethnic kin in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian state: Zakarpattia and Odesa Oblasts. Specifically, the Hungarian minority in Zakarpattia, and the Moldovan/Romanian in Odesa. In addition, two ethnic minority groups without a kin-state will be analysed in my study for comparison - the Roma and the Crimean Tatars. First evidence suggests that the well-established Hungarian and Romanian minorities, which both feature civil society networks and organisations, facilitated cross-border communication and assistance in aid delivery by the kin-state. As the full-scale war enters its fourth year, it is worth investigating these processes to discern whether this engagement has contributed to the long-term consolidation of a civic identity among minorities.

My book project examines contemporary Ukrainian war poetry in the context of the military and political strategy known as hybrid warfare. It argues that poetry on social media has become an instrument of hybrid warfare as well as a form of resistance to it, forging a sense of individual subjectivity and collective agency and organizing heterogeneous communities through targeted and personalized engagement and dissemination. Throughout the book, I develop an innovative account of poetry as a form of perspective-shifting and emotion-shaping technology able to serve contrary political and ideological goals, thus blurring the line between truth and propaganda. The manuscript will be accompanied by an interactive digital platform, further contextualizing the poems in terms of the new social virtual reality within which they are produced, interpreted, transmitted, and disseminated. Integrating the approaches I developed as a literary scholar with the methods, tools, and techniques from the digital humanities, such as topic modeling, text mining, historical mapping, and network analysis, I examine the transformative effect that the digital presentation has on literary form and content; and map, analyze, and interpret the reception of politically charged poems over time, registering the shifts in the identity-focused narratives expressed and formulated through virtual engagement.

As the sole defendant in one of last, high-profile show trials conducted in communist Europe, Ivan-Asen Georgiev is by no means an obscure figure. However, his story has been interpreted for far too long from an intelligence perspective rather than a humanities one. I view Georgiev as a capable intellectual who believed that his collaboration with the West would ultimately benefit both Bulgaria and the world. By pairing wide-ranging archival evidence from Bulgaria with recently declassified documentation from American archives, I plan to recover Georgiev’s unheralded contributions to the de-escalation of the Cold War and establish his important role in the wider history of American understanding of the socialist world.

The project’s overarching aim is to problematize the concept of (Central) Europe in a transregional, global perspective, in relation to (Latin) America and Russia, Asia through the phenomenological prism of individual experiences of travel and life in exile (self in the mirror of other). The research distances from the widely spread in the scholarship geopolitical approach to East-Central Europe founded on region-building ideas and identity politics. The emphasis is put on geopoetics and literary self-identifications of several Central European writers (Czesław Miłosz, Andrzej Bobkowski, Joseph Roth, Alma Karlin) reshaped in relation to changeable places, cultures and plural temporalities. Drawing on interdisciplinary area of sensory studies the project addresses the writers’ changeable “grammars of identity/alterity” nourished by emotional responses to various instances of Eastern and Western otherness. The geopoetic approach traced in egodocuments re-evaluates the region’s dominant geopolitical conceptualizations structured along the horizontal axis which trapped the Slavic nations in an unfavourable position of in-betweenness forcing on them the complex of inferiority in the face of more civilized West and greater imperial East. The geopoetic transregional horizon sheds a new light on East-Central Europe as an array of sensory topographies stretched from North to South and placed in a global framework.

This project analyzes the ubiquitous narratives and experiences about ghosts and treasures in contemporary Paraguay as folk memories of past violence and war. Such haunting spirits and buried riches are said to be results of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), which killed at least half of Paraguay’s prewar population and during which its wealthy citizens buried their valuables to prevent looting by foreign invaders. Today, Paraguay is full of stories of encounters with distressed wartime ghosts and of people digging the land in search of underground treasures. Also, all Paraguayans are familiar with widespread tales of specters who scare the greedy away from those riches and who reveal their location to selected people deemed worthy of receiving them. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 and 2024-2025, this project interprets narratives and experiences about ghosts and treasures in Paraguay as vernacular memories that allow people to a) feel the past in the present through the senses of hearing, sight, and touch, and b) make moral sense of trauma and violence in ways that depart from official nationalistic, militaristic commemorations. Such sensory and moral histories offer messages of loss and recovery, of trauma and hope, to today’s war-torn world.