About the speaker

Yekelchyk had earned his BA and MA and was conducting research on the construction of national identities in late imperial Russia in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Ukraine was plunged into bankruptcy. His is currently a Professor at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. From 1995 to 2000 Yekelchyk attended the University of Alberta, where he earned his PhD. He spent the next year on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he taught Russian history and pursued research on the construction of cultural and historical memory in Ukraine during the Stalinist era.  Yekelchyk studies nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, drawing from a wide variety of sources including novels, opera, and paintings to illuminate how the past was represented and how those representations were received by people. He recently completed a book manuscript on historical memory under Stalin examining how Stalinist authorities manipulated representations of the past.