Outside the Canon: Unconventional Biographies, Ideas, and Trajectories of the 20th Century
Marci Shore, Ulyana Kyrchiv
16.7.2026, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
Culture tends to establish canons: lists of must-read books, must-see movies, and people you should know. However, these canons are never exhaustive, and are often unfair or simply overlook important figures. As a result, entire bodies of work and brilliant ideas remain overshadowed by more prominent figures in the artistic and intellectual pantheons.
How can we be more attentive to people who aren't part of established canons? How can we write about them without undermining their role, and without paternalism or hierarchies? What stories do their biographies tell? What do the gaps in our knowledge say about us?
We’ll discuss these less obvious intellectual histories and biographies during an event with Marci Shore and Ulyana Kyrchiv.
Marci Shore is currently working on a book about philosophers and intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Among the book's protagonists is Irena Kronska. Kronska studied phenomenology in Lviv, translated philosophical literature, and participated in the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. She survived the Holocaust and, together with her husband Tadeusz, ended up in Paris in 1946.
Ulyana Kyrchiv is researching the biography of Petro Ravych, a French-language writer born in Lviv in 1918. He survived the Holocaust and also ended up in Paris after the war. The author of the French-language novels Blood of the Sky and Notes of a Counterrevolutionary, or From a Hangover, he experimented with language, writing about the experience of survival during World War II in a way unlike anyone else.
Conversation participants
Marci Shore
Historian and author of the book on the Revolution of Dignity, “Ukrainian Night: A Close-Up History of the Revolution.” Professor at Yale University. Her research focuses on the history of ideas in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the history of the literary and political interaction between Marxism and phenomenology.
Ulyana Kyrchiv
Historian, junior research fellow at the Mykola Haievoi Center for Contemporary History at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), and academic manager of the “Ukrainian History: A Global Initiative” project. Her research interests include intellectual history, philosophy, Holocaust literature, and the processes of identity formation and transformation.
Daria Badior
Event moderator. Editor-in-chief of re/visions, critic, and film curator from Kyiv. Since 2021, she has curated a series of publications on the commemoration of the events of 1941 and the reconstruction of Ukraine during and after the current war, and has written articles for Der Tagesspiegel, The Independent, Hyperallergic, Osteuropa, Dwutygodnik, and other international publications.
The event is co-organized by the Center for Urban History and the online journal re/visions in partnership with the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).
Credits
Cover Image: Valentyna and Nina reading, 1960s, Kyiv / photo by Oleksii Shepelyuk / collection of Kateryna Volochnyuk / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History