Orysia Kulick is a historian and author, who has published widely in areas of Soviet history, cultural resistance, and material cultures of authoritarianism, including an exhibition catalogue, War and Revolution: 100 Years of Cultural Opposition in Ukraine. 

She holds a PhD in History from Stanford University and has previously taught at the University of Manitoba, as an assistant professor in the departments of Political Science and German and Slavic Studies. 

She left the academy in 2025 to focus on  writing for broader audiences, continuing to work on her first book How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and the Politics of Empire. Orysia has made a number of research trips to Ukraine, most recently in spring 2025 as Scholar in Residence at INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, in Lviv.

During her residency at the Center for Urban History Orysia Kulick will continue to work on her book. This work is rooted deeply in history, and draws on a historian's tools and sensibilities, but the outcome is no longer steered by the demands of academia. It is rather a reaction to the field’s response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which made acutely visible to the author how tattered our collective intellectual canvas really was (and is). Rather than trying to patch this irreparably damaged canvas, the essays in this book aim hold space for Ukrainian stories on their terms.