Sofia Dyak and Mayhill Fowler at IAS CEU: Working on A Concise History of Ukraine

From October 1, 2026, through the end of February 2027, the director of the Center, Dr. Sofia Dyak, and historian Prof. Mayhill Fowler (Stetson University) will be Senior Core Fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study, CEU. Together they will work on A Concise History of Ukraine for Cambridge University Press. 

This project is an attempt to offer a more inclusive account of Ukraine's history, one that places it within the wider European context while also inviting a rethinking of that context. In this project, the authors revisit the interpretive frameworks established at the turn of the 20th century, when history served to argue for Ukrainians' right to be a nation and to have a state of their own. Today Ukraine is an internationally recognized state resisting the largest act of aggression on the European continent since the Second World War. So rather than history-writing as a practice of legitimation, the project offers a history that explains Ukraine's complex and rich reality and helps readers better understand the present.

To this end, the book works with the concept of "place," which makes it possible to see a set of connections, layers, and meanings that are hard to fit into a single national narrative. The authors develop this approach in several ways: they follow the lives of people and communities through time and space, show the various centers and peripheries and the links between them, and interweave different, sometimes conflicting, historiographical traditions. In this way, the book offers not only the history of one people on the path to statehood, but also the intertwined experiences of many states and state projects, peoples and communities, ideas and objects that met on these lands.

We wish both authors productive writing and look forward to the book!

Credits

Cover Image: CEU building in Budapest / Sofia Dyak