Lecture format: on site
Room: 2R-EG-07 (lecture hall of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2, Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.
The Transformative Seminar will entail a book presentation of Mischa Gabowitsch/Mykola Homanyuk, "Monument and Territory", CEU Press, 2025 and a panel discussion featuring Mariia Shynkarenko (IWM Vienna) and Petra Hudek (Slovak Academy of Sciences).
From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. This landscape consists of tens of thousands of monuments, mostly in small towns and villages, commemorating the Second World War and other conflicts, including Ukraine’s resistance against Russia since 2014. The Russians have destroyed some of these memorials, renovated others, and built new monuments amid continued fighting. They also used war memorials in countless propaganda photos and videos aimed for a domestic audience and largely escaping Western attention.
More information on the book and download link for Open Access publication at the publisher's website.
Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the EHESS in Paris, and previously held positions in Princeton, Potsdam, and Vienna. He is the author or editor of numerous books in various languages, including Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016) and Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017).
Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer, and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University, Ukraine. He defended his PhD thesis in sociology at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theater Lab.
Mariia Shynkarenko is the Research Director in IWM's Ukraine in European Dialogue program. She is a political scientist, who specializes on questions of resistance, nationalism, and identity. Specifically, her research focuses on identity and resistance of the Crimean Tatars both historically and contemporary. She is interested in instrumentalization of identities, indigeneity, people’s power, and resistance in contexts of occupation and authoritarian regimes. As such, she relies extensively on qualitative methodology, particularly ethnography, discourse and historical analysis. Mariia received her PhD from the New School for Social Research in 2023. Her work has been supported at various stages by The New School for Social Research, International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, New York University, University of Toronto, and Alberta University.
Petra Hudek is a researcher at the Institute of History, Slovak Academy of Sciences. She currently leads the project “Visual Representation of the Second World War in Museums, Memorials, and Commemorations in Central Europe” in collaboration with Thomas Chopard. As a postdoctoral fellow in Prague, she conducted the project “Iconoclasm in Czechoslovak Public Space after 1989: The Heritage of Socialism in Historical Perspective”. Her monograph on Soviet war memorials in Czechoslovak public spaces after 1989 is set to be published in 2025. She also co-leads the Post-Socialist and Comparative Memory Studies (PoSoCoMeS) working group at the Memory Studies Association.
