Kateryna Ruban is a historian who received her Ph.D. from New York University in September 2022. In 2022-2023, she was a fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. Earlier, Kateryna earned master’s degrees at Central European University in Hungary and at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. She was a part of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv.

Kateryna has been working on turning her dissertation into a book, provisionally entitled Female Emancipation in Doctors’ Hands: OBGYN Nina Holopatiuk and the History of Abortion in Ukraine. In her book, Kateryna explores the role of abortion in women’s lives in the twentieth century and argues that for doctors this medical procedure was a part of female emancipation, even when abortion was illegal. Her findings are based on a microhistory of a provincial hospital in the town of Irshava in Transcarpathia (Western Ukraine) and a memoir of a Soviet Ukrainian obstetrician-gynecologist who worked there. Kateryna also continues her research about Ukrainian artists, scholars, and writers refusing to participate in events alongside Russians since the full-scale invasion as part of a broader demand for decolonization addressed to Western academic and cultural institutions.

Research interests:

• history of Ukraine and the Soviet Union
• history of medicine and public health
• Gender, reproduction, and abortion
• Ukrainian contemporary art and cinema.