Andrii Portnov on Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City
Date and time:
Tuesday 27 June, 2023
17:00 - 18:30
Location:
Andrii Portnov’s new book Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City is the first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (known until 2016 as Dnipropetrovsk, and until 1926 as Katerynoslav).
Locating the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context, Portnov untangles the history of Dnipro through the prism of key threads in modern European history: imperial colonisation and industrialisation, war and revolution, the everyday life and mythology of a Soviet closed city, and the transformations of post-Soviet Ukraine. Designed as a critical entangled history of the multicultural space, the book looks for a new analytical language to overcome the traps of both national and imperial history-writing.
Join us to hear Andrii Portnov in conversation with Marci Shore as they discuss the entangled history of one of the most important and interesting cities of modern Ukraine.
Speaker
Andrii Portnov
Andrii Portnov is Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder), Director of the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe and a member of the Ukrainian PEN-Club. He graduated from Dnipro (M.A. in history) and Warsaw (M.A. in Cultural Studies) Universities, and defended his PhD dissertation (2005) at the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute for Ukrainian Studies in Lviv. Since 2012 he conducted research and lectured at the Universities of Basel, Cambridge, Geneva, Potsdam, Free University Berlin, Free University Brussels, Humboldt University of Berlin, SciencesPo Paris, SciencesPo Lyon, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Institute for Advanced Study (WIKO) in Berlin. He is the author and co-editor of ten books and numerous articles on intellectual history, historiography, urban history, genocide and memory studies.
Speaker
Marci Shore
Marci Shore teaches modern European intellectual history. She received her M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1996 and her Ph.D from Stanford University in 2001; she taught at Indiana University before coming to Yale. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, a history of phenomenology in East-Central Europe, tentatively titled “Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth.” She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Presently she is co-curating a Public Seminar/Eurozine forum “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life".
