Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
Bulgaria
fellow
Andrii Portnov
Home institution
PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe
Country of origin (home institution)
Ukraine
Discipline(s)
Contemporary history
Theme(s)
Regional Studies
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Prof. Andrii Portnov is a Ukrainian historian, essayist, and editor. He is the director of the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe. He specializes in Polish-Russian-Ukrainian history and memory studies. He was a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Humboldt University in Berlin and Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. In 2016–2017 he was a research fellow at the University of Geneva. In 2017 and 2019 he was a short-term Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Portnov taught courses on Ukrainian and East European history and cultures at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Free University Berlin, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Basel, the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lyon, etc. The thematic scope of his research includes the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian triangle of history and memory, genocide and memory studies, Ukrainian and Soviet historiography, Ukrainian emigration in inter-war Europe, the Partitions of Poland and the Ukrainian politics of the Russian Empire, and the history of Dnipro (former Dnipropetrovsk).
Research Project
Ukrainian Studies in the Cold War Era: Dialogue Above the Iron Curtain, the KGB Special Operations, and Soviet Ukrainian Patriotism
The project aims to bring together institutional history of science and intellectual history using the case of Ukrainian historiography on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. I will analyze the various forms of dialogue between Soviet and diaspora Ukrainian historiography in a transregional perspective. Special attention will be paid to such phenomena as Soviet Ukrainian patriotism, the internal diversity of both Soviet and Western Ukrainian historiography, tactics of coexistence and non-conformism with the official ideology, attempts to go beyond national history (in either the Soviet or nationalist version) and to establish Ukrainian-Jewish, Ukrainian-Polish, and Ukrainian-Russian dialogues. My project is based on unpublished and newly declassified archival sources (especially from the State Archive of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine), as well as a close reading of academic texts and memoirs written by American, Canadian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian scholars. This project is also motivated by the search for a new analytical language that could hopefully minimize the dangers and traps of both methodological nationalism and methodological imperialism, and help us to more adequately capture the complexity of social and cultural phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe.
Research Interests:
Ukrainian studies; Soviet and diaspora Ukrainian historiography; intellectual history; Cold War; Iron Curtain; KGB