Stipends to Attend the Holodomor Conference

RHN 58/2013 | Opportunity

Organiser: Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta
27-28 September 2013, Toronto, Ontario

Deadline: 15 July 2013

 

Stipends for Early Career Scholars and Graduate Students to Attend 
Contextualizing the Holodomor. A Conference on the 80th Anniversary

The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta) announces the availability of stipends to support young scholars to attend the conference Contextualizing the Holodomor: A Conference on the Eightieth Anniversary, to be held in Toronto September 27-28, 2013. The stipends will allow scholars to deepen their knowledge of the Holodomor by learning from and engaging with leading scholars in the field. Presenting are Anne Applebaum, Andrea Graziosi, Nicolas Werth, Norman Naimark, Olga Andriewsky, Stanislav Kulchytsky and Roman Serbyn. Discussants include David Marples, Mark von Hagen, Douglas Irvin, Liudmyla Hrynevych, Serhii Plokhii and Frank Sysyn.

Each recipient will receive a $500 stipend to defray the cost of attending the conference.

Eligibility: Applicant must be a graduate student or have defended a Ph. D. within the past three years. Applicant must commit to attending the conference in its entirety.

Application Procedure:

  1. Submit a letter (500-750 words), indicating how you meet the criteria and answering the questions: What do you hope to gain through attending? How would attendance support your research interests, teaching and/or career plans? How might you be involved in Holodomor studies in the short and long term?
  2. Submit current curriculum vitae/resume.
  3. Submit a letter of support from a professor or colleague.

Please submit application by July 15, 2013, via email to hrec@ualberta.ca with subject line, Conference Stipend. Applicants will receive notification of award status by July 30, 2013.

Contextualizing the Holodomor - Conference Concept

It was only in the 1980s that academics began to study the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933. This interest was spurred in part by the appearance of Robert Conquest's ground-breaking study Harvest of Sorrow, which focused attention on the event that came to be called the Holodomor. In reviewing the book, R. W. Davies said that the Famine until then had been treated as a secondary event in accounts of Soviet history, although it deserved a central place.

Geoffrey Hosking stated that “Almost unbelievably, Conquest’s book the first historical study of what must count as one of the greatest man-made horrors in a century particularly full of them.” The discussion around Conquest’s book amounted to a sea change in academia.

The Famine literature is now considerable. The Soviet denial of the Famine ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the opening of archives. Issues that once raised controversy such as whether the Ukrainian borders were closed have been resolved by documentary evidence. The amount of survivor testimony has expanded many times over. Careful demographic studies have replaced the former guesstimates regarding the number of victims. Yet many issues remain hotly debated such as the relation of the Holodomor to the general Soviet famine, intentionality, and the question of genocide.

The research and the discussions on the Holodomor have influenced the work and thinking of more than one generation of scholars. With this in mind, on the eightieth anniversary of the Holodomor, the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium is organizing a conference to examine what the last thirty years of scholarly work on the Ukrainian Famine has added to our understanding of the broader topics of Ukrainian history, Soviet history, the history of the Communist party and Marxism, genocide studies, famine studies, and peasant and agrarian history. This event will bring together leading specialists to discuss what that research and academic discourse have meant for their understanding of various fields of knowledge. Each subject will be presented by a specialist, followed by a discussant.

For more information, contact: Marta Baziuk, Executive Director, Holodomor Research and Education Consortium

Preliminary Program (September 27-28, 2013)

Source: H-Net