Chair of Ukrainian Studies

The Summer School is interdisciplinary and follows a workshop format. Each participant will present a pre-circulated paper and receive comments from a group of international faculty, as well as from other participants. Participants are expected to contribute actively to discussions and to participate in the extracurricular program. Throughout the week we will include roundtables, field visits, local interviews and excursions within the region. These off-site activities will contribute to our seminar discussions. 

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The International Social Science Summer School in Ukraine takes place in a different city of Ukraine every year. Previous schools have been held in Uman (2009), Dnipropetrovsk (2010), Ostroh (2011), Zhytomyr (2012), Mykolaiv (2013) and Lviv (2014).

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Chernivtsi is a quintessential border city. Nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains on the Prut River, Chernivtsi is the gateway to the Bukovina region, an area contested, conquered, and lost by multiple empires and nations. Today the region is split between Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The Romanian and Moldovan borders are only kilometers away from Chernivtsi.  Chernivtsi, Cernauti, Czernowitz, Tschernovits, Chernovtsy -- the city’s name echoes its multilingual and multiethnic heritage. The city was known as a cosmopolitan center, where the local population spoke at least six languages and enjoyed a rich and diverse cultural life. Austrians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Germans and Jews lived in this city, dubbed “Little Vienna.” It was also, however, known as “Jerusalem upon the Prut,” and at a conference in 1908 Jewish writers declared themselves for Yiddish as a literary language. Czernowitz native Paul Antschel, better known as Paul Celan, was a Jewish poet who chose to write in German, and the city now hosts a yearly international poetry festival in his name. Control of the city shifted constantly. During the First and Second World Wars its German, Jewish, Romanian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian inhabitants saw the city change hands several times, often at dramatic human cost.  Claimed by the USSR in 1940, Chernivtsi fell to Nazi forces in 1940 and experienced Romanian occupation until 1944, when it became part of Soviet Ukraine until the USSR’s collapse in 1991. Today, it is in independent Ukraine, but traces of its multi-ethnic past as a city on the border of national and imperial projects remain. Its beautiful architecture preserves much of the heritage of previous generations, and it features one of the region’s largest Jewish cemeteries. Our summer school will take place in the Chernivtsi National University, whose main building is an architectural gem recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage List.