New Books in Ukrainian Studies

New Books in Ukrainian Studies

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New Books in Ukrainian Studies episodes

  • The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy with Nataliya Kibita (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum: Despite 300 years of contact with Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine's post-independence period has been characterised by pluralism. To explain why and how Ukraine's and Russia's paths diverged, this monograph investigates the century-long and Soviet origins of regionalism in Ukraine, which the author argues are at the foundation of the modern Ukrainian institutional system. Drawing on unused archival material, the book re-examines the relationship between Moscow, Kyiv, and the Ukrainian regions in the period from spring 1917 to summer 1994 to demonstrate how interlinked political and economic incentives and constraints determined the opportunities and institutional interests of both the Ukrainian leadership and those of the Ukrainian regions, and how this institutional framework affected in turn the dynamic of the relationship between the central leadership in Moscow, the Ukrainian leadership, and the regions. The result - weak central authority and pronounced regionalism - was Ukraine's Soviet legacy, and the established power of regional clans made (post-Soviet) Ukrainian politics resistant to Russian-style authoritarianism, even when the Soviet centralised party-state system collapsed.

    Nataliya Kibita is a visiting academic at the University of Oxford in Russian and East European Studies. She is the author of Soviet Economic Management under Khrushchev: The Sovnarkhoz Reform (Routledge, 2013) and The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024).

    Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023).


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    40 min
  • Tamara Hundorova, "Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)

    Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma (Academic Studies Press, 2026) explores transitional post-Soviet cultural consciousness in Ukraine at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The main themes in the book are postcolonial traumas in relation to past empires and old historiographical narratives; post-totalitarian consciousness, which is characterized by sociocultural ruptures, postcolonial resentment, and intergenerational crises; and post-memory as a means of overcoming historical and familial traumas. Against the backdrop of the Chornobyl catastrophe, the book examines the meeting of different generations and views the clown Verka Serduchka as a mediator between the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet world. The book focuses on three significant Ukrainian novels written between the two Maidans: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko (2009), Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan (2010), and Notes of a Ukrainian Madman by Lina Kostenko (2010).


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    47 min
  • On Who Blew Up Nord Stream: A Conversation with Author Bojan Pancevski

    The September, 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines transporting Russian gas to Germany was perhaps the greatest single act of sabotage in modern history. In The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World (Henry Holt, 2026), Bojan Pancevski makes a compelling case that the culprit was an intrepid team of Ukrainian intelligence agents, military personnel and civilian divers. In our conversation, he explains how he came to this conclusion. And we touch on the wider issue of what Pancevski calls the “Cossack spirit,” at the heart of the determination of courageous and resourceful Ukrainians to resist, by all means available, Moscow’s efforts to subdue Ukraine. Pancevski is the chief European political correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and has considerable experience covering Ukraine.


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    1 hr
  • Victoria Donovan, "Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East" (Daunt Books, 2025)

    Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books Publishing, 2025) is

    a unique reflection on the much-mythologised Donetsk and Luhansk
    regions of the Ukrainian east, the old and recent history of the region
    as seen by an esteemed academic multi-disciplinary scholar Victoria
    Donovan in her numerous travels to the region prior to the full-scale
    invasion. Seen through a deeply empathetic lens of conversations with
    local curators, historians, museum workers, and artists, the region is
    shown in its complexity, with the uniqueness of its landscapes,
    endangered biodiversity, entangled colonialisms of its past and a
    threatened future.

    Since start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in

    2014, its eastern region—Donbas—has been synonymous with conflict. With
    the escalation of that war in 2022, its, cities such as Bakhmut and
    Lysychansk have become familiar to us through the images and reports of
    brutal devastation. Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural
    history of this area, and paints a radically different picture.

    Travelling

    from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of
    Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the
    physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought
    to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives are
    embedded there now—curators, artists, railway workers, young people who
    have grown up amidst instability and destruction—Donovan amplifies local
    voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.

    Victoria

    Donovan is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and
    Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Southeast, Central
    and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews.

    Viktoriia

    Grivina is an independent anthropologist and writer, author of Kharkiv,
    a War City (Ibidem, 2025), and Kharkiv is a Dream: Public Art and
    Activism, 2013–2023 (Ibidem, 2025).


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    1 hr 2 min
  • Galina Bogatova, "Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)

    Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms

    (Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden
    imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors,
    revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify
    control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist
    empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia
    portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,”
    or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating,
    and manipulating them in the name of unity. 

    Blending

    psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this
    groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression,
    legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A
    thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it
    offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its
    former empire.

    This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

    focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
    negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
    analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
    Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 


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    38 min
  • Dmytro Soloviov, "Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine" (Fuel, 2025)

    Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function,

    avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these
    qualities, they remain largely unrecognized.
    This is a result of several factors, including the stigma of belonging
    to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of
    destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. Photographer
    Dmytro Soloviov has crossed Ukraine documenting them to form the most
    comprehensive publication available on the subject. 

    With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cultural and political context.

    Dmytro Soloviov is a photographer, tour guide, and activist, and the creator of the popular Ukrainian Modernism Instagram page. He frequently leads tours of modernist architecture in different cities in Ukraine.

    Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023).


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    53 min
  • Jonathan Daly, "The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the

    author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I
    will forgive you.” Love him or hate him, Richard Pipes (1923–2018), left
    an indelible mark on Russian and Soviet history in his long and
    remarkable life.
    This conversation delves into Pipes’ personal and intellectual
    biography, scholarly contributions, the role he played in shaping late
    Cold War policy and a generation of American historians of the Imperial
    and Soviet Russia. Have a listen to get a better sense of this humanist
    historian—described as both polemical and preeminently polite—who cast
    such a long shadow on academia in and beyond the Cold War.

    Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history.


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    1 hr 12 min
  • Cristina Florea, "Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton UP, 2025), Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.
    Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.
    A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.


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    1 hr 32 min
  • Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports

    readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its
    rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other. 

    Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.

    Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics.


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    50 min
  • The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of Sholem Aleichem

    Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. Jonathan Brent, Executive Director at YIVO, Jeremy Dauber, author of the recently published book, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, and Adam Kirsch joined each other on stage for a lively discussion about the fascinating life and work of the "Jewish Mark Twain.”

    This discussion originally took place on October 17, 2013.


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    1 hr 4 min

About New Books in Ukrainian Studies

From the publisher's feed

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.