Ukrainian Studies abroad: why it is important for cultural diplomacy

In November last year, during a speech to the Verkhovna Rada, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented a ten-point “Plan for Ukraines internal resilience”. One of the points is called Cultural Sovereignty; and provides for, among other things, systematic promotion of the creation of Ukrainian Studies departments in world universities. The promise to create Ukrainian Studies departments at universities immediately conjures up scenes from popular films, where professors in corduroy jackets teach enchanted humanities students and quote poetry in the original language. The dream that one day the words of Lesia Ukrainka or Mykhailo Semenko will be heard in such films is worthy of closer examination.
Suspilne Kultura tells us what is needed to ensure that there are more Ukrainian Studies departments in world universities? Does Ukraine have the resources and patience to wait for the results of their work? Are there other models for promoting knowledge about Ukraine in foreign academia?

In his speech, Volodymyr Zelenskyy stressed the importance of cultural diplomacy to "actively promote our Ukrainian narratives through cultural and artistic projects abroad." The goal is to replace Russian narratives and content, in the creation of which Russia has invested and continues to invest considerable resources, with Ukrainian ones. "And the most obvious thing is the targeted, systematic creation of our Ukrainian content. The kind of content that can completely replace Russian content. This is an investment in the creation of a Ukrainian cultural product for different social groups, different age groups. First of all, for our children. This is a question of resilience, a question of our security now and in the future. We must outplay Russia in this"; the president believes, and this "content" is not only artistic but also academic, as can be inferred from the fact that the "cultural" point includes a plan to open Ukrainian Studies departments. Ukraine has a separate state institution for cultural diplomacy - the Ukrainian Institute, founded in 2017 and subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The UI sees its mission as spreading knowledge about Ukraine and Ukrainian narratives, strengthening Ukraine's role in international cultural, information and educational platforms, and enhancing Ukraine's representation abroad. This, of course, includes work with world universities, which is handled by the Department of Analytical and Research Work and Academic Programmes.

The head of the department, Olena Kovalenko, is pleased that the topic of opening Ukrainian Studies departments has been raised at the highest level of government: "It is very good that the state is now paying more attention to Ukrainian Studies abroad as a resource for influencing the opinions of others, as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, knowledge diplomacy, as it is called. In particular, Olena Zelenska makes this her key focus - during her trips abroad, she visits universities, participates in signing memoranda of cooperation and opening of departments, and introducing Ukrainian bookshelves. She supports this topic."

Slow changes in the academic field
However, there is a caveat: announcements about the opening of departments do not mean that this will be implemented quickly. The academic sphere is a slow and sometimes inert field, where changes occur very slowly.

"If not much has been done in this area for thirty years, and Ukrainian Studies has been a forgotten part of Slavic Studies or Eastern European Studies, where Russianists dominate, it will not be possible to open departments quickly and beautifully now. We need to understand that the work we are starting now will yield results in five to ten years", Kovalenko explains.

In 2022, the Ukrainian Institute published a study of the state and needs of Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar Ukrainian Studies abroad. It contains a map of Ukrainian  Studies centres, by which UI means both research centres that study Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar topics and individual programmes - in Ukrainian Studies, Ukrainian language and literature, or more generally, regional Ukrainian Studies: post-Soviet countries, Eastern Europe, etc.

Ukrainian Studies. Ukrainian Institute
Thus, the study identified 91 centres of purely Ukrainian Studies, 73 based on regional Ukrainian Studies, and five centres of Crimean Tatar Ukrainian Studies. The authors of the study counted 30 separate departments. Most of the centres are located in Europe, but there are also some in North (31) and South America (2), Australia (4), and a few in Asia (China, Japan, and Korea).

"We tried to understand the main problems these centres face and came to several conclusions"; says Olena Kovalenko. First, almost everyone said that the main problem is underfunding. Secondly, the lack of attention from Ukraine is painful - both in terms of financial support from our state and understanding why we need Ukrainian Studies abroad."

The study also mentions the third main problem identified by respondents involved in Ukrainian Studies abroad - "lack of attention from the target audience."
"More than ten respondents said that students are not interested in Ukrainian Studies and that the number of students enrolled is constantly decreasing. For example, it is known that the reason for the closure of the Centre for Ukrainian Studies at Macquarie University in 2009 was also due to the small number of students (less than twenty)," the study says.

Ukrainian Studies. Ukrainian Institute
However, this does not mean that Ukraine as a state should neglect the opening of the departments, Olena believes. She calls the establishment of departments a sustainable format for spreading knowledge about Ukraine, unlike the short-term academic programmes that many universities have launched, especially after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"In 2022, we really saw a surge in support for Ukrainian scientists, who were actively invited to come for various scholarships and were taken out of regions that were dangerous. This is still going on. But these programmes last for two, three, five years. The question is, what happens after those five years?" she reflects, "We can return to the status quo, where the head of the [Slavic Ukrainian Studies] department will be a Russian, and there will be only a few specialists in Ukrainian Studies, if any. To stop this, we need stable formats, i.e. departments. A department means that you have a person in a position who will work for a decade or more and form a school around him or her, teach bachelors and masters. But a person is expensive, both in American and European universities."

Money and networks to open Ukrainian departments
Fundraising and an honest assessment of the cost of opening a department, or even just one faculty position, is one of the most important points in the conversation about Ukrainian Studies abroad. For example, the University of Berkeley (California) is raising an endowment of $9 million to create a professorship of Ukrainian Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. An endowment is a popular form of funding in the United States, where funds are collected in an account to generate, for example, a professor's salary. In other words, the endowment does not work in the short term, but covers the necessary expenses for an unlimited number of years.

In Canada, representatives of Ukrainian communities have become patrons of Ukrainian Studies. "The Canadian Institute of  Ukrainian Studies is supported by more than 80 donors, mostly from the diaspora, with a market value of more than $40 million," the Ukrainian Institute's study says.

But this scheme will not work everywhere. "In Sweden, for example, universities can only take money from trust funds, not from private benefactors. They are afraid that private funding may influence their decisions," says Yulia Yurchuk, a historian and senior lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm. She believes that relying on opening departments at universities is "expensive and not very possible in the near future."

"Our university received information that the Ukrainian state wants to initiate the creation of Ukrainian Studies departments. But no one understood who would create them, who would finance them, where would we get people?"

Sociologist Susann Worschech from the Viadrina University in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, coordinates the KIU Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt, and sees this networking as an alternative to the creation of departments.

"Ukrainian Studies have not yet become a discipline," says Susann. "It lacks several factors for institutionalisation: journals, professorships, and separate thematic conferences. This is how a discipline is founded. So the landscape of Ukrainian Ukrainian Studies here is rather poor. In Germany, there are several institutions that deal with Ukrainian Studies, but they are often not connected to each other."

According to the sociologist, the isolationism of such centres and departments as separate centres for the study of Ukraine can be a serious drawback: "Departments tend to be closed clubs. There is a danger of losing ties with other disciplines." At the same time, she notes that if Ukrainian Studies departments are to be created, they should be in large universities, but keeping in mind the great competition that exists there - for positions and students.

Therefore, Viadrina chose to create the landscape of Ukrainian Studies through networking, connecting not only people who work exclusively on Ukraine, but also people who work in general disciplines (sociology, political science, etc.) and see interest in Ukraine for their research. Currently, the KIU project has received four years of funding from the DAAD (another research centre for interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies funded by this organisation will open in Regensburg) and aims to become a platform for all those who work on or are interested in Ukraine and to train others.

"We have opened a certification programme in Ukrainian Studies, which is open to anyone from other disciplines. We are recruiting 15 PhD students and launching an interdisciplinary book series on Ukrainian Studies. Our focus is to bring  Ukrainian Studies into different disciplines. I want to see people who will deal with Ukraine not from the position of Ukrainianists, but from other theoretical perspectives, finding something in Ukraine that fits their research topic. I think that the network approach is more open to this than the establishment of departments."

Yulia Yurchuk also speaks about the importance of introducing knowledge about Ukraine into other disciplines and general university courses: "Every year I teach a course on intellectual history - from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. We talk about absolutism, Voltaire, Diderot. In particular, I tell them that although the Russian Empire of those times was seen as a seemingly civilised country that seemed to save those intellectuals (Catherine the Great corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, actually sponsored them and bought their libraries - Ed.), other processes were taking place in the empire itself. Students are not told about this."

Another example is a conversation with students about genocides in a global history course. "When I received this course, there was not a single word about Ukraine or the Soviet Union. There was the Holocaust, Africa, and a little bit about Srebrenica"; says Yurchuk. "I introduced the USSR, the Holodomor, and told students about the Gulag when we talked about state violence against citizens, because students are only taught about Nazi Germany. I think this is basic work: you just start to expand the horizons a little bit in the programmes that are already taught at universities."

Shifting the focus
So far, the field of Eastern European or post-Soviet Ukrainian Studies has been dominated by Russian Studies and an uncritical view of Russia.

"The Russians still have a huge advantage because there are so many of them everywhere"; Yulia Yurchuk comments, "So if universities open up professorships at the Slavic or East European Studies departments, there will always be a flood of applications from Russians who have come here and are working here for a long time, so they can apply for a professorship, unlike me, for example. Even in the current situation - Russia's war against Ukraine - Russians will have positions, and we will not."

"In the field of East European Studies, there is indeed a strong focus on Russia, and it is an ambivalent topic", says Susann Worschech. "We have to do Russian Studies because it is a security issue. We shouldn't underestimate Russia, but at the same time, we should be critical of the fact that Russian  Studies often go hand in hand with Russian propaganda. Therefore, we should not lobby for the downgrading of Russian Studies, but for the establishment of Baltic Studies, Ukrainian, Caucasian, Central Asian, and so on, without putting them in one basket and calling them "Russia and others", as it used to be. "The key developments of researchers in this field can be seen at the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference, which is held annually in the United States, and is regularly attended by Ukrainian scholars. Over the past three years, the focus has shifted to Ukraine and topics related to Russia's full-scale invasion. Changes come from specific people. Why did so much change in ASEEES? Because Vitaly Chernetsky (a literary scholar and translator, Slavicist, teaches at the University of Kansas - Ed.) became president", Yulia Yurchuk comments. "That's why the theme of the conference in 2023 was Decolonisation; and in 2024 it was Liberation".
In addition to ASEEES, researchers have founded a new association called RUTA, which focuses on Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, the Caucasus, and Central and North Asia. In 2024, Zakarpattia hosted the first conference of the new association, which is to be held in Ukraine annually in early summer. According to the association's mission statement on its website, the founding of RUTA was a reaction to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The aim is to strengthen discussions about the region, as well as to promote "critical Ukrainian Studies of imperial and colonial legacies" in the region.

What's next: when will the results from Ukrainian Studies be available?
On 14 January, it became known that a Memorandum of Cooperation had been signed within the framework of the Global Coalition of Ukrainian  Studies initiative, which is intended to promote Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar Studies. The creation of such a coalition was announced by First Lady Olena Zelenska back in September 2024, and the idea was born on the basis of the Presidential Foundation for Science and Education, the Ukrainian Institute, and the Crimean Platform. Work is now set to begin on creating a coordination office that will communicate with universities in Ukraine and abroad. But, as with other memoranda on Ukrainian Studies, we should not assume that the signing of this document will have a magical
effect - there is still a lot of work to be done, and the results will be visible not in two or three years, but in ten or fifteen.

"After 2022, funding for projects about Ukraine has increased, and these projects will end in four to five years. This means that the books that will be published as a result of this research will be published in another five years. It is still too early to talk about absolute qualitative changes. But I think they are there. We need to continue to support these projects, to continue the research, and to continue publishing these books"; says Yulia Yurchuk.

The success of the KIU project will also be measured in five to six years. "I would be happy if during this time we became the centre of expertise on Ukraine in Germany. I would like every journalist or politician who needs to learn something about Ukraine to come to us for expertise, and it should be of high quality", says Susann Worschech. Currently, knowledge about Ukraine in Germany is rather superficial, and the topic of Ukraine is being instrumentalised by politicians - especially before the elections due at the end of February.

"We should do as much as possible to support Ukrainian Studies and related projects, to invest in longer-term things", says Olena Kovalenko, and as a state, we should carefully determine where we want to direct our limited resources.

Text in Ukrainian

Translation: Severyna Yakubych