INTERVIEW: Prof. Nancy Kollmann on Ukrainian studies at Stanford U. (03/14/04)

INTERVIEW: Prof. Nancy Kollmann on Ukrainian studies at Stanford U.

Last year, The Ukrainian Weekly reported that Stanford University had inaugurated a drive to expand teaching and research in the field of Ukrainian studies. The renowned university, which has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students in East European and Russian studies since the 1920s and has a strong commitment to international studies, boasts significant resources in Ukrainian studies.

In February through June 2003, Stanford presented a series of distinguished lecturers to kick off its program-building effort for Ukrainian studies. Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREES), the "Ukraine: Emerging Nation" series featured political scientists, historians and public figures speaking on various aspects of Ukraine's current development. The response to the series was good, and attendance was high and included a broad mix of members of the community, faculty and students.

This year Stanford University is embarking on a serious fund-raising effort to support the expansion of Ukrainian studies. Roma Hadzewycz of The Weekly interviewed Nancy Shields Kollmann, a professor in the department of history at Stanford University and a fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, about new developments at the university regarding Ukrainian studies.

Prof. Kollmann received her Ph. D. in 1980 from Harvard University, where she specialized in early modern East European and Russian history and had the opportunity to work with scholars at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute such as Omeljan Pritsak, Ihor Sevcenko, Edward Keenan, Richard Pipes and Wiktor Weintraub.

She has been the recipient of numerous national grants, including research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for Humanities, American Philosophical Society and the Fulbright Scholars Program. Her research and publications focus on the political and social history of Muscovite Russia, including her most recent book, "By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia" (1999).

At Stanford Prof. Kollmann regularly teaches a survey course on early modern Eastern Europe, in which Ukrainian history plays a central role. She also trains graduate students in Ukrainian and East European history.

For the last three periodic reviews of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, in 1993, 1998 and 2002, she has been a member of the Committee to Oversee HURI, chairing the committee for the last two reviews.

Q: What has taken place at Stanford in regard to the Ukrainian studies program since the lecture series that kicked off the program-building efforts?

A: This winter and spring we have initiated our third lecture series on contemporary Ukraine, with a monthly lecture through May. We sponsored a public symposium on the Ukrainian Famine last autumn, with featured guest Robert Conquest. This year our outreach program for high school teachers - a daylong symposium on "Stalinism" - included significant attention to the Famine in Ukraine. We continue to offer courses that include Ukrainian materials, such as Prof. Amir Weiner's survey course on "The Soviet Union in the 20th Century" and my lecture course on "Early Modern Eastern Europe."

Q: To backtrack a bit, whose initiative was it to work toward establishing Ukrainian studies at your university? And when did this initiative move from the discussion and planning stage to the current fund-raising and implementation stage?

The initiative came simultaneously from members of the community who have been active in encouraging more Ukrainian activities. Here at Stanford more directly the initiative has been led by myself and Prof. Amir Weiner, whose research focuses on Ukraine in the 20th century. Both of us have been involved in Ukrainian studies since our graduate school days, and found that we now have at Stanford a small, but dedicated, cohort of scholars who are interested in Ukraine and would support such an initiative in their teaching, research and mentoring of students.

This broader group of faculty includes Prof. Michael McFaul of political science, Associate Director of CREEES Mary Dakin, Senior Research Fellows Robert Conquest and John Dunlop of the Hoover Institution, Prof. Norman Naimark of the history department, Prof. Coit Blacker of Stanford Institute for International Affairs.

We moved into the fund-raising mode this academic year.

Q: What does the Ukrainian studies program at Stanford envision as its focus? Will it be teaching or research? Will it focus on undergraduates or graduates, or perhaps both?

A: Our focus will be on teaching and research; we are particularly interested in broadening the curriculum by including Ukrainian topics in undergraduate courses across the curriculum, in fields such as history, culture and literature, political science, economics and sociology. We hope to do this initially by sponsoring visiting professors, and in the long run by endowing a chair.

We are also quite committed to the idea of training graduate students in Ukrainian studies in the fields of history or political science. We have internationally recognized faculty, as well as library and archival resources, and there is a need for well-trained scholars as the current senior generation of Ukrainianists at American and Canadian universities looks towards retirement.

Q: How do you envision the establishment of the program? Is there some sort of phased-in approach that is being considered?

A: Yes, we hope at first to raise expendable funds to inaugurate some programs, such as visiting professorships and graduate fellowships. Then, we hope to turn to the longer task of establishing an endowment to make sure that Ukrainian studies becomes a permanent part of Stanford's curriculum and activities. Such an endowment would include funds for programs, guest teachers and ultimately perhaps a chair.

Q: How will the Ukrainian studies program at Stanford differ from those at, say Harvard, where the Ukrainian Research Institute is an established presence, and at Columbia, where Ukrainian studies are now being heavily promoted? How would it be similar?

A: We would be similar inasmuch as we will all be offering coursework at the graduate and undergraduate levels and training students. However, we at Stanford really want to focus on the training of a strong generation of scholars in Ukrainian studies, and in the exposure of broad numbers of undergraduates to Ukrainian studies by integrating Ukraine in courses across the curriculum.

We would like to see, for example, Ukrainian topics represented in courses on contemporary politics, social change and culture in departments such as sociology, anthropology, political science and Slavic languages and literatures.

We will try not to duplicate the efforts of other centers of Ukrainian studies. We do not have ambitions to develop a publications program, for example, since Harvard does that so well. Similarly, we will not aspire to create a Summer School, since the Harvard Ukrainian Summer School does an excellent job. We will not focus as much on post-doctoral grants as Harvard does, with its recent Shklar Fellowships, but we hope to invite scholars from Ukraine and elsewhere as postdoctoral scholars to some extent.

We will probably not be as active in public outreach as Columbia can be, given that it is located on the Eastern Seaboard, in New York, on the flight path for any scholar or public figure headed to Washington or other East Coast locations.

But, of course, we hope to offer a lively program of lectures and conferences, for specialists and for the general public, on a wide range of Ukrainian topics.

Q: How would your program be different, or similar to, programs at Canadian universities?

A: We will always be smaller in scale - Stanford is small as major research universities go - and we will dedicate ourselves to training, mentoring and supporting the research of students and scholars of Ukraine. We are not aspiring to have the sort of broad-based program that is so successful at the University of Alberta, for example. There they sponsor an active publications program, outreach to Canadian public schools, graduate training and cultural activities.

Q: What areas of study will it encompass? Will there be a Ukrainian studies major and/or minor?

A: Since Stanford is a small university that has not historically attracted large numbers of Ukrainian heritage students, and since Ukrainian studies is not well known to the average undergraduate - at least not yet - we will not rush to create a major or minor in Ukrainian studies. That would require the kind of depth in permanent faculty positions that only a few schools, such as Alberta and Harvard, currently offer. But we have current strength in history and political science, and would work to create visiting positions so that Ukrainian studies would be taught in departments such as Slavic languages and literatures, cultural anthropology, economics and sociology. We also intend that students could earn our interdisciplinary M.A. in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies with a focus on Ukraine.

Q: How will the program fit in with the university's existing Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian studies?

A: The program will fit in well. CREEES is an umbrella organization that oversees a wide range of activities across the broad range of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Among the free-standing programs that our staff oversees are an interdisciplinary M.A. program in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies, outreach programs for K-14 teachers, a Video Lending Library, administration of federal fellowships for academic year study at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels and summer language grants, an endowed lectureship in post-Soviet studies, etc.

The current public lectures and symposia in Ukrainian studies that we do offer are sponsored by CREEES as part of our commitment to broad representation of the East European and FSU area. A Ukrainian studies program would complement and enrich our array of current activities.

Q: How will the program make use of the resources that already exist at Stanford, for example the Hoover Institution?

A: Our resources are incredible. For research, Green Library is a world-class collection of books and current journals, and the Hoover Institution's archives are very rich. Students at the undergraduate and graduate levels will be able to use these wonderful collections in their coursework with Stanford professors on Ukrainian themes. Our students will benefit from consultations with affiliated research scholars in such institutions as Stanford Institute for International Studies as well as the Hoover, the Graduate Schools of Business or Law, or wherever there are affiliated scholars.

Q: What other types of institutional support for the development of the Ukrainian studies program do you have, or expect to have at Stanford? Are there any notable scholars, university officials who are prime supporters of this endeavor? What faculty strengths can be utilized by the program?

A: I have mentioned the faculty who are interested in this field and are actively working with us. Other institutional support comes from CREEES, which can offer matching funds to support Ukrainian initiatives from its endowment (The Wayne S. Vucinich Fund for Russian and East European Studies) and from its federal funds.

CREEES is a "National Resource Center" in area studies of the Department of Education, and receives annually a grant of almost $300,000 for fellowships and program development. Ukraine is one of the many fields to which we dedicate our Title VI Federal funds.

CREEES also works with departments on an ad hoc basis to gather funding for sponsorship of events such as public lectures and visiting professors. Our current visiting professor in economics, Prof. Roy Gardner of Indiana University, a specialist on the economy of contemporary Ukraine, is jointly sponsored by CREEES and the department of economics, for example.

Q: We are interested also in how the symposium on the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine was received? Was it widely attended? Did the university media and local news media cover it?

A: The Famine symposium was very well received; well over 100 people attended the event, and they included many students and faculty, as well as members of the community. The event was covered in the Stanford media and on our website.

Q: Has the Ukrainian community of California joined the effort to promote Ukrainian studies at Stanford? How have local activists become involved?

A: We have been gratified by the interest shown by members of the northern California Ukrainian community. We have a strong working group composed of local individuals who have been active in Ukrainian affairs for decades, and we are very grateful for their dedication and expertise.

Q: Tell us what arguments you use to make the point that this effort should be supported by the Ukrainian community at large? And, why it should be supported by the scholarly community as a whole, and Stanford in particular?

A: The Ukrainian community at large should support our effort since our primary goal is to produce a generation of scholars who will move out to teach and work in areas associated with Ukraine throughout America, and the world.

It is time now to produce that generation since the very senior Ukrainianists in America - the endowed professors at Harvard for example (Flier, Szporluk and Grabowicz) - are approaching retirement, and the first wave of graduate students produced in America by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute are actually now eminent senior scholars and within two decades of retirement. This includes eminent scholars such as Magosci, Subtelny, Sysyn and Kohut. So the time is ripe to produce scholars for universities, not in huge numbers but a select few trained at a very high level.

Graduates of Stanford with undergraduate and advanced degrees can also move into careers in government, journalism, policy studies and the like, and by exposing them to Ukrainian studies in a range of disciplines we will expand exponentially the awareness in the broader world of Ukraine and its importance in the European sphere and in global processes.

The scholarly community should support this initiative since Ukraine offers a challenging case of post-Soviet cultural, political, social and economic transition, one that provides useful data for global understanding of these processes.

Stanford should support such a program since the university has a long tradition in East European and Slavic studies, going back to the work of Herbert Hoover in the 1920s and the founding of his institution, really an archive and library, dedicated to the study of contemporary European "war, revolution and peace."

Q: What is your primary focus during 2004? Do you have certain financial goals that you would like to attain in order to support your Ukrainian studies program?

A: Our goal in 2004 is fund-raising, which we are launching in March. We have already received two generous grants from philanthropic institutions interested in Ukranian studies on the national level - one to underwrite the lecture series and the other to bring a post-doctoral fellow or teacher from Ukraine to Stanford.

We also have the promise of a matching grant (1:1) for all that we raise this year. So we look forward to building a fund for programmatic development; our goal is $250,000.

Q: Do you have any final comments on your hopes for the program? Where do you see the program 10 years down the line?

A: A decade from now I would like to see us having trained several successful Ph.D. and M.A students, who would be out in the real world teaching Ukrainian issues or working in government, NGOs, journalism and the like.

I would like us to have sufficient funds to support a CREEES staff member dedicated to Ukrainian studies, who would be organizing an active calendar of events.

I would like us to have hosted visiting professors in several departments for courses in Ukrainian studies, and I would hope that we, with the support of an increasingly national Ukrainian community, would be working towards building a permanent endowment for teaching and programs in Ukrainian studies.

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