Visiting Scholars
Oksana Klymenko is a Senior Lecturer at National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. Her primary research interest concerns Ukrainian history of the 20th century, memory studies, Soviet society, gender studies, and labour history. The topic of her dissertation was “Constructing the Memory of the New Man in the 1920s–1930s (the case of the Ukrainian Republic)”. She has conducted research at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (Austria). Studying at the doctorate program she received a scholarship in the University of Giessen (Germany) and the Dissertation Research Grant of Shevchenko Scientific Society in the United States of America.
At Stanford, Paula will be working toward finishing her book project in which she examines the economic policy shifts between privatization and nationalization prompted by the interaction of international economic pressures and domestic politics. Inspired by the experience of her family with three different land property rights regimes in the span of seventy years of Romanian history, in this project she scales the analysis to the whole world and use an original data set of privatizations and nationalizations since 1950 as well as data from my extensive fieldwork in Eastern Europe. This project breaks new ground by studying the privatization and nationalization processes together as two sides of the economic policy coin, as well as through new data collected specifically for the quantitative analysis component of the project
Katarzyna Jeżowska is a cultural historian of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. She is currently completing the manuscript of her first book ‘Socialist by design. The state, industry, and modernity in Cold War Poland’. The central task of this book is to uncover how modern Poland was conceptualized and visualized in the three decades between the 1940s and 1970s. It shows that more than merely developing a new iconography, the state turned to the products of industry, which allowed it to connect the search for Polishness with the national economic and social objectives. At stake was a political project, which from the start was imbued with a paradox: how to demonstrate the socialist commitment of post-war Poland while providing it with a clear distinctiveness vis-à-vis other countries, including, most importantly, the USSR. At Stanford, Katarzyna will work on her second project, ‘Coal Nations and Carbon Cultures’. The project continues an investigation into the political potential of material cultures, placing coal at the forefront of this enquiry. It unearths the complex relationship between natural resources, industrial products, and national identity.
Valeriy Vasylyev is a Leading Researcher at Institute of History of Ukraine of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He explores the functioning of the communist dictatorship and the repressive policy of the Kremlin in Ukraine. He has also wrote a book "Political leadership of the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR: the dynamics of relations between the center and the sub-center of power. 1917-1938". At Stanford Hoover Archives he plans to continue his research on political leadership with focus on 1939-1953 years.
