Sofia Dyak

Director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe and Head of the Representative Office of the Foundation in Ukraine.

PhD in Sociology from the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), MA in History from the Central European University (Budapest) and BA in History from Lviv Univerisity.

Visiting Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam in 2008, Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2008.

Currently preparing her dissertation "(Re)imagined Cityscapes: Lviv and Wrocław after 1944/45" for publication.

Contact: s.dyak@lvivcenter.org

Selected Publications:

• "Tvorennia obrazu Lvova yak regionalnogo tsentru Zachidnoi Ukrainy: radiansky proekt ta yioho urbanisrychne vtilennia" [The Creation of the Image of Lviv as a Regional Center of Western Ukraine: The Soviet Project and Its Urban Realization], East-West: History and Culturology Collection. Issue 9-10: Patria, ed. by Volodymyr Kravchenko, Kharkiv: "NTMT" Ltd., 2008, pp. 75-86.
• "The Paradox of Remembered Harm? Empathy, Publicity and the Mobilization of the Memory of Forced Migration and Forced Labor Across Germany, Poland, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine", in Beyond Camps and Forced Labor. Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution. Proceedings of the international conference, London, 11-13 January 2006, ed. by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth, pp. 562-571, published in 2007.

Selected Presentations:

• "Encountering and Appropriating Cityscapes: Soviet Ukrainian Lviv and Polish Communist Wrocław after 1944/45," presentation at the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford University (23 April 2012)
• "Diaspora Battlefield": Commemorative and Heritage Projects in Lviv after 1991, paper for the 2012 World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University (April 20, 2012)
• "Histories of Heritage: Soviet Ukrainian Lviv," paper for the workshop "New Approaches to the History of Sovetization" at Harriman Institute, Columbia University (February 24-25, 2012)
• "Commemoration and Heritage Protection in Lviv: The Jewish Past and Contemporary Cityscape" at conference "Ukrainian Jewish Encounter: Cultural Interaction, Representation, and Memory" (mounted by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative in collaboration with the Israel Museum and the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, October 2010)
• "From Central Square to Industrial Belt: Visions and Limits of Soviet Lviv, 1944–1960" at the workshop "Backward or forward? Changes in East Central European Cities: 19th and 20th Centuries" (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw (October 2009)
• "Inscribing the Second World War in the Postwar Lviv Cityscape after 1944" at the international seminar "Cities on the Border: Vilnus-Lviv-Daugavpils" (Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature Vilnus, December 2008)
• "In Place of Displacement: Commemorating Deportations in Lviv after 1991" (Fourth Annual Danyliw Research Seminar in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa, October 2008)
• "Urban Heritage, Local Authorities, and City Community in Transition: Historic Center of Lviv, 1991-2007" (Summer Course "Public Management of Urban Change in Post-Socialist Cities," Central European University, Budapest)
• "Teaching the History of Territories Gained and Lost: Polish and Ukrainian Textbooks on ‘ziemie odzyskane’ and ‘kresy’" (The XXXII Conference of the Polish-German Textbook Commission, Berlin, Germany, June 2007)
• "Commemorating Deportations in the Cityscapes of Lviv and Wroclaw" (Seminar "Postwar Polish-Ukrainian Relations: Memory of the Wisla Operation," Columbia University, April 2007)