Tobias Wals holds the coordination office between the LMU Chair for Contemporary History and the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History. In 2024, he defended his PhD thesis on the impact of the Second World War and the Holocaust on the Jewish community of Zhytomyr. In his research and teaching, Tobias focuses on interwar Europe, National Socialism and Soviet history, with special attention for minorities.

His current research project addresses the life and legacy of Ievhen Konovalets, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the interwar period. Despite his prominence in the Ukrainian national movement, Konovalets has received relatively little scholarly attention, especially outside of Ukraine. The project aims to reconstruct his biography with a clear focus on his political career, beginning with his student years in Lviv. Konovalets was involved in the failed struggle for Ukrainian independence following the Russian Revolution and played a pivotal role in the diaspora community before founding the OUN in 1929. The project revolves around the questions of how Konovalets turned the OUN into the most successful Ukrainian nationalist organization and why the OUN disintegrated almost immediately after his death. Konovalets was killed by an NKVD agent in 1938, after which his organization was split into two competing factions (Melnyk and Bandera).

During his residency at the Center for Urban History, Tobias will be looking for source materials pertaining to Konovalets’s life before emigration, as well as to the Ukrainian national movement in late Habsburg Lviv. He also plans to visit the Lviv Oblast State Archive, that holds relevant collections on, among other things, Ukrainian student circles in the 1910s.