Joint Lecture by Sofia Dyak and Mayhill Fowler on Inscribing Women's Lives in War and Postwar at Princeton University
7.11.2023
On November 2, 2023 the co-presentation "Towards a New History of Ukraine: Writing Women’s Lives into War and Postwar" by Dr. Sofia Dyak and Stetson University professor and Center affiliated researcher Dr. Mayhill Fowler took place at Princeton University.
This co-presentation aims to unsettle the way the history of Ukraine has been imagined by venturing into stories that might be found in other historiographies, such as Russian, Eastern European, Polish, Jewish, and Soviet. Exploring the biographies of two women — Dina Pronicheva, a Jewish survivor of Babyn Iar and a puppet theater actress, and Muza Konsulova, an architect involved in postwar rebuilding in Soviet Ukraine — highlights the ways we can reimagine scholarly categories and think differently about women’s lives in the time of war and postwar. Ukraine then becomes central to larger stories of the region.
A joint lecture by Dr. Sofia Dyak and Dr. Mayhill Fowler
A joint lecture by Dr. Sofia Dyak and Dr. Mayhill Fowler
A joint lecture by Dr. Sofia Dyak and Dr. Mayhill Fowler
A historian, researcher, and director of the Center. Sofia has been a fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. In 2019-23, she was a visiting researcher at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam as part of the international research project “Legacies of Communism.” Her research interests include postwar urban history, and understanding heritage and historic cities in socialist contexts. An associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Urban History. She has held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Toronto, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Ukraine 2019-2020. She is currently finishing a book on theater women in Ukraine across the long 20th century, and re-thinking a project on Soviet military theater and how societies tell war stories. She is also a former actress.
Dr Sofia Dyak
Center for Urban History 
Dr. Mayhill Fowler
Stetson University