Scholar in Residence 2025

INDEX - Spring 2025 1 – 31 March 2025

As an INDEX scholar in residence Orysia Kulick, (PhD, Stanford University), spent time working on her book project How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics after Stalin. She conducted archival research at the State Archives of Lviv region (DALO) and also gave a lecture on this topic to students at Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU). The lecture was the most enjoyable and important part of the journey.

In related research for an autoethnographic oral history of Galicia, which traverses, through family stories, the tumult of the long 20th century, Orysia found archival records of “repatriations” that took place on the Polish-Ukrainian border in 1944-46, including inhabitants of Dźwiniacz Górny, one of her ancestral villages, which she visited for the first time in summer 2024.

She was invited to speak about these experiences at the University of Saskatchewan in May 2025, where she delivered the Mohyla Lecture, “Notes from the field: Entangled History-Writing in Wartime Ukraine.”

Orysia Kulick

Orysia Kulick is completing her book How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics after Stalin, which is about regional elites in post-Stalin Soviet Ukraine, the personal networks that shaped its relations with Moscow, and how both influenced politics in the center of Soviet power. She has published widely in areas of Soviet history, cultural resistance, and material cultures of authoritarianism, including an exhibition catalogue on “War and Revolution: 100 years of Cultural Opposition in Ukraine.” Her recent piece “Gender and violence in Ukraine: changing how we bear witness to war,” was awarded the 2023 Heldt Prize for best article by the Association for Women and Slavic Studies (AWSS).

She has made several research trips to Ukraine in the last few years, most recently in March/April 2025 as scholar in residence at INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange in Lviv. Having returned since then to her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Orysia is exploring new genres in her writing, reconnecting with her musical roots, and resuming her work at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, where she catalogues collections related to displaced persons and the Second World War.