New Books in Ukrainian Studies

New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. Jul 3

    Dmytro Soloviov, "Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine" (Fuel, 2025)

    Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognized. This is a result of several factors, including the stigma of belonging to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. Photographer Dmytro Soloviov has crossed Ukraine documenting them to form the most comprehensive publication available on the subject.  With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cultural and political context. Dmytro Soloviov is a photographer, tour guide, and activist, and the creator of the popular Ukrainian Modernism Instagram page. He frequently leads tours of modernist architecture in different cities in Ukraine. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    53 min

  2. Jun 21

    Jonathan Daly, "The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    He’s been called the man academics love to hate. One time, when the author disclosed that he worked with Pipes, the colleague responded, “I will forgive you.” Love him or hate him, Richard Pipes (1923–2018), left an indelible mark on Russian and Soviet history in his long and remarkable life. This conversation delves into Pipes’ personal and intellectual biography, scholarly contributions, the role he played in shaping late Cold War policy and a generation of American historians of the Imperial and Soviet Russia. Have a listen to get a better sense of this humanist historian—described as both polemical and preeminently polite—who cast such a long shadow on academia in and beyond the Cold War. Jonathan Daly is Professor of History at University of Illinois Chicago. In addition to The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior (Stanford University Press, 2025), he is the author of several monographs on Russian and Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 17m

  3. Jun 16

    Cristina Florea, "Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton UP, 2025), Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 32m

  4. May 22

    Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2026) transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.  Alex Averbuch is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and culture in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    48 min

  5. Mar 24

    The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of Sholem Aleichem

    Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. Jonathan Brent, Executive Director at YIVO, Jeremy Dauber, author of the recently published book, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye, and Adam Kirsch joined each other on stage for a lively discussion about the fascinating life and work of the "Jewish Mark Twain.” This discussion originally took place on October 17, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 3m

  6. Feb 28

    Elliot Dolan-Evans, "Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine" (Bristol UP, 2025)

    Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic restructuring programmes during active conflicts. Using a critical political economy perspective, the book explores how these restructuring efforts affect vulnerable communities’ survival amid violence. Chapters provide a detailed case study of Ukraine during the War in Donbas, analysing the controversial reforms in agriculture, gas and pension sectors. The resulting analysis offers valuable insights into how these reforms have influenced Ukraine’s political economy and the survival of conflict-affected populations since the 2022 Russian invasion. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    55 min

  7. Feb 19

    Denys Gorbach, "The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Soviet City" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

    Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working-class and structures its relations with other social groups. The Making and Unmaking of the Ukrainian Working Class is written by Denys Gorbach, published in 2024 by Berghan Books. Denys Gorbach is a teaching and research adjunct at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 10m

  8. Feb 8

    Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

    In the 1920s, Józef Piłsudski was a household name not just in Poland, but across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean as well. Yet this complex and contradictory figure – a socialist and a nationalist, a clandestine agitator and a legendary military strategist, protector of Jews and other national minorities on Polish soil who was nonetheless often accused of imperialism – has eluded serious biographical treatment in English until now. Yeshiva University professor Joshua D. Zimmerman offers a nuanced, readable, and definitive account of the man who re-founded the independent state of Poland in 1918. Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland (Harvard University Press, 2022) could not be more timely, given the lessons to be learned from Piłsudski’s career by today’s opponents of far-right populism in Eastern Europe, and even more urgently – by English-language readers seeking to understand the imperative of preserving an independent Ukrainian state in the face of Russian aggression. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 38m
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Ratings & Reviews

4.3
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

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