Events

Monday, February 2
Maksym Butkevych, The Principle of Hope 

Maksym Butkevych is a Ukrainian journalist and human rights advocate. He is a co-founder of the Zmina Human Rights Centre and of Hromadske Radio. Despite his lifelong pacifism, he volunteered for the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the start of the 2022 Russian invasion and became a platoon commander. Captured and sentenced to 13 years in prison by Russian forces, he endured over two years of harsh imprisonment before being released in a prisoner exchange in October 2024. In September 2025, he received the Václav Havel Prize.

Harrison Hall 304, 4:30-5:45pm
Co-sponsored with the Department of Media, Journalism and Film thanks to the Diana Stark Speakers Series Fund

Mondays, February 9-April 27
The Havighurst Center Colloquia Series (follow link for full schedule)

This series will look at a political development that has transpired in post-accession Eastern Europe-- democratic backsliding--examining it from different analytical perspectives: conceptual, theoretical, comparative and empirical.

Harrison Hall 302, 11:40am - 1:00pm
(part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Democracy and Authoritarianism)

Tuesday, February 17
Movie Screening: 2000 Meters to Andriivka (Mstyslav Chernov, 2025),
Sponsored by Razom for Ukraine.

From the Oscar®-winning team behind 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL, 2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA documents the toll of the Russia-Ukraine war from a personal and devastating vantage point. Following his historic account of the civilian toll in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov turns his lens towards Ukrainian soldiers —who they are, where they came from, and the impossible decisions they face in the trenches as they fight for every inch of their land.

Pearson Hall 116, 4:30-6:30pm

(part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Ukraine at War)

Tuesday, February 24
Ivan Kurilla, visiting scholar, The Ohio State University
and Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati
Writing the History of 19th Century Russian-American Relations after 2022: A Conversation

Ivan Kurilla is a historian of U.S.–Russia relations, national identity, and the political uses of history. He previously taught at Volgograd State University and the European University at St. Petersburg and has held appointments at Dartmouth College, George Washington University, Bowdoin College, Wellesley College, and Middlebury College. In 2024 he left Russia after being dismissed for opposing the war in Ukraine and is now based in the United States as a visiting scholar. Kurilla is the author or editor of numerous books, including Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American–Russian Relations (with David Foglesong and Victoria Zhuravleva, Cambridge University Press, 2025 and Echoes of the American Civil War Abroad (co-edited with Victoria Zhuravleva, Bloomsbury, 2026).

Willard Sunderland is the Henry Winkler Professor of Modern History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of two books, including The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. Sunderland's current book-in-progress is a travelogue/history of John Quincy Adams' voyage to Russia in 1809 as the first US ambassador appointed to the Russian court.  Following John Quincy's route, Sunderland sailed in 2023 to the edge of Russia himself with his friends and fellow Cincinnatians Tom and Chuck Lohre in his sailboat Clio.  John Quincy's trip from Boston to St. Petersburg took 80 days.  Sunderland's from Boston to Kotka, Finland, located just shy of the Russian border, took 76.  In addition, Sunderland is also working on a book focused on the history of Russia and the world in the age of Peter the Great as well as new research related to Russian maritime history, the history of the Russian Far East and Northern Pacific, and Sino-Russian relations.

Harrison Hall 304, 4:30-5:45pm

Monday, March 2
Katerina Gordeeva, journalist
How to Speak When Words Can Harm: Trauma Journalism and Conversations in Moments of Irreversible Loss

Katerina Gordeeva is one of Russia’s most famous independent journalists. Until 2012, she worked as a TV reporter for the federal television channel NTV. During her time with that channel, she reported from the frontlines of Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq as a war correspondent. She later resigned from the channel due to a disagreement with the channel’s programming agenda. 

Gordeeva left Moscow out of protest in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and seizure of part of Eastern Ukraine. In 2020, she created her own YouTube channel, Tell Gordeeva, which today has more than 1.65 million subscribers. To make her documentary film “Humans At War,” Gordeeva travelled to dozens of refugee shelters in both Europe and Russia. She collected first-person accounts by interviewing people with opposing views about their experiences and how the war had drastically changed their lives. This three-hour testimonial film has been viewed by more than 3 million people. She has subsequently published a book based on these interviews, Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine.

In the summer of 2022, Gordeeva was named as one of the top 10 most influential independent journalists in Russia. She is a five-time winner of the Redcollegia Award, an independent prize that recognizes the work of journalists doing ground-breaking work despite government pressure. Gordeeva was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya International Journalism Prize in August in 2022. In September 2022, the Russian government named Gordeeva a “foreign agent.”

Harrison Hall 304, 4:30-5:45pm

co-sponsored with the Department of Media, Journalism and Film thanks to the Diana Stark Speakers Series Fund

part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Dissent in Russia Today

Wednesday, March 4 (via Zoom)
Olga Feshenko, author
Live Histories of War
Kreger Hall 221, 2:50-4:20pm 

Monday, March 9
Yurii Savchuk, Director of Kyiv War Museum 
The War Museum during Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion: Challenges and Experiences

Kreger Hall 221, 2:50-4:20pm 

part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Ukraine at War and Under Occupation

Wednesday, March 18
Oleksandra Tarkhanova, University of St. Gallen
Citizenship Constellations During a Crisis of Sovereignty: Lived Experiences of Occupation in Ukraine

Kreger Hall 221, 2:50-4:20pm 

part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Ukraine at War and Under Occupation

Monday, March 30
Margarit Ordukhanyan, Hunter College-CUNY

Irvin Hall 040, 1:15-2:35pm

part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Exile and Emigration

March 30 - April 10 (via Zoom)
Havighurst/TCUP Book Club
Artem Chapeye, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns 
Contact Stephen Norris, Director of the Havighurst Center for more information

part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Ukraine at War

Thursday, April 16
Victoria Lomasko, graphic artist
The Last Soviet Artist

Victoria Lomasko was born in Serpukhov, Russia in 1978. An artist and journalist, Lomasko is the author of Other Russias (n+1 Books, 2017) and the coauthor of Forbidden Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous shows in Europe and in the United States. She lived in Moscow until March 2022 and now lives in exile. In 2019, Lomasko spent two weeks at Miami completing her mural “Atlases,” which now hangs on the third floor of King Library.

Her latest book – and the focus of the event – is entitled The Last Soviet Artist (n+1 Books, 2025). In this powerful chronicle of change and resistance, Lomasko takes the measure of the post-Soviet space in the late Putin years. The Last Soviet Artist opens with a series of beautifully illustrated trips to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, and the North Caucasus, where Lomasko interviews a long list of varied subjects (artists, activists, teachers, senior citizens, schoolchildren), about gender rights, grassroots politics, and the ghosts of the Soviet past. In the book’s second section, Lomasko depicts with great immediacy the drama of the Belarusian revolution and attends the final major protests in Russia on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine—which in turn leads to the third section, written entirely in exile. How do ordinary people navigate historic changes? How do different generations make sense of their shared present? Equally attentive to its interlocutors and their landscapes, The Last Soviet Artist is an unforgettable work of graphic reportage. 

Winner of the 2022 Pen Catalan Free Voice Award and the 2023 Prix Couilles au Cul pour le Courage Artistique, Festival de BD d’Angoulême.

King Library 320, 4:30-5:45pm 

part of ongoing Havighurst Center focus: Dissent in Russia Today, Emigration and Exile

 
Friday, April 24
Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University
The Nuclear Age: Chernobyl 40 Years After

12-1pm online with Lane Library (a link will be posted closer to the date of the event) 

Join us for an online discussion with the preeminent historian and bestselling author Serhii Plokhy about his latest book, The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power, and Survival. 

In The Nuclear Age, Plokhy, the Mykhailo S. Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, explores why governments have acquired and stockpiled nuclear weapons and reveals the global failure to reach meaningful nuclear arms treaties. Plokhy argues that the risk of nuclear war has never been so high: Russia threatens nuclear aggression in its war on Ukraine; China is constructing hundreds of new missile silos; and India and Pakistan are locked in ongoing nuclear competition. Plokhy also examines how more countries than ever have come within perilous reach of acquiring nuclear arms, while new technologies, such as hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence, make the nuclear landscape increasingly unpredictable.

Co-sponsored by Miami University’s Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and moderated by its director, Stephen Norris, this event is timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, which Plokhy has also written about in his books Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Disaster and Chernobyl Roulette: War in the Nuclear Disaster,