The project “Women’s Dimensions of the Past” progressed from an academic initiative to a landmark scholarly publication, becoming a significant contribution to the modernization of Ukrainian historical scholarship.
Concept and Intellectual Context
The impetus for the project was the 10th anniversary of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History (UARWH), founded in October 2010 in Lviv. To mark the occasion, a conference was planned for October 2020, with the aim of discussing the state of research on women’s past in Ukraine and demonstrating the potential of this field for understanding contemporary social processes. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these plans.
Online events became a new format for academic exchange. UARWH, together with the Center for Urban History, organized a series of ten online lectures and discussions, “Gender Dimensions of Modernity Spaces“, which ran from December 2020 through July 2021. The project was carried out with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation and proved remarkably successful, attracting thousands of views on YouTube.
International Conference
The International Scholarly Conference “Women’s Dimensions of the Past: Ideas, Experiences, Representations” ultimately took place on June 8–11, 2021. The Organizing Committee received over 100 submissions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was held in a hybrid format: moderators worked in person in Lviv, while 43 participants from five countries presented their 25 papers remotely. The high scholarly quality of the research and the significant public demand convinced the organizers of the need to publish the materials in the form of an edited volume.
Preparation of the Volume and War-Time Challenges
Work on the book, under the academic editorship of Doctor of Historical Sciences (habilitation equivalent) Oksana Kis, began in late 2021. The authors submitted their texts in January 2022, but the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion halted the process for nearly six months.
Work resumed in July 2022 during a creative residency by Oksana Kis in Poland. Despite shelling and power outages, the authors substantially revised their chapters, strengthening their argumentation and theoretical frameworks. The project team underwent changes: due to the difficult circumstances of war, some researchers were unable to complete their work, but new and timely studies were added to the volume, including Olena Haleta’s text on the travelogues of Sofiia Yablonska.
A professional team worked on the publication:
- Coordination: Viktoriia Panas.
- Literary editing: Yuliia Kolesnikova.
- Design and layout: Iryna Tsimerman.
- Partners: the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (https://ethnology.lviv.ua/) provided the Academic Council’s recommendation for the book’s publication as a scholarly work.
Promotion and Public Discussions
An important part of promoting the forthcoming publication was the panel discussion “Women’s Dimensions of the Past: How History Becomes Reality”, held in the summer of 2023 with the participation of the academic editor and co-authors of the volume. This event served as one of several planned public forums to discuss how knowledge of women’s past helps reveal the historical roots of gender discrimination and offers arguments for contemporary human rights debates. A video recording of the event is available here.
Publication and Presentation
The edited volume “Women’s Dimensions of the Past: Ideas, Experiences, Representations” was published in late 2023. The 440-page book contains studies by 22 authors, organized into four thematic sections: cultural representations, women in professional environments, women’s activism, and historical dimensions of violence. The table of contents is available here.
On December 13, 2023, an online presentation of the volume took place, with the participation of Oksana Kis, Alla Shvets, and Tamara Zlobina. The book has become an important resource for educators, human rights advocates, women’s organization activists, and all those interested in a critical examination of the gendered dimensions of Ukrainian history.
Open Access Due to the publication’s great popularity, the print run of 500 copies was quickly exhausted. In response to high public demand, and with the consent of all project partners, the electronic version of the volume was made available for free download on the Center for Urban History website.