"Oral Histories of War and Holocaust in Kharkiv: On Methods, Parallels, and Autoethnography"

Professor Gelinada Grinchenko will talk about oral history as the source and method of researching wartime in Kharkiv (Ukraine). She will speak on her experience writing the book On Kharkiv and ourselves: the city's fates and experiences in its inhabitants' oral histories, the main section of which is dedicated to the 1941-1943 years in Kharkiv. She will also address ethical issues and academic insights on the current war and reflect on what kinds of historical parallels and interventions are possible in this context.

Gelinada Grinchenko left Kharkiv as a refugee in March 2022 and is now a Scholar at Risk Fellow at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.  She is a Professor of History at the Department of Ukrainian Studies (Faculty of Philosophy, V. N. Karazin National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine), Editor-in-Chief of the Ukrainian-based academic peer-reviewed journal Ukraina Moderna, Head of the Ukrainian Oral History Association, Member of the German-Ukrainian Historical Commission. Her main areas of interest are oral history, the history, and memory of WWII, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Memory Studies. Her latest edited volume is Traitors, Collaborators, and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory: Formulas of Betrayal, ed. by G. Grinchenko and E. Narvselius (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2018), 422 pp.

Paid for with funds from the Wexler Fund for Holocaust & Genocide Education.

Presented with the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for German & European Studies, the Institute for Global Studies and the History Department.