Nearly 100 Renowned Global Historians Initiate the Project "Ukrainian History: Global Initiative"
Prominent Western and Ukrainian intellectuals, scholars, and historians, including Timothy Snyder, Serhii Plokhy, and Yaroslav Hrytsak, embark on a large-scale research project titled "Ukrainian History: Global Initiative".
This is reported on the project's official website.
Fifty Ukrainian and forty international researchers will work on exploring 70 topics in the history of Ukraine and the world, analyzing the "connections and interdependencies" between them.
'Ukrainian History Global Initiative seeks a new empirical and conceptual understanding, using an innovative approach across disciplines and application of new technologies to write history today. It is seeking indirectly to answer fundamental questions such as: who are we? how was a nation possible?' according to the project announcement.
The program is designed for three years, during which, historians will conduct dozens of independent studies covering broad timeframes from the prehistory of Ukrainian lands to the present.
'Topics to be investigated include the beginning of human settlement, the spread of Indo-European languages, relations between classical Greece and the Black Sea region, Europe in the Viking Age, relations between Byzantium and Kyiv, as well as contemporary issues of nation-building and empires,' as described in the initiative's overview.
It is expected that the results of one of the most extensive international studies of Ukrainian history will contribute to three scientific works. The first comprehensive volume will contain a complete "scholarly apparatus and illustrations as appropriate."
Participants in the initiative emphasize that all texts created by the team of historians will be written "accessibly, for reading by the general audience," as "accessibility is an integral component of the project."
The program of the project 'Ukrainian History: Global Initiative' will be coordinated by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, as well as an independent board of directors. The board will include politician and diplomat Carl Bildt, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum, Metropolitan-Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia Borys Gudziak, poet Serhiy Zhadan, and the founder of the initiative Viktor Pinchuk.