Natalie Nougayrède is currently involved in mentoring civil society initiatives and media projects in the Eastern Partnership region. Her activities as a Fellow at INDEX and a Residency Fellow for the Center for Urban History will draw from her experiences as a journalist who covered or reflected on crises and wars in the former Soviet space and beyond since the 1990s. She will reflect on the notion of storytelling and the challenges that come from war being observed both from the outside and from the inside, and will look into how storytelling manages or not to share experiences across various boundaries. In this way, Natalie aims to document the experience of war and reflect on the "documentors" themselves.

One of the starting points for her project is Hannah Arendt's book Humanity in Dark Times: "However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. (...) We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human".

During her residency, Natalie will also work on the project of launching a new online journal of ideas and culture in English and Ukrainian.

In this framework, she writes her thesis "Defying Soviet Assimilation: Non-Titular Minorities in Post-Stalinist Transcarpathia and Lviv" [working title]. She is part of the SNSF-Prima research project, "Red Tower of Babel: Soviet Minorities Experiment in Interwar Ukraine" under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Olena Palko at the University of Basel. This research delves into the dynamics of nationality and minority policies in post-Stalinist Soviet Ukraine. Seeks to analyze the dynamics of nationality and minority policies in newly acquired Soviet western borderlands, as well as examine the responses of local minority members in those two distinct areas. By comparing the regions of Transcarpathia and Lviv Oblast—both located on the western border yet marked by significant differences—the project uncovers specific nuances and commonalities that are essential to understanding local conditions.

During her residency at the Lviv Center for Urban History, Julia’s main objective is to take full advantage of the Center’s extensive resources, particularly in the realm of multiethnic urban history, while fostering meaningful connections with the local community. She aims to explore the Center’s library collections, especially in Jewish and Polish Studies, and utilize the multimedia archive. In addition to engaging with researchers affiliated with the Center, she plans to visit local archives and trace the history of Lviv’s multiethnic population in the city and its museums.

Andriy's research interests center on the history of ideas. He is interested in the genesis, development, interconnection of various paradigms, the causes, and consequences of their emergence, and their impact on human thinking. His personal interests include European philosophy, spirituality, and culture.

The scholar will work at the Center for Urban History on the study of esoteric ideas in Galicia, focusing on sources, documents, and local societies, as well as on analyzing the prospects for further study of occult movements in the region. The result of his work will be a series of scholarly publications that will cover this little-known topic in the context of the history of ideas.

Amidst technological change and global deregulation, newly independent states of Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) were modernizing telecommunications infrastructures (Bareikytė 2022; Himma-Kadakas and Kõuts-Klemm 2023). Canada's Nortel was the sole company to possess digital telephone switch technology at the time (MacDonald 2000). Nortel forged early links between the East and West, for example, connecting London and Moscow with ISDN service on the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) standard. Nortel's mission became "to be the architect of a world of networks" (Bell System Memorial, 1997).

Nortel developed fibre-optic highways in the Black Sea region, modernized Lithuania’s railway communication, and expanded Ukraine's first nationwide 3G mobile network.

Kayla's research suggests that the popular myth of the global "network of networks" (Lovink and Rossiter 2018) propagated by Nortel allowed the company to persist long after confidence in the company had been shattered, exacerbating the largest economic failure in Canadian history. Situating the legacy of digitalization politics in ECE alongside the rise and fall of Nortel will unpack this mythology and contribute to new perspectives in the context of shifting technological and political realities, in both regions.

At the Center for Urban History, Kayla will be working on her dissertation research and participating in the conference "Reassembling the Computer Networks of Eastern and Central Europe."

At the Center for Urban History, Natalia will be working and collecting materials for a new book on the anthropology of the war in Ukraine, which will be published in 2025 by the University of Toronto Press.

Her ongoing research project delves into the personal archive of her grandfather Oleksii Shepeliuk. The archive has never been studied and will provide critical insights into Soviet-era industrial history and heritage, which exists today in a grey zone between abandonment and extinction. Oleksii Shepeliuk was a photographer and editor for the Kyiv Lepse Factory newspaper from 1963-1970. His corpus of work, consisting of photography, journalism, and accompanying notes, offers a rare glimpse into the practices of industrial self-documentation and the intersections of familial and public histories.

During her Visiting Doctoral Researcher placement at the Center in 2024, Kateryna will digitize and process her family archive to contribute parts of it to the Urban Media Archive. She will conduct comparative, visual, and historical analyses using the Center’s collections to trace the role of the photographer in industrial communities, the genre of photo-accusations, and the role of family archives. The study will also include a presentation of part of the project and a workshop.

Author of seven monographs, the last one: In captivity of borders and narratives: Research on the history of Sloboda Ukraine XVII-XIX centuries (Kharkiv: Publisher Oleksandr Savchuk, 2021.) Compiler and editor of a number of collections and collective monographs. The recent one, co-authored with Ihor Serdiuk: Disenchantment of the ailment. Local tradition, old diseases and new medicine in Ukraine XVIII-XIX centuries (Kharkiv: Publisher Oleksandr Savchuk, 2021.) He has received many research grants from the funds of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Shevchenko Scientific Society in America.

In 2022, he received a fellowship at the Center for Urban History with the support of the Kerber Foundation and the Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg. Currently, he is working on church relations on the borderlands, the history of salt, and his main area of interest is the pre-industrial city in the Ukrainian territories of the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

His research focuses on a city that is not a village but retains a rural, peasant character. Such a city was dominant in Eastern Europe until the mid-nineteenth century. In part, this research is a continuation of the study of the quality of life, which the researcher has been doing in recent years. A great challenge emerges in the early nineteenth century: on the one hand, it is more open communication within empires along with imperial interference in city governance and urban formation, and on the other hand, it is the aforementioned influence of the village, previous settlement practices, and urban self-government.

Currently, is working on a project concerning the Jewish communities of Transcarpathia with the tentative title: "Lili Jacob, Bilky, and the Auschwitz Album: A Triple Biography". It is a biography of a person, place, and an object. In all his work John C. Swanson tries to think about how everyday people, mainly non-urban dwellers, throughout the 20th century understood (and understand) who they were, often in relation with their neighbors and their immediate environment.

During his residency at the Center for Urban History with the support of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), he plans to research the tools of Stalin's memorial policy in Western Ukrainian cities and find out its consequences for urban public space. His project offers a local perspective on Soviet memory policy during the Stalinist era as a system of methods aimed at cleansing the memorial space of symbols and artifacts that contradicted Soviet ideologies; and on constructing new memorial landscapes that reflected the official interpretation of the past. The research also aims to identify specific features of Soviet commemorative practices in the annexed territories and to find out the means of ideological control over memorial and cultural institutions in the postwar decade.