Society and Culture

2026 Tompkins Lecture by Hanna Abakunova

8 December 2025

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Join the Department of History, Classics, and Religion and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies for the 2026 Tompkins Lecture. "What Was a Ghetto in Ukraine and Poland, during the Holocaust? Rethinking Space and Everyday Life of Jews and Roma" by Tompkins Professor Hanna Abakunova will take place on Friday, January 9 at 3 p.m. in Tory 2-58. There will be a light reception following the talk.

Talk description: The talk re-examines the concept of ghetto in Ukraine and Poland during the Holocaust by focusing on how survivors described and interpreted these spaces versus archival documents. Drawing on Jewish and Roma testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive, and other oral history collections, as well as German, Ukrainian, and Polish archives, the speaker argues that existing historiography fails to capture the lived reality of confinement. Survivors’ accounts reveal ghetto as a fluid social and moral landscape, inviting a broader rethinking of everyday life under the occupation in Eastern Europe during WWII.

Speaker bio: Hanna Abakunova is Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. She received her PhD in Holocaust History from the University of Sheffield (UK, 2019) and earlier completed a Candidate of Science in History (Ukraine, 2010) as well as an MA in Psychology (Ukraine, 2005). Prior to her Tompkins Professorship, she worked as the Research Director and Content Manager (contractor) for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Refresh Project at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and as a researcher and lecturer at Uppsala University (Sweden). Abakunova’s research focuses on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland, the genocide of Roma, and interethnic relations in the former Soviet Union.