The KuFC at the 2025 Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

With more than 600 panels in the program, the ASEEES convention offered excellent opportunities for networking and sustaining scholarly connections within the Ukrainian studies community across North America and beyond.

Representing the Centre at the event were Oleksandr Pankieiev, KuFC director and associate professor and Kule Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, together with Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, a professor in the same department, Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography at the KuFC, and director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

Dr. Oleksandr Pankieiev participates in the roundtable discussion "From KGB Archives to Digital Media: Transformations of Historical Memory and Wartime Ukraine" at the ASEEES conference.

They participated in the round table "From KGB Archives to Digital Media: Transformations of Historical Memory and Wartime Ukraine." Pankieiev spoke about the challenges of researching digital folklore related to the Russo-Ukrainian war and reflected on the future of digital archives and their sovereignty. Khanenko-Friesen discussed new AI-based interpretive tools and research protocols designed to track, analyze, and expose repressive language in KGB files that was employed to erase Crimean Tatars as an Indigenous people of Crimea.

In addition, Oleksandr Pankieiev served as a discussant on the panel "Truth, Quasi-Truth, and 'Pure' Fake: Russia's Ongoing War Against Ukraine," contributing his expertise on contemporary information warfare and the weaponization of identities and cultures.

Dr. Olga Zaitseva-Herz and Dr. Oleksandr Pankieiev during the 2025 ASEEES

Dmytro Yesypenko, research assistant at the Kule Folklore Centre and coordinator of the Sustainable Ukrainian Canadian Heritage Program, joined colleagues from the University of North Dakota, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan on the panel "Registering Personal and Collective Histories: Body as a Document, Memory as an Archive." Dmytro's presentation explored epidemic narratives and the reinterpretation and preservation of trauma in the works of leading Ukrainian and Polish literary figures, respectively Taras Shevchenko and Juliusz Słowacki, demonstrating how bodily experience, contagion, and memory intersect in literary and folkloric traditions. The talk also provided an opportunity to introduce this lesser-known dimension of Ukrainian and Polish cultural heritage to an international audience and to highlight the work of the Kule Folklore Centre.

L to R: Dmytro Yesypenko, Jemma Paek (Harvard U), Paul Morrison (Harvard U), Anastassiya Andrianova (North Dakota State U), Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed (Harvard U), Grace Mahoney (U of Michigan)

Anna Olenenko, a PhD student at the KuFC, took part in the panel "At the Vanguard of Modernization: The Intertwined Histories of Animals and Empire in Ukraine" with her paper "The Unhealthy Wetlands: Pests and Modernization of the Ukrainian Steppe" and also chaired the panel "Bringing the More-Than-Human into Memories of Crisis." In the paper, she examined how "uncanny animals" became agents of territorialization and modernization in the Ukrainian steppe, shaping administrative boundaries, influencing decision making, and contributing to the "correction" of the environment. Overall, these sessions brought a non-anthropomorphic perspective into Ukrainian studies and strengthened the growing environmental aspect of the field.

L - R: Anna Olenenko, Svitlana Arabadzy, Julia Malitska (co-panelists of the panel "At the Vanguard of Modernization: The Intertwined Histories of Animals and Empire in Ukraine")

Before the convention on November 19, Olga Zaitseva-Herz, a post-doctoral fellow at KuFC presented her research at the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University in Washington, DC. She served as convenor of the panel and delivered a paper titled "Digital Resistance: Mobilizing AI-Generated Sound and Visuals for the Political Cause in the Russo-Ukrainian War." Immediately afterward, she presented at ASEEES, delivering her paper "Mnemonic Soundscapes: Memory, Propaganda, and Resistance in Russo-Ukrainian Wartime Music Repertoires," which examined the instrumentalization of historical narratives and the manipulation of memory in contemporary propaganda.

L - R: Volodymyr Sheiko; Alex Averbuch; Olga Zaitseva-Herz; Oleh Kotsyuba.

In addition to her academic presentations, Olga also performed at the ASEEES event "An Evening of Ukrainian Poetry and Music" alongside poet Alex Averbuch, moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba. This performance engaged with echoes of the Holodomor, the voices of Ukrainian Ostarbeiters, Nazi persecution, Holocaust-era trauma, and the ongoing continuum of Ukrainian struggles against imperial and colonial violence. The program draws on Averbuch's book Furious Harvests (published by HURI), combined with Olga's musical settings, to interweave testimonies from historical and contemporary wartime experiences. The duo recently presented this musical-poetic program at the Razom Ukrainian Cultural Festival in New York City, hosted by the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Olga devoted her last day in Washington to research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

L - R: Alex Averbuch, Tetiana Pastushenko, Olga Zaitseva-Herz, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Oleksandr Pankieiev