Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle”

Name: Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle”
Start: 2026-04-07T18:00:00+02:00
Location: Pariser Platz 4a, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Schedule

Tue, 07 Apr, 2026 at 06:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Pariser Platz 4a, 10117 Berlin, Germany | Berlin, BE

Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle”
Book Launch and Lecture by Prof. Andrii Portnov
07.04.2026, 18.00
Registration: https://forms.gle/iL9yFdGtftHbocKL7
Omeljan Pritsak and the Intellectual Origins of the Ukrainian “Harvard Miracle” is the first English-language intellectual biography of Omeljan Pritsak, the co-founder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the first professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard. Andrii Portnov places Pritsak’s life and legacy in the context of Ukrainian and world historiography and illuminates the development of his scholarly interests, which emerged in interwar Poland and developed through the Sovietization of Western Ukraine and the perturbations of World War II.
Based on unique materials the author uncovered in several German archives (Hamburg, Berlin, Tübingen, Munich, Heidelberg, and Bremen), this concise study serves as an introduction and an invitation to write a new intellectual history of Ukrainian history.
Andrii Portnov is Professor at the Pilecki Institute, a founding director of the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe in Berlin, and an Associate Member of the Viadrina Centre of Polish and Ukrainian Studies. He is the award-winning author of numerous books on intellectual history, historiography, genocide, and memory studies in Central and Eastern Europe, including, most recently, Ukraine-Studien. Einführung (2025).