We invite you to A Secret Power: Normative Femininity as Source of Women's Agency in Times of Extreme Violence, a talk by Oksana Kis, part of our Fall 2022 Conversatorium on Ukraine series, which launches the Transregional Dialogues fellowship program at NSSR. 

As a historian of women and a feminist anthropologist, I would like to focus on women's experiences of living through the extreme historical events and to ponder how some of those experiences resonate in women's war time activities today. I'd like to use my research on Ukrainian female political prisoners of the Gulag as a starting point and explore how they used elements of the normative femininity (gender-based knowledge, skills, attitudes, etc.) as survival tools and coping practices, and how corresponding activities manifest themselves in women's war time efforts being used as valuable resource. Then we could ponder how women's oftentimes invisible and underestimated agency could be acknowledged to the benefit of Ukrainian society at large.

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The week-long intensive Conversatorium on Ukraine focuses on the past, present, and future of Ukraine and its regional context. The five guest talks scheduled for Sept. 12-16, will provide insights into the complexities of its history, politics, and culture, helping to illuminate the current situation and to see the future beyond the horizon of the war.

Oksana Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist, a Visiting Professor at the Anthropology Department, New School of Social Research, and head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (in Lviv). She authored two books: Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukrainskii kilturi druhoi polovyny 19 – pochatku 20 stolittia (Lviv, 2008; 2n ed. in 2012) and Ukrainky v GULAGu: vyzhyty znachyt peremohty (Lviv, 2017; 2nd revised ed. 2020), the latter was included into the list of the 30 most significant books of the Ukrainian Independence by the Ukrainian Book Institute in 2021. Its English version Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2021) was awarded the Translated Book Prize from Peterson Literary Fund in December 2021. She also edited and co-edited several volumes including the award-winning book Ukrainski zhinky u hornyli modernizatsii (Kharkiv, 2017).

Since 2010 she serves as a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History. She is also a co-founder and a vice-president of the Ukrainian Oral History Association. In 2014-2020 Oksana Kis was an editor-in-chief of the academic website Ukraina Moderna, and she is an editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History. In 2018 she was elected to the Scientific Council of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine. 

Dr. Kis is a recipient of several academic awards, including the Fulbright Scholarship (Rutgers University, 2003; Columbia University, 2011), Shklar Research Fellowship (Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 2007), Petro Jacyk Visiting Professorship (Columbia University, 2010), and Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Professorship (University of Alberta, 2013), Petro Jacyk Research Fellowship (University of Toronto, 2018). She has taught at Columbia University, University of Alberta, Free Ukrainian University, Ukrainian Catholic University, and Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. The areas of her expertise include Ukrainian women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, and gender transformations in post-socialist countries. Her current research focuses on everyday lives of the Ukrainian refugees in the displaced persons camps in post-WWII Europe.

For the full program of the Conversatorium on Ukraine please visit our website here.

Registered attendees will receive the zoom link via email.