Serhy Yekelchyk's research while affiliated with University of Victoria and other places

... Nonetheless, mid-19 th century texts tended to reflect not a continuity with pre-partition ideas about the religious identity of the national "we," but an evocation of a broader community that harkened back to the 16 th century attitudes expressed by the Confederation of Warsaw. Later, the emergence of the phrase Polak-Katolik in the 20 th century marked the pendulum's swing back towards a more religiously homogenous vision of the nation, one which set up new barriers to outsiders and demanded conformity among insiders (Porter, 2000). The hyphenated expression denoted a moment of transition and rhetorical contestation, when multiple ideas about who was a Pole vied for supremacy in a dynamically expanding modern public sphere. ...

... The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union were followed by a 'recovery of memory' also in the Eastern part of the continent (Nora 2002). Not by accident, the break-up of 'Stalin's empire of memory' (Yekelchyk 2004) coincided with the third phase of border changes. 'After the collapse of communism, memories of the Second World War were "unfrozen" on both sides of the former Iron Curtain … liberated from constraints imposed by the need for state legitimation and friend-enemy thinking associated with the Cold War' (Müller 2002, 6). ...

... After a brief period of tolerance for Ukrainian narratives of national heroism and anti-Polish and anti-German resistance during the Great Patriotic War, 23 Russocentrism re-emerged in historiographic accounts of crucial moments in Ukrainian-Russian history, duly dressed in the rhetoric of the 'friendship of peoples', and enforced through a renewed series of post-war repressions known as the 'Zhdanovshina' (Reshetar, 1953). These reformulations included such mainstays of the Tsarist narrative as the Kievan Rus, the Treaty of Pereieslav, and the Battle of Poltava: the common Slavic origins of Russians and Ukrainians were unfailingly stressed, and the 'progressive' role of Greater Russia in aiding the Ukrainian Cossacks in their endeavours against Polish feudalism became a theme echoing-in almost literal ways-that of earlier, nineteenth-century accounts (Pelenski, 1964;Yekelchyk, 2002Yekelchyk, , 2004. 24 While, as in the case of 'Oriental' peoples, de-Stalinisation did present a short-lived window of opportunity for the assertion of-especially-Ukrainian specificity, strict limits remained-notably on a need to assert the Russians' leading, progressive historic role-and narrowed considerably during the Brezhnev years: in fact, historiographic deviations were cited to justify the purge of Ukraine's Khrushchev-appointed 'national-communist' leader, Petro Shelest (L. ...

... To understand the socialist background of citizenship, I separate understandings of citizenship into small analytical units. First, I use the tendency of some authors (Turner 1993, Somers 1993, Yekelchyk 2006 to define citizenship as more than "merely [a] collection of rights and obligations" (Turner 1993: 2), but rather as a set different kinds of citizenship practices. The set of practices can take different forms: Somers, for instance, notes political, social, and cultural practices of citizenship (Somers 1993). ...