Daria Mattingly, a PhD candidate in Ukrainian studies at University of Cambridge is working on a project that is an interdisciplinary examination of the identities, activities and memorial traces of the rank-and-file perpetrators of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, known as the Holodomor.

Date: 26 April 2018

Time: 7pm

Venue: Ukrainian Institute, 79 Holland Park, London

Admission: Free but registration is required. Please register here.

While Stalin and his fuctionaries in the Kremlin have long become an object of enquiry, people who directly facilitated mass famine in Ukraine have largely been neglected by scholars. Who were the perpetrators on the ground? How have they been remembered?

To answer such questions, Daria proposes a methodology that incorporates a microhistorical analysis of the famine period with a close reading of memorial and cultural texts composed after the famine. She draws on archival data, testimonies of the perpetrators and the survivors of the famine, and on contemporary ‘post-memory’. Casting what took place in the rest of the country in greater relief, her study challenges reductive readings of the famine as well as readings of its active participants as outcasts devoid of historical agency.

With this project I hope to contribute to the study of the Holodomor Studies and to history of Soviet Union more generally.

Speaker’s bio

Daria Mattingly is a PhD candidate in Ukrainian studies at University of Cambridge. She is currently finishing her dissertation on the rank-and-file perpetrators of the Holodomor and their representation in cultural memory. She is also a convener of Places of Amnesia research group which focuses in its seminars on themes less commonly studied. Mattingly has written articles and reviews on topics in Ukrainian history and cultural history. She was educated at Kyiv Shevchenko University and University of Bristol, where she received her MA in Russian history.