Course director: Volodymyr Ryzhkovskyi (Independent Researcher)
This course offers a critical perspective on twentieth-century Ukrainian history by situating it within broader global processes of modernity, modernization, and modernism. The central premise of the course is that claims to be “modern,” “up-to-date,” or forward-looking are never neutral. They rest on historically specific attitudes toward time and progress and often operate politically by denying contemporaneity to others. The course explores how this “politics of time” unfolded in twentieth-century Ukraine, producing competing and often conflicting visions of modernity across different historical moments—imperial collapse, revolution, Soviet socialism, war, postwar reconstruction, and late socialism. Using Ukrainian modernism as an entry point, the course engages students through artistic, architectural, and cultural phenomena that are often intuitively compelling but are rarely connected to the deeper processes of economic transformation, social reorganization, and ideological reflection that made them possible. By bridging aesthetic modernism with modernization as a historical process, the course highlights the historically conditioned circumstances under which different versions of modernity emerged in Ukraine and beyond. While the course does not foreground national struggle as its primary explanatory framework, it critically examines how Ukraine was positioned—sometimes centrally, often marginally—within broader Soviet and global projects of modernity. Covering the twentieth century in its entirety, the course draws on a wide range of materials, including visual art, literature, political thought, economic history, and everyday practices, to examine how modern subjectivities were constructed, contested, and lived. In light of the current war and its global reverberations, Ukraine emerges in this course not only as an object of historical inquiry but also as a crucial site for contemporary theoretical reflection on modernity, socialism, capitalism, and possible futures.