Dr Olena Palko — Birkbeck, University of London

Overview

Biography

Olena Palko joined Birkbeck in January 2018 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Her research interests lie in the field of early Soviet cultural history and the interwar history of Eastern Europe. She was awarded her Ph.D. from UEA in 2017 and held research fellowships at Humbold University (Berlin) and Basel University. She also holds a Degree of ‘Candidate of Sciences’ (kandydat nauk) from the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Her current research examines the interwar minority policies in Eastern Europe. It aims to investigate the links between foreign-policy considerations of the Polish and Soviet governments and the promotion of ethnic diversity in the region. Thereby, the project focuses on the competing policies towards the Polish minority in Ukraine/Belarus and the Ukrainian/Belarusian minorities in Poland

Olena has taught various courses in Modern European, Russian and Soviet history at Birkbeck, the University of East Anglia and the University of Basel

Highlights

Latest paper: Palko, O. (2021). “Poles of the World Unite”: The Transnational History of the 1929 World Congress of Poles Abroad in the Context of Interwar Soviet–Polish Rivalries. Nationalities Papers, 1-21.
Prize for the Best Book in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture (2019-20) from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies
Eastern Europe's Minorities in a Century of Change: podcast series convener
Co-convener of the BASEES Study Group for Minority Histories
Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu (eds.) Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (MQUP, 2022) funded by the Centre for Culture and Governance in Europe, University of St. Gallen, and the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies (CFUS)

Qualifications

PhD in History, University of East Anglia, 2017

Professional memberships

Member of British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES)
Post-Graduate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Honours and awards

Prize for the Best Book in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture, American Association for Ukrainian Studies, June 2021
Scholarly Publication Support Grant, Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies (CFUS), June 2020
Post-Doctoral Visiting Research Fellowship, Deutsches Historisches Institut, Warsaw, Poland, June 2019
Post-Graduate Prize for the Best Article, BASEES , June 2018
'Ukrainian Research in Switzerland' (URIS) Post-Doctoral Fellowship , University of Basel, Switzerland, June 2017
Faculty of Arts and Humanities Graduate School Prize, Best Article, University of East Anglia, June 2017
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Study Foundation of the Berlin House of Representatives, June 2013
The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) annual PhD Scholarship, The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) , June 2013
National Scholarship Programme for the Support of Mobility of Students, PhD Students, University Teachers and Researchers, Government of the Slovak Republic, June 2012

ORCID

0000-0001-9576-7906

Research

Research interests

National minorities in Eastern and Southeastern Europe
Political and cultural history of Soviet Union and Ukraine
Transnational history of the Polish-Soviet borderlands

Research overview

Dr Olena Palko is the author of Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury, 2020) that examines the rationale, limitations, and peculiarities of the Soviet nationalities policy in Ukraine and the role of artists and public intellectuals in the process of political and cultural Sovietisation.

Her current project, entitled ‘Contested Minorities: A Transnational History of the Polish-Soviet Borderlands, 1918-1939’ employs a comparative and transnational history methodology to identify the underlying motives behind the implementation of the minority policies in the Soviet-Polish borderlands in the interwar period, and to examine the link between ethnic particularism and foreign policy considerations of the emerging Polish and Soviet governments.

Dr Olena Palko is also co-editing (with Prof. Constantin Ardeleanu, University of Galati) the edited volume dealing with the formation of Ukraine’s borders, titled ‘Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth-Century Ukraine’ (forthcoming with MQUP), and a special issue in the peer-reviewed journal National Identities (with Dr Samuel Foster, UEA) titled, ‘Contested Minorities in the “New Europe”’.

Dr Palko's primary research interest lies in the field of Soviet and East European history, nationalism, and minorities.

Research Centres and Institutes

co-convener, Study Group for Minority History
Project Coordinator, Shadows of Empire: contesting territorial imaginations and borders in modern Europe

Research clusters and groups

Mobility, migration
Conflict and violence
Difference, race and inequality
Global history and internationalism

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Teaching modules

The Modern World (SSHC411S4)

Publications

Article

Palko, Olena (2022) Constructing identities, ascribing nationalities: the Polish minority in Ukraine during late-imperial and early-Soviet rule. EUXEINOS - Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region 12 (34), pp. 15-48. ISSN 2296-0708.
Palko, Olena (2022) Between Moscow, Warsaw, and the Holy See: the case of Father Andrzej Fedukowicz amidst the early Soviet anti-Catholic campaign. Revolutionary Russia ISSN 0954-6545. (In Press)
Palko, Olena (2021) ‘Poles of the World Unite’: the transnational history of the 1929 World Congress of Poles abroad in the context of interwar Soviet-Polish rivalries. Nationalities Papers ISSN 0090-5992. (In Press)
Palko, Olena and Foster, S. (2021) Contested minorities in the ‘New Europe’: national identities in the interwar eastern and southeastern Europe. National Identities 23 (4), pp. 303-323. ISSN 1460-8944.
Palko, Olena (2020) Mykola Khvyl’ovyi and the making of Soviet Ukrainian literature. Connexe: Les espaces postcommunistes en question(s) 5, pp. 29-52.
Palko, Olena (2019) Reading in Ukrainian: the working class and mass literature in early Soviet Ukraine. Social History 44 (3), pp. 343-368. ISSN 0307-1022.
Palko, Olena (2018) Social and/or national revolution? Ukrainian communisms in the revolution and civil war. Socialist History journal ISSN 0969-4331.
Palko, Olena and King, F. (2018) Contrasting centenaries: how Russia, Ukraine and Belarus marked October. Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History 14, ISSN 1758-6437.
Horbyk, R. and Palko, Olena (2017) Righting the writing; the power dynamic of Soviet Ukraine language policies and reforms in the 1920s-1930s. Studi Slavistici XIV, pp. 67-89. ISSN 1824-761X.
Palko, Olena (2016) Between two powers: the Soviet Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvyl'ovyi. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 64 (4), pp. 575-598. ISSN 0021-4019.
Palko, Olena (2014) Ukrainian National Communism: challenging history. Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 22 (1), pp. 27-48. ISSN 0965-156X.

Book

Palko, Olena (2020) Making Ukraine Soviet: literature and cultural politics under Lenin and Stalin. London, UK: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350142718. (In Press)

Book Section

Palko, Olena (2020) Debating the early Soviet Nationalities Policy: the case of Soviet Ukraine. In: Douds, L. and Harris, J. and Whitewood, P. (eds.) The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917-1941. Library of Modern Russia. London: I.B.Tauris. ISBN 9781350117907. (In Press)