The first session of the new Book of the Month series by the CEU Review of Books and the Review of Democracy presented the essay collection Invisible University for Ukraine: Essays on Democracy at War, edited by Ostap Sereda, Balázs Trencsényi, Tetiana Zemliakova, and Guillaume Lancereau, published by Cornell University Press in 2024. The session was co-hosted by Visible Ukraine.
The Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) is an initiative of Central European University, and is implemented in cooperation with the CEU Democracy Institute and Ukrainian and EU-based university partners. It was launched in the spring of 2022 and by now, it involved nearly 1000 Ukrainian students who have taken online and on-site courses. The program aims to help sustain intellectual growth despite the ongoing war and provide a framework to push back against autocracy. It was recognized by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University with the 2024 Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal, by the second-place prize in the 2024 MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship, by the Dr. Elemér Hantos Prize.
As a result of the ongoing online courses, Summer and Winter Schools, the volume Invisible University for Ukraine: Essays on Democracy at War brings together the Ukrainian students and scholars with their international peers. The authors explore the intersections between human resilience, intellectual curiosity, and unsolved historical legacies. In each chapter, the authors ask from a different perspective fundamental questions about ethical commitments, agency, life, vision of future and historical tensions caused by the ongoing conflict. This book is available in Open Access and can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes from the Cornell University Press website.
PARTICIPANTS
Authors:
- Tetiana Zemliakova, Lead Researcher/Research Fellow Democracy in History Workgroup, CEU Democracy Institute
- Ostap Sereda, Associate Professor of History, Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv); Visiting Lecturer, Bard College Berlin
Discussants:
- Jan Kubik, Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and Professor Emeritus of Slvonic and East European Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London
- Natalie Nougayrède, Advisor to Civil Society Organizations, Institute for Documentation and Exchange (Index), Lviv, Ukraine
Moderator:
- Adrian Matus, Editor, Review of Democracy
