Mark Von Hagen: Historical studies should not depend on who comes to power in a country

“Excellent interpretation of some historical periods in the different parts of Ukraine is not something new. Germany, Spain, and Belgium are living through a similar experience. The task of historians is to use various historical sources to better understand processes that took place in the different parts of country over a long period of time,” said Mark Von Hagen of the Arizona State University at the international conference of researchers from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, the United States, and western Europe, which took place at the Ukrainian Catholic University. “Many citizens, trying to forget the Soviet the past, want Ukraine to became a nation-state at once, like France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain,” noted the professor. “However, this is regressive because all of these countries took centuries to form. Ukraine differs from these countries because the process of creating a nation in eastern Europe differs from the western European model of creating a state.” At the same time, Mark Von Hagen cautioned “to not fall into the simplified method of interpreting the history of Ukraine as exclusively the history of Ukraine and not to be bound to the format of the state historiography approach. Historical studies should not depend on who comes to power in a country. You live beside Poles, Russians, Crimean Tatars, and Jews. They had an influence on the formation of the country, cooperated with the native population, and to cast this aside is historical ignorance.”

Department of Information and External Relations of UCU

Background information about the conference  On October 8-10, 2010, an international academic conference on the theme “Urgent Problems of Researching in the Humanities in the Post-Soviet Space” was held at the Ukrainian Catholic University. The organizers of conference were the International Association for the Humanities and the Ukrainian Catholic University. The conference brought together about eighty research workers from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, USA, and western Europe.  Information about Mark Von Hagen Mark Von Hagen teaches Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian history at Arizona State University. He was formerly at Colombian University. He was educated at Georgetown University, the University of Indiana, and Stamford University. He teaches at Stamford and Yale universities, the Free University of Berlin, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

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