Dr. Nataliia Ivchyk is a Holocaust scholar active in the field of public history and memory politics. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at Rivne State University for the Humanities in her hometown of Rivne, Ukraine. Together with Maksym Gon (a history professor currently serving in the Ukrainian Army) and Petro Dolhanov, Nataliia co-founded and is a project manager of NGO "Mnemonics,'' an organization devoted to citizenship education and the memory of the multicultural history of the Rivne region. In 2022, NGO "Mnemonics" was awarded by The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism prize for the commemoration of the violent history of the twentieth century.
Nataliia's research examines gender and children's experience during the Holocaust as well as memory politics in Ukraine and East Central Europe. She has held a number of international fellowships. Her recent research projects include: "Disgraced Worlds: Jewish Families during the Holocaust" (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, July 2022), "Gender and Everyday Life in Volhynia and Podolia Jewish Ghettos" (Prague Civil Society Center and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany, 2021) "Life and Agony of the Jews in the Rivne Ghetto: Reconstructing Women's Experiences" (Yad Vashem, Israel, 2018) and "Ghettos in the General District of Volhynia and Podolia in Memories of Jewish Victims and Neighbors" (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2017-18). Her most recent publications include monographs titled Insulted Otherness: Ethno-Confessional Policy of the Russian Empire in Right-Bank Ukraine, 1850-1880 and The Town of Memory – the Town of Oblivion: the Palimpsests of the Memorial Landscape of Rivne (as a co-author), which addresses the gendered aspect of the symbolic space of Rivne.
When the Russian Federation attacked Ukraine in February of this year, Dr.Ivchyk was in Romania with a group of students. They were taking part in an EU-funded program on civic education and European identity for two weeks. After a while, she made her way from Romania to Prague and back home to Rivne.
Thanks to Dr. Serhy Yekelchyk from the University of Victoria, she was connected with UBC professors Dr. Richard Menkis and Dr. Heidi Tworek, and the Scholars at Risk network. After several months of planning she arrived in Canada, from Ukraine through the Czech Republic and Germany. Nataliia is joining UBC's Department of History as a Visiting Scholar for 2022-23. During this time, she's planning to conduct research at the VHEC, and she will also teach a course in summer 2023 (HIST 402: "Problems in International Relations"). Nataliia was the John Grace Memorial Holocaust Historian in Residence at Green College through September 2022 through March 2024.