The Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine : Epistemologies, Agencies, and Margins

The Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine: Epistemologies, Agencies, and Margins is the first edition of a two-year scholarly initiative designed for early-career researchers from Ukraine to take part in critical, collaborative, and practice-oriented reflection on art historical methodology and develop their own research projects.

From August to October, 12 Ukrainian art historians participated in the weekly deep-reading methodological webinars and peer-to-peer consultations with experts, while developing their own research projects in art history.

In the last week of October they will gather in Bibliotheca Hertziana to present their work-in-progress and take part in a series of intense workshops with renowned scholars.

The seminars will be accompanied by the public lecture program, which will be announced later on this page.

SPEAKERS

David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there.He has a specialist interest in the art and design histories of Eastern Europe under communist rule.

Edit András is a Hungarian art historian, an independent scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She is a senior member of the HUN-REN, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of Art History, Budapest. Her main interest concerns Eastern and Central European modern and contemporary art, gender issues, socially engaged art, public art, critical theories, post-socialist condition, and nationalism in the region.

Dr. Mateusz Kapustka is a Privatdozent at the Art History Institute of the University of Zurich (UZH) and, since 2025, the PI of a DFG research project at the Freie Universität Berlin (FU. His research interests include image conflicts, visual anachronism, idolatry and iconoclasm, images of protest, transcultural art history, and early modern intersections of knowledge and visual propaganda (focus Central and Eastern Europe).

Oksana Barshynova, deputy director of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, is an art historian, curator, and researcher studying contemporary art and the history of Ukrainian art in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. She is codeveloper of the new concept for exhibiting modern and contemporary art at NAMU and the author of many articles on the history of Ukrainian art.

Dr Olenka Pevny, Associate Professor in Ukrainian Studies and in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge. She studies the art and culture of Kyivan Rus’ and Ruthenia. She is particularly interested in the reception and acculturation of the Orthodox tradition in Eastern Slavic lands and in the place of visual culture in narratives of national, regional, religious, and gender identity.

Dr phil. Seraina Renz is a lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University. She is specialised in modern and contemporary art from central and eastern Europe, with a particular focus on the former Yugoslavia. She examines monuments, conceptual and performance art from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as sculpture, memorials, and architecture from the first half of the 20th century.

Dr Stefaniia Demchuk is Associate Professor of Art History at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research explores art historiography and methodological approaches to early modern visual culture, with a focus on Netherlandish and East-Central European contexts. She is editor and contributor of Entangled Art Histories in Ukraine (Routledge, 2025) and publishes widely on iconography, cultural transfer, and visuality.

Scientific Organization: The project is realized with the support of the Getty Foundation, as a part of the Connecting Art Histories program, by the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and the Max Weber Foundation’s Research Centre Ukraine.

_{Image: Oleksandr Bohomazov, “Sharpening the Saws”, 1927, oil on canvas, 138x155 cm. National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv}