Yale European Studies Council’s Professor Marci Shore Delivers Lecture at Kyiv Security Forum

Marci Shore, professor of history and director of graduate studies for the Yale MacMillan Center’s master’s degree in European and Russian studies, traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine in March to attend the 16th annual Kyiv Security Forum.

 

Joining the conversation with security experts, politicians, and thinkers, Shore stressed that “Ukraine is the vanguard of this moment that returns a sense of real meaning to what it means to be a human being with dignity, to what it means to take responsibility for truth.”

 

Shore also engaged in a thought-provoking discussion with Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher, and Tetyana Ogarkova, a Ukrainian literary critic and journalist, at the Kyiv School of Economics. The conversation delved into the concept of liminal experience, or “borderline situations” (Grenzsituation), which has been a pivotal theme in twentieth-century philosophy, spanning psychoanalysis, existentialism, postmodernism, and dissident thinking. The conversation centered on the idea on how we can integrate this concept of liminal experience into the twenty-first century, and how might it aid our understanding of the past and present, particularly within the lived reality of Ukraine.

 

During her visit, Shore also had the opportunity to reconnect with alumni of the European and Russian Studies MA program who are now working across different fields, from consulting to human rights advocacy, in Ukraine: Kamila Orlova ’18, Sergii Drobysh ’18, and Maksimas Milta ’23.