Profile
Oksana Kis is a 2022/23 Visiting Professor in the Anthropology department at The New School for Social Research.
Dr. Kis is a feminist historian and anthropologist from Ukraine, head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (based in Lviv).
She is a President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, a co-founder and a vice-president of the Ukrainian Oral History Association.
Degrees Held
2018 - Doctoral habilitation (doktor nauk) - Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, NAS of Ukraine
2011 - Senior Scholar certificate, Higher Certification Commission of Ukraine
2002 - Ph.D. in History/Ethnology (kandydat nauk) - Institute of Ethnology, NAS of Ukraine
Recent Publications
Books
Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2021
Ukrainky v GULAGu: vyzhyty znachyt peremohty (Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva NAN Ukrainy, 2017 (2nd revised ed. 2020)
Zhinka v tradytsiinii ukrainskii kilturi druhoi polovyny 19 – pochatku 20 stolittia. Lviv: Instytut narodoznavstva NAN Ukrainy, 2008 (2n ed. 2012)
Edited volumes
Ukrainski zhinky u hornyli modernizatsii. Kharkiv: KSD, 2017
Zhinky Tsentralno-Skhidnoi Evropy v Druhii Svitovii viini: genderni aspekty dosvidu v chasy ekstremalnoho nasylstva (co-edited with Gelinada Grinchenko and Kateryna Kobchenko). Kyiv: Art-Knyha, 2015
Articles and chapters
Faith as a Shield: Ukrainian Women’s Religious Practices in the Gulag. Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 29 (2021): 9-29
Women’s Experience of the Holodomor: Challenges and Ambiguities of Motherhood. Journal of Genocide Research, October 2020
Remaining Human: Ukrainian Women’s Experiences of Constructing “Normal Life” in the Gulag. Gender and Peacebuilding: All Hands Required, ed. by Maureen P. Flaherty, Tom Matyok, et all. Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 121-137
Gender Dreams or Sexism? Advertising in Post-Soviet Ukraine. New Imaginaries. Youthful Reconstruction of Ukraine's Cultural Paradigm, ed. by Marian Rubchak. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Press, 2015, pp. 110-140 (co-authored with Tetyana Bureychak)
National Femininity Used and Contested: Women’s Participation in the Nationalist Underground in Western Ukraine during the 1940s-50s. East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Vol. 2(2), 2015, pp. 53-83
Ukrainian Women in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Politics: When Personal and Political Merge and Diverge. Femina Politica. Zeitschrift fur Feministische Politikwissenschaft. Vol. 23(2), 2014, pp. 129-132
Defying Death: Women’s Experience of the Holodomor, 1932-33. ASPASIA. International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southern European Women’s and Gender History. Vol. 7, 2013, pp. 42-67
Feminizm we współczesnej Ukrainie: od „alergii” do ostatniej nadziei (in Polish), Kultura Enter, Vol. 3, 2013: 264-277
(Re)Construting the Ukrainian Women’s History: Actors, Agents, Narratives. Gender, Politics and Society in Ukraine, eds. Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012, pp. 152-179
Ukrainian Women Reclaiming the Feminist Meaning of International Women’s Day: A Report about Recent Feminist Activism. ASPASIA. International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southern European Women’s and Gender History. Vol. 6, 2012, pp. 219–232
Biography as a political geography: patriotism in the Ukrainian women’s life stories in Ukraine. Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Ukraine, ed. by Marian J. Rubchak. London: Berhahn Books, 2011, pp. 89-108
Telling the Untold: Representations of Ethnic and Regional Identities in Ukrainian Women’s Autobiographies. Orality and Literacy: Reflections across Disciplines, ed. by Keith Carlson, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, and Kristina Fagan. Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 280-314
Restoring the Broken Continuity: Women’s History in Post-Soviet Ukraine. ASPASIA: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southern European Women’s and Gender History. Vol. 6, 2012, p. 171-183
Choosing without Choice: Predominant Models of Femininity in Contemporary Ukraine. Gender Transitions in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. by Madeleine Hurd, Helen Carlback and Sara Rastback. Stockholm: Gondolin Publishers, 2005, pp. 105-136
L’approche de genre dans les recherches en histoire et ethnologie Ukrainiennes (in French), Éthnologie Française, Vol. 34(2), 2004, рp. 291-302
Research Interests
Ukrainian women’s history, feminist anthropology, oral history, gender transformations in post-socialist countries.
Her current research focuses on everyday lives of the Ukrainian refugees in the displaced persons camps in post-WWII Europe.
Awards And Honors
Dr. Kis is a recipient of several academic awards, including two Fulbright Scholarships (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 2003; Columbia University, 2011), Shklar Research Fellowship (Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 2007), Petro Jacyk Visiting Professorship (Columbia University, 2010), Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visinting Professorship (University of Alberta, 2013), Petro Jacyk Research Fellowship (University of Toronto, 2018).
Her book Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2021) was awarded the Translated Book Prize from Peterson Literary Fund in December 2021.
Her book Ukrainky v GULAGu: vyzhyty znachyt peremohty (Lviv, 2017; 2nd revised ed. 2020) was included into the list of the 30 most significant books of the Ukraine's Independence by the Ukrainian Book Institute.
The volume she edited Ukrainski zhinky u hornyli modernizatsii (Kharkiv: KSD, 2017) received the Best Book in History award from the Lviv Book Forum in September 2017.