{"id":20553,"date":"2026-01-28T10:10:30","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T08:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/?p=20553"},"modified":"2026-03-05T10:16:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T08:16:47","slug":"ukrainian-art-history-is-not-a-marginal-appendix-to-european-culture-interview-with-stefaniia-demchuck-recipient-of-the-international-research-award-of-the-max-weber-foundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/20553","title":{"rendered":"“Ukrainian art history is not a marginal appendix to European culture” – Interview with Stefaniia Demchuk, recipient of the International Research Award of the Max Weber Foundation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Following her selection as the recipient of the International Research Award, which will be presented in the context of the opening of the Research Centre Ukraine<\/strong>, the Max Weber Stiftung spoke with<\/strong> Stefaniia Demchuk <\/strong>about her current research projects, her international academic trajectory, and the motivations that guide her work. In the interview, she reflects on early modern visual culture <\/strong>in Ukraine and East-Central Europe, the transregional entanglements <\/strong>that shape her approach to art history, and the personal and scholarly significance of pursuing research under the conditions of ongoing war<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What projects are you currently working on and what excites or motivates you most about your current research?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am currently working on several interrelated projects that explore early modern visual culture through the lenses of transregional exchange, historiography, and material culture, with a particular focus on Ukraine and East-Central Europe. I am developing a series of articles on early modern Ukrainian art and architecture \u2013 especially funerary chapels, religious imagery, and the entanglements of Netherlandish, Italian, and local traditions \u2013 situating Ukrainian material within broader European art-historical narratives from which it has long been marginalised. A parallel strand of my research addresses the historiography and methodology of art history itself, including the reception of figures such as Max Dvo\u0159\u00e1k and Heinrich W\u00f6lfflin in East-Central Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What motivates me most is the possibility of making Ukrainian art history visible as an integral part of European cultural history, rather than as a peripheral or derivative case.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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\"Rotes
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv<\/strong>
\u00a9 Unsplash (Unsplash License)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In the current context of war, this scholarly work has acquired an additional urgency. It is a way of safeguarding cultural knowledge, challenging inherited hierarchies of canon formation, and insisting on intellectual connectedness across borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does receiving the International Research Award of the Max Weber Stiftung mean to you personally and professionally?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Receiving the International Research Award of the Max Weber Stiftung has a profound meaning for me both personally and professionally. Professionally, it constitutes an important recognition of my work within an international scholarly community whose commitment to transnational research, methodological rigour, and long-term intellectual exchange closely aligns with my own academic values. Such recognition not only promotes my past projects and supports my current ones, but also helps integrate research on Ukrainian art and visual culture more firmly into broader European and global scholarly conversations. I am especially looking forward to further collaboration with the Research Centre Ukraine of the Max Weber Stiftung in Lviv.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a personal level, the award would represent a form of stability and affirmation at a time when both my professional and private life have been profoundly disrupted by the war in Ukraine. Continuing scholarly work under conditions of precarity \u2013 financial, emotional, and institutional \u2013 has required sustained effort and resilience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Support from the Max Weber Stiftung therefore not only enables focused research time and access to essential academic infrastructures, but also serves as a powerful sign that scholarly work carried out under extreme circumstances is seen, valued, and worth sustaining.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Most importantly, the award allows me to continue my research as a form of intellectual continuity and responsibility: preserving, interpreting, and contextualising Ukrainian cultural heritage within a shared European history. In this sense, it would not simply support an individual career, but would contribute to maintaining scholarly dialogue and knowledge production across borders at a moment when such connections are especially fragile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your academic path includes fellowships across Europe and the United States. How have these international experiences shaped your understanding of Ukrainian art history?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My international research experiences in Europe and the United States have fundamentally shaped the way I approach Ukrainian art history, both methodologically and conceptually. Working in different scholarly environments \u2013 from Central European universities and research institutes to major American libraries and fellowship programmes \u2013 has trained me to see Ukrainian material not as a self-contained national corpus, but as part of a dense network of artistic, intellectual, and material exchanges across early modern Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ivan Trush \u2013 Hutsul Girls<\/em> (1933) <\/strong>
\u00a9 Public Domain, Quelle: Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Access to international collections, archives, and libraries has been crucial in revealing how deeply Ukrainian art was embedded in broader European processes: through the circulation of prints, artistic models, devotional practices, theoretical texts, and historiographical frameworks. Equally important has been exposure to different historiographical traditions, which made visible the ways in which Ukrainian art history has often been shaped by external paradigms \u2013 imperial, Soviet, or Western \u2013 and how these paradigms can be critically reassessed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These experiences also sharpened my awareness of the structural invisibility of Ukrainian art within global art history. Being positioned simultaneously as an insider to the material and an outsider within international academia has encouraged me to act as a mediator: translating Ukrainian sources, objects, and debates into shared scholarly languages without flattening their specificity. In this sense, international mobility has not distanced me from Ukrainian art history; rather, it has provided the intellectual tools and comparative perspective necessary to situate it more convincingly within transnational narratives, which remains a central aim of my current and future research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there is one idea or understanding you would like people to take away from your work, what would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there is one idea I would like people to take away from my work, it is that Ukrainian art history is not a marginal appendix to European culture, but one of the places where European art history becomes especially legible in its complexity. Ukrainian visual culture, shaped by shifting borders, confessional plurality, mobility of artists and objects, and layered political regimes, offers a privileged vantage point from which to rethink categories such as centre and periphery, influence and originality, continuity and rupture. Across my work, whether on early modern religious imagery, funerary monuments, banqueting culture, or historiography, I seek to show that cultural \u201centanglement\u201d is not an abstract theoretical concept but a historically grounded reality, visible in materials, practices, biographies, and institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ukrainian cases do not merely illustrate European trends. Rather, they challenge established narratives by exposing their limits and blind spots.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, I hope my research encourages a more reflexive art history \u2013 one that takes seriously the histories of regions long written through imperial or reductive frameworks, and that recognises scholarly responsibility as part of cultural continuity. In this sense, I want my work to go beyond adding Ukrainian material to existing narratives and to contribute to a recalibration of how European art history itself is written and understood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Barockes
Potocki Palace<\/em>, branch of the Lviv National Art Gallery<\/em><\/strong>.
\u00a9 Andrey Okhrimets \u2013 Potocki Palace in Lviv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Quelle: Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Dr. Stefaniia Demchuk<\/strong>, who was nominated by the Research Centre Ukraine, is this year\u2019s recipient of the Max Weber Foundation\u2019s International Research Award. The prize is endowed with \u20ac5,000 and additionally supports the translation and publication of one of the awardee\u2019s scholarly works.

Stefaniia Demchuk is among the scholars bringing new clarity and international visibility to Ukrainian art history. Her research combines a decolonial approach with transnational art history, firmly situating Ukraine within the global academic discourse. Her scholarly profile unfolds between Lviv, Los Angeles, Leuven, and Brno \u2013 international and conceptually innovative. Her recent publications, including the much-noticed article Decolonizing Ukrainian Art History<\/em> (2024), compellingly demonstrate how Ukrainian art history can move beyond national frameworks and be repositioned as an integral part of european and global art history.<\/td>		\"Frau<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the occasion of awarding the International Research Award, the Max Weber Stiftung spoke with Stefaniia Demchuk about her current research projects, her international academic trajectory, and the motivations that guide her work. In the interview, she reflects on early modern visual culture in Ukraine and East-Central Europe, the transregional entanglements that shape her approach to art history, and the personal and scholarly significance of pursuing research under the conditions of ongoing war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4757,"featured_media":20767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_license":"","publish_to_discourse":"0","publish_post_category":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"1","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5911,2264452,4835,2264600],"tags":[2264875,214979,247258,480055],"ppma_author":[2265255,2265350],"class_list":["post-20553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-geisteswissenschaft-international","category-interview","category-kunstgeschichte","tag-internationaler-forschungspreis","tag-kunstgeschichte","tag-max-weber-stiftung","tag-nachwuchsforderung"],"authors":[{"term_id":2265255,"user_id":4757,"is_guest":0,"slug":"maxweberstiftung","display_name":"Max Weber Stiftung","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cdba4e03b5b592913f3a423eab290a9c6c63c33d14328cdc43bfb6bb4d9c1eb?s=96&r=g","1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""},{"term_id":2265350,"user_id":91438,"is_guest":0,"slug":"abock","display_name":"Annika Bock","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/c490f2e00eec2cd7a23357bc744a565fabd71673e66237496df2e0daf926c65f?s=96&r=g","1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4757"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20553"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22069,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20553\/revisions\/22069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20553"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gab.hypotheses.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=20553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}