Jessica Zychowicz PhD, University of Michigan; BA, University of California Berkeley

I am currently Director of Fulbright Ukraine and  

IIE: Institute of International Education Kyiv.

For a recent press overview of the history of IIE since 1919 in light of current events, see here.  

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For ways to locate help for individuals or institutions impacted by the ongoing war, please get in touch through this site, or at above links. Additional resources are compiled here.

I am currently based in Warszawa/Kyiv. 

In my daily work I serve a wide community of students, scholars, artists, and institutions globally connected to this region of the world. 

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I am a scholar, author, consultant, and curator.

My recent monograph about Ukraine has won several awards including the 2022 American Association of Ukrainian Studies Book Prize, the MLA Slavic Studies Prize, and the Omeljan Pritsak Prize at ASEEES for Ukraine Studies given by Harvard. The forum for scholarly articles at Krytyka Press  that I co-founded, "Race and Postcolonialism" won the Ivan Lysiak Rudnycky Award from Ukraine's Ministry Foreign Affairs Inaugural Award for Cultural Diplomacy in 2020.

 

I completed my doctorate at the University of Michigan in Slavic Studies/REEES focused on Poland and Ukraine relations, visual culture, historiography, and gender. Among other research positions, I have been a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in REES Area Studies to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2017-18). I was also a Fellow at Univ. of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs (2015-2016), where I designed and hosted a conference about the beginning of the war in Ukraine featuring firsthand knowledge about the conflict from U.S. and Ukrainian and Canadian anthropologists and historians, entitled: "The Ukraine-Russia Conflict: Uncommon Perspectives." 

From 2018-2021 I was also a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at Univ. of Alberta, and also in 2018 at Institute for Russian and East European Studies at Uppsala Univ. in Sweden.

The first time I went to Ukraine was as a TEFL Peace Corps volunteer (2005-2007) after earning my BA in English literature and political theory at U.C. Berkeley.

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I was born in the U.S. My ancestors arrived at Ellis Island in 1890-1910 and 1840s from East Europe and Ireland and Germany; my great-grandfathers and grandfathers served in the Civil War, also in Custer's Army in WWI, and the U.S. Navy in WWII along the Pacific Front and against the Axis inside of Italy. My grandparents supported the Solidarity Movement, dissidents defecting from the USSR, escapees of the GULAG, Holocaust survivors and others. Democracy was the language of both of my grandmothers who raised many children and educated them all, even though they, like many women of their own generation, were not able to attend university themselves. They inspire my work most of all.

I learned Ukrainian and Polish as an adult.

English is my native language; I learned Spanish as a child.

Several languages, religions, and nationalities

are woven into the fabric of my life.

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