About the person
Olena Palko is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests lie in the field of early Soviet cultural history and the interwar history of Eastern Europe. She was awarded her Ph.D. from UEA in 2017 and held research fellowships at Humbold University (Berlin) and Basel University. She also holds a Degree of ‘Candidate of Sciences’ (kandydat nauk) from the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Research
Her current research examines the interwar minority policies in Eastern Europe. It aims to investigate the links between foreign-policy considerations of the Polish and Soviet governments and the promotion of ethnic diversity in the region. Thereby, the project focuses on the competing policies towards the Polish minority in Ukraine/Belarus and the Ukrainian/Belarusian minorities in Poland.
Projects
"Contested Minorities: A Transnational History of the Polish-Soviet Borderlands, 1918-1939" (Birkbeck, University of London).
"Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth-Century Ukraine", publication project co-editing with Prof. Constantin Ardeleanu, University of Galati and New Europe College.
"Being a Minority in Times of Catastrophe", scientific workshop and collective publication, together with Samuel Foster, University of East Anglia.
Project Coordinator, “Shadows of Empire: contesting territorial imaginations and borders in modern Europe”: Digital map-tool (University of St. Gallen and Dekoder-gGmbH)