Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the media: a conversation with Professor Markian Prokopovych
By Samara Patel
The Zoom meeting glitches slightly as Professor Markian Prokopovych, Professor of Modern European History at the Department of History, joins the call. He adjusts his glasses on his nose as I ask the first question.
Do you want to start by introducing yourself?
My name is Markian Prokopovych, and I’m Professor of Modern European History at the Department of History.
Can you tell us a bit about your educational background?
That’s a long one. I have a number of master’s degrees, from art history to architectural conservation, to nationalism studies, to heritage, and then a PhD in history.
What’s been your favorite degree to obtain?
Probably my doctorate at Central European University in Budapest. I don’t know if you know about CEU, but it’s a highly international institution. That’s the reason I liked it so much; it was incredibly international, and incredibly critical as well. My colleagues and peers were from all around the world, from Eastern Europe to Western Europe to the Third World and so on.
That’s something that prepared me, maybe more than all the other degrees, to think critically about historical and contemporary issues. They get you ready to get out of your comfort zone.
Would you recommend getting multiple masters to students going to Durham now?
No. I think that’s absolutely not necessary. I liked being a student, finding myself, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and what I liked to do most. Things have changed since I did my masters. These days, I mostly advise people to think about what they want to do after that. We are living in a different world where students need to face these existential questions: how do you look for a job, what it is they want to do, is it helpful for you to have a postgraduate degree or diploma, or is it actually hampering you in some ways?
We’re living in a place where social media is deliberately flooded with a lot of misinformation that just isn’t helpful
How did you settle on Central and Eastern European studies as what you want to do and what you loved most?
Well, I do like the region very much, and some of my degrees that I’ve mentioned are obtained in that region. What’s interesting about it is that it’s so diverse. People who don’t work on East Central Europe or Eastern Europe tend to think that it’s a region that’s dominated by Russia, but it’s composed of many very different, interesting countries — a variety of languages, a variety of cultures. I happen to speak a lot of these languages because I lived in many of these countries, so it was a natural move to work on the region in my PhD and after that.
Would you say that you fell in love with the region?
Love. Hmm. I mean, it’s a complex question. Yes, in some ways, you obviously have to. I would rather say I find it very interesting and productive to work with.
Switching topics a bit, can you tell us a bit about the current situation in Ukraine as you see it from your academic point of view?
One thing that I should have said from the very beginning is that I’m Ukrainian. I grew up there. What I do currently is directly affected by what’s been happening in Ukraine and more broadly in that region.
Originally, I became a historian and specialized in the nineteenth century. But since the open scale warfare started in 2022, with Russia invading Ukraine, obviously that had to be put aside. I got together with a number of interested people, and now we have a whole team at Durham who are involved in all sorts of projects. My background as a historian is certainly useful there, but what is much more useful is the capacity to work with people of very different academic backgrounds: sociologists, geographers, people at the business school, the sciences, psychology, and so on. What we do is a direct consequence of what’s been happening.
What sort of projects have you been working on with this group?
One thing to say before this is that Durham has a Ukrainian partner. It’s Zaporizhzhya National University. This is a university that’s very close to the front line, but it is in Ukrainian territory, not in the occupied territory. We’ve been working with them since 2022. One thing we’ve done was a project for the twinning scheme funded by UUKI. It was called “Multidisciplinary approaches to building research capacity and resilience through partnerships during conflict” and was led by our then Deputy Pro-VC for Research Professor Jane Macnaughton. It involved people from across the entire university. We had student exchanges, staff exchanges, specific workshops, and conferences on a variety of topics.
And as a follow-up of this, we currently have a project at our Institute of Advanced Study. This one is called Looking Back to Move Forward. Beyond that, I ran an entire series of public talks at the Gala Theatre in 2022 with our colleagues in Zaporizhzhya joining online. We’ve also gotten approval for the establishment of a Centre for the Study of Ukraine. I can’t say much more about this because we are really just beginning.
What do you think the Ukraine situation tells us about the future of Europe, especially Central, and Eastern Europe?
That’s changing every day, as I’m sure you know. We are still trying to grapple with what’s been happening in the broader geopolitical space with the new Trump administration. So, at the moment, it’s very difficult to predict what will be happening. What we know for sure is that it will not be how it was in the last three years.
It’s already affecting East Central Europe and Europe more broadly. There are lots of Ukrainians who have come as refugees or temporarily displaced persons to various countries. We are now asking ourselves questions like, how do we help these people, and how do they find their place? European politicians and others are still trying to understand how to deal with this situation. All we know is that Ukraine is very much at the centre of everyone’s attention and that it needs help. It’s in the news again, maybe not necessarily in the way that Ukrainians wished it to be.
What do you think of the media attention, in and around Ukraine?
In many ways this is one of the most mediatized wars. In some ways, this certainly helped. Ukrainian media has been fantastic. In some other ways, there’s been a lot of misinformation. We’re living in a place where social media is deliberately flooded with a lot of misinformation that just isn’t helpful.
All we know is that Ukraine is very much at the centre of everyone’s attention and that it needs help
How would you say that this media attention is differing between Ukraine and other wars and genocides happening in the world right now?
My expertise doesn’t allow me to comment on other contexts, which I’m obviously following in the media and trying to understand what’s going on there. All I can say is that all news has its short time span. One conflict emerges and the media keeps its attention on it for a little bit, but then other conflicts happen, and they switch. At the moment, the new Trump administration has put both Gaza and Ukraine suddenly back on the front pages. Whether that’s good or not remains to be seen. I’m personally invested in what is happening in Ukraine and really wish that we don’t forget that people continue dying there, and that the war isn’t over. But unfortunately, the world is full of other conflicts as well.
What do you think Trump’s administration means for the war in Ukraine specifically?
There’s certainly a lot of “flooding the zone” as they call it. In other words, there is a deliberate production of a lot of news items at the same time that have to do with various conflicts, as well as with what the Trump administration understands as “American problems”.
I’m not sure anybody knows what this means for Ukraine. I would just warn against calling it a Ukrainian conflict because it isn’t – it’s Russia’s war against Ukraine. Unfortunately, some of the media that spread disinformation continue calling it a Ukrainian conflict, as if this is a conflict that originated in Ukraine. It didn’t.
You wrote the book, The Museum Age in Austria Hungary. What inspired this book and why did you feel it was a necessary write?
The reason I work in this region is because it is so interesting and so diverse. However, one of the consequences of this is that you need to have really good language skills to be able to scope the region in its broader geographical area, and that’s done by fairly few people.
There’s been a lot of scholarships on national museums in each of the countries of East Central Europe, but nobody has tried before us to do an actual analysis of how they emerged and how they borrowed from each other, even if they all pretended to be unique. What we discovered was that there was this shared space facilitated through some of the imperial networks, but also through broader European networks. We wanted to let those various regional and national traditions speak to each other. They borrowed ways of exhibiting things as well as ways of building a narrative. They borrowed architectural plans from each other, or they looked at the models and then tried to adapt them.
You’ve written many other works about very niche concepts and subjects. Vienna Art School and the Budapest Opera House are two subjects that you have a lot to say about. What’s your favorite fun fact that you’ve come across in your research or something that people may not know?
Well, the opera is obviously really, really fascinating. It’s particularly fascinating in the nineteenth century when you get new ways to implement technology. With new technologies you have new ways to perform, new ways to light the scene. One interesting thing about the opera is that it is a microcosm of the urban community. It shows you all these various hierarchies that exist: the elites sitting in their boxes, respectable middle class on the second and upper levels, then students and others who can barely afford it at the very top, and who can’t really see so well what’s happening on stage.
It’s absolutely fascinating and in some ways bizarre. If you don’t like it, then it’s a really strange cultural product. Opera is also full of all sorts of gossip and scandals and fights between various directors and primadonnas. It’s an endless source of jokes and fun as well as enjoyment, of course.
It’s been very interesting to get your insight, on the place that you know have studied so thoroughly. Thank you very much!
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
