Short essay topics

Short Essay Topics (1,500 words)

To what extent was the Rus’ a Viking state?
To what extent was Mongol rule a ‘yoke’?
What impact did the Reformation have on Poland-Lithuania and the Ukrainian lands?
Assess different views of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
What role did the Ottoman Empire play in the history of Ukraine?
To what extent is the term ‘New Russia’ for Southern Ukraine a misleading term?
How do you explain the wave of pogroms in the late Russian Empire?
How do Polish, Ukrainian or Russian society remember the Holocaust?
To what extent was Ukraine still in 2012 a "divided country"?
Why do the majority of Crimean Tatars prefer Crimea to be part of Ukraine?

You may also come up with your own question, but please run it past me first.

Medieval and Early Modern

To what extent was the ‘baptism of Rus’’ a ‘civilisational choice’?
What does the marriage policy of the early Kyivan rulers tell us about the position of Rus’ in Europe?
What influences shaped the political ideology of the Tsardom of Muscovy?
What impact did the Reformation have on Poland-Lithuania and the Ukrainian lands?
Was the Khmelnytsky uprising a national, social, religious, or frontier revolt?
What was the status of Cossacks in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth?
To what extent can Polish rule in Ukrainian lands be called colonial?
Is there any difference in the status of women in early modern Russia, Poland and the Hetmanate?

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

To what extent were the partitions of Poland the result of great-power rivalry?
To what extent did the partitions expose the failures of the Polish political elite?
When did Poland stop being the "noble nation"?
Compare the peasant economy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ukraine and Russia.
What did nineteenth-century Ukrainian national activists see as the principal differences between Ukrainians and Russians?
To what extent was Ukraine's experience within the Russian Empire colonial?
To what extent was Zionism a response to the Spring of Nations?
Why did Lithuanians reject Polish proposals to restore the Commonwealth?
To what extent did Galicia function as the "Piedmont" of the Ukrainian national movement?

Twentieth Century

How do you explain the extent of antisemitic violence between 1918 and 1920?
What effect did the First World War and the wars of independence have on Polish and Ukrainian nation-building?
"Socialist in content and national in form": how did the Bolsheviks address the nationality question?
How should historians understand the Holodomor: genocide, state crime, or unintended consequence?
Assess Polish minority policy in the interwar period.
Compare tactics, strategies, and aims of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the legal Ukrainian parties in interwar Poland.

Contemporary

Why did Ukraine become a liberal democracy while Russia became authoritarian?
Assess the role of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory in history politics.
Assess the role of the Polish Institute of National Memory in history politics.
Which role does the Second World War play in Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian memory culture?
What impact do the Volhynian massacres have on Polish-Ukrainian relations?
How have memories of the Second World War changed in Ukraine since 1991?
To what extent has language policy in independent Ukraine been driven by nation-building rather than ethnic nationalism?
Assess the treatment of linguistic and ethnic minorities in Ukraine since 1991. To what extent have Ukrainian policies balanced minority rights and state-building objectives?
Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

Across time

How useful is the concept of empire for understanding Ukrainian history?
To what extent was Russian and Soviet policy in Ukraine modernising?
How have interpretations of Kyivan Rus' changed in Russian, Ukrainian, and Western historiography?
What role did borderlands play in shaping Ukrainian identities?
How useful is postcolonial theory for studying Ukrainian history?
When did Ukraine become a nation?