Oleksiy Tolochko, Director of the Center for Kievan Rus' Studies, Institute of Ukrainian History

Oleksiy Tolochko, Director of the Center for Kievan Rus' Studies, Institute of Ukrainian History

Oleksiy Tolochko, Director of the Center for Kievan Rus' Studies at the Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences and Professor in the History Department at the University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy visited CMS in May and early June at the invitation of the OYI project The 'Forging' of Christian Identity in the Northern Periphery (c.820-c.1200). In addition to his research on Kieven Rus', Professor Tolochko has also produced academic work on Early Modern history-writing in Eastern Europe and Russian and Ukrainian historiography of the nineteenth century. He is the author of a study of Russia's first comprehensive history entitled "The Russian History" by Vasily Tatishchev: Sources and Accounts (Moscow, 2005) and editor of Ruthenica, a journal of East European history and archeology. His edition of The Hustyn' Chronicle, the first attempt of early modern chroniclers to write a systematic history of Ukraine written in the early seventeenth century, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

At CMS, Professor Tolochko presented work on "Christian Chronology, Universal History and the Origin of Chronicle Writing in Rus'" which offered particpants an insightful introduction to the genesis of The Primary Chronicle (Povest' vremennykh let) written in the early twelfth century in Kiev. Given the paucity of earlier annalistic history in the Slavic world, the impetus for The Primary Chronicle has been much debated. Professor Tolochko suggested other writing traditions that might well have served as models for writing this type of history in Kievan Rus'.

In addition to his role at the University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy, Professor Tolochko has taught at the Central European University in Budapest after holding a junior fellowship there, Harvard University as a Fulbright fellow at the Harvard Ukranian Research Institute, and Taras Shevchenko Kiev University. He has been the Eugene and Daymel Shklar Fellow in Ukranian Studies at Harvard University, the Jacyk Visiting Scholar at the Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies in the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto and the recipient of the Bourse Diderot from the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris.