Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is a cultural anthropologist, professor and director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. A researcher, she works at the intersection of oral history and testimony production, diaspora studies and vernacular transnationalisms, post-Soviet studies and contemporary Ukraine. Natalia is the author of numerous publications and books including monographs “Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the 20th Century (2015) and “The other world, or ethnicity in action: Canadian Ukrainianness at the end of the 20th century” (2011). Her current book project has the working title “Decollectivized: The Last Generation of Soviet Farmers Speak Out.” Since February 24, 2022, in her capacity as a co-president of Ukrainian Oral History Association, she coordinates a number of scholarly initiatives focusing on war testimony research, including hosting the summer oral history institute “Witnessing the War on Ukraine.”