The faculty and staff of the Department of History want to extend a heartfelt congratulations to this year’s PhD dissertation and MA thesis prize winners: Dr. Iryna Skubii (PhD, 2024) and Josephine Vitella (MA, 2024).
Dr. Iryna Skubii' dissertation, titled “Survival Under Extremes: Human, Environmental, and Material Relationships Amidst the Soviet Famines in Ukraine”, offers a new perspective on a central topic in Ukrainian historiography — the Holodomor, the famine that resulted in millions of deaths in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Extending her gaze both backwards and forwards, Iryna situated this famine in a longer historical perspective and successfully moved beyond the predominantly political and demographic foci that have defined scholarship thus far. Instead, she adopted the methods and insights of environmental history, waste and food studies, animal studies, and material culture studies to address the way human experiences of famine were crucially mediated by the population’s relations with the non-human world. This is at once a history of human survival, encompassing both the strategies and spaces of survival, and a history of how famine and the human practices it engendered impacted the animal, natural, and material worlds. Even as Iryna sought to de-center the human experience of famine, her reliance on the testimonies of survivors and her creative incorporation of contemporary forms of commemoration situated human perspectives at the centre of the story. While her chapters are each devoted to an element of the non-human world, she has woven through most if not all of them a compelling history of memory and loss. The result is an ambitious and pathbreaking study that is already garnering significant scholarly attention. Supervisor: Dr. Rebecca Manley.
Josephine Vitella's Masters Thesis, “Till Impotence Do Us Part: Defining Sexual Normalcy in Seventeenth Century Mexico”, makes an original contribution to the field due in part to the originality of the organizational structure of the thesis but also because of the contribution it makes to studies of sexuality in the Early Modern period. Josephine’s thesis explores how “normal” sexuality was defined in seventeenth century Mexico, using a 1699 court case as a case study. Supervisor: Dr. Nancy van Deusen.
Congratulations to Iryna and Josephine!
