It’s Personal: Reflections on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Join us for a special discussion focused on the war in Ukraine as experienced by Ukrainian-Americans here in New York City. CUNY academics with personal connections to the nation will share their own perspectives and histories. Attendees are invited to contribute to the discussion with questions.

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés
Moderator

Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is the Interim Dean of the Macaulay Honors College. She is the former director of the Black Studies Program at The City College of New York-CUNY. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, and a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, her research interests focus on the cultural production of Black peoples throughout the Americas: the United States and Latin America, including Brazil, and the Caribbean.
Dr. Valdés is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Her latest book, Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean (2020) is an edited collection that re-centers Haiti in the disciplines of Caribbean, and more broadly, Latin American Studies.

SPEAKERS

Dr. Renata K. Miller
Interim Dean of Humanities and Arts

Renata Kobetts Miller is Interim Dean of Humanities and the Arts and Professor of English at the City College of New York. Her most recent book is The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage (2019). Renata grew up in a Ukrainian diasporic community in the borough of Queens, and she has been monitoring the effects of the Russian invasion on her cousins in Ukraine.

Dr. Lev Sviridov
Director of Macaulay Honors College at Hunter

Lev Sviridov has served as the Director of Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College since 2014. He is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Hunter and has been part of CUNY’s Energy Institute. Prior to that he was a  Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford.

Lev holds a D.Phil., Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a B.S. from City College.

Dr. Mikhal Dekel
Acting Chair of the Department of English & Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts

Mikhal Dekel teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English, the 2021-2022 Stuart Z. Katz Professor of Humanities, Interim Chair of English, and the Director of the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts. In her book IN THE EAST (WW Norton, 2021), she followed the footsteps of Holocaust refugees who were deported to Soviet Gulags, traveling and researching across the former USSR. She will speak on how the ghosts and aftermath of WW2 are re-emerging in the current war.