REEEC at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is pleased to welcome two new Nonresidential Fellows from Ukraine to our campus community: Oleh Bahmet and Vladyslava Moskalets. These two scholars join our community in the Spring 2025 semester as part of the IU-Ukraine Nonresidential Scholar Program (NRSP).

Vladyslava Moskalets is a researcher at the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe in Lviv and an Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of the Jewish Studies Program at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She was a fellow of the Galician Doctoral Program at the University of Vienna, a Fulbright Scholar at Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research interests focus on Jewish social history, Yiddish literature, and Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Her recent publications include the article “The Roads of Baal Shem Tov: Reimagining the Carpathians as a Jewish Space in the 20th Century” (Euxenios, 2024) and the book chapter “Ukrainischer Jude. Eine Geschichte, die eigentlich nicht hätte passieren können” (2023). During her fellowship period, she will work with Anastasiia Strakhova, Associate Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at Illinois.

Oleh Bahmet is a senior research fellow at the Department of Geomorphology and Paleogeography at the Institute of Geography of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His research focuses on modern geomorphogenesis, assessments of the stability of urban areas, threats from exogenous relief-forming processes, as well as work on engineering and geomorphology. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Oleh’s research interests have focused on the transformation of terrain as a result of military operations. He is the author of more than 60 publications, including 6 collective monographs, and has contributed articles to the Great Encyclopedia of Ukraine, a major state-sponsored scholarly enterprise. While with Illinois, he will work with the Department of Geography & Geographic Information Systems.

The NSRP was pioneered by Indiana University in 2022 and expanded with support from the Big Ten Academic Alliance. In addition to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the other host institutions include The Pennsylvania State University, The Ohio State University, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Washington, and the University of Maryland.