Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow in Ukrainian Studies Oksana Dudko was awarded an Honourable Mention for St. Thomas More College’s Teaching Excellence Award (TEA). The committee mentioned that it “was impressed by Oksana’s commitment to student learning through tenuous political times, drawing connections from learning about the past to reading and responding to the present.”
During the 2021–2022 academic year, Oksana taught two courses at St. Thomas More College: HIST248. The Soviet Union and HIST238. Modern Ukrainian History and Russian–Ukrainian Conflict. The latter coincided with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. During the course, students discussed the use of history and historical memory in the current war in Ukraine. They also had the opportunity to meet a series of Ukrainian experts and artists during online meetings to discuss various topics related to 20th-century Ukrainian history (i.e., the 1944 Deportation of Crimean Tatars and the war in Donbas). The guest speakers also shared their personal experiences of the current war with students.
