Dr Olenka Pevny

  • University Associate Professor in Ukrainian Studies and in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic
  • Slavonic Studies
Dr Olenka Pevny

Contact

About

Olenka Pevny is a cultural and art historian specialising in the medieval and early modern cultures of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Her research spans the visual and material worlds of Byzantium, Rus′, Ruthenia, Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, with particular attention to Eastern Rite Christianity and to the movement of people, objects, artistic forms, and ideas across religious and political frontiers.

At the centre of her work is a broad question: how do people use images, buildings, objects, landscapes, and cultural practices to understand their world, construct identities, and make sense of the past? She is particularly interested in how visual and material culture creates historical meaning and participates in narratives of national, regional, religious, social, and gendered identity—and how such narratives are transformed, contested, forgotten, or recovered over time.

Her scholarship combines close analysis of images, buildings, and objects with archival and textual research and an interest in the people who made, commissioned, used, inhabited, viewed, and transformed them. She has conducted extensive research in Ukraine, both in archival collections and at historic monuments throughout the country. Before joining the University of Cambridge, she was Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. She also worked as a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, contributing to the landmark exhibition The Glory of Byzantium, and has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Crimea and Greece. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Research

Dr Pevny’s current work ranges from Rus′ to the early modern period and examines both the cultures of the Ukrainian lands and their subsequent interpretation, appropriation, obscuring, and recovery. She is writing ‘Encountering Beauty in the Lands of Rus′’ for the Ukrainian History Global Initiative. Moving across objects, architecture, landscape, ritual, sound, and written testimony, the chapter considers beauty in the medieval world as a sensory, emotional, and imaginative encounter, exploring how order, radiance, and affect shaped experiences of the material and sacred world.

Alongside this work, she is editing Invisible Rus′: The Medieval Inheritance of Early Modern Ukraine, a volume that brings the often-overlooked medieval and early modern history of the Ukrainian lands into view. Its chapters examine Ukraine as a crossroads of empire, religion, language, art, music, and political imagination, while challenging narratives that reduce its Rus′ inheritance to a prehistory of Russia or marginalise it within European history.

Her forthcoming study, ‘Pope Clement in Kyiv, Pskov and Rome: Conjunctures in the Christian Ecumene from the Mid-Eleventh to the Mid-Twelfth Century’, traces the cult of Pope Clement across Kyiv, Pskov, and Rome to explore the religious networks connecting Rus′ to the wider Christian world and to reconsider conventional divisions between eastern and western Christianity.

Her broader book projects include Mobilising Byzantine Imagery: A Cultural Biography of the Medieval Churches of Kyiv, which examines the changing meanings of Kyiv’s medieval monuments, and Visual Obliteration of Otherness: Nineteenth-Century, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Restoration Practices in Ukraine, a study of restoration, cultural memory, and the ideological transformation of Ukraine’s architectural heritage.

Published works:

‘Art and Transcultural Discourse in Ukrainian Lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’, in Diversity and Difference in Poland-Lithuania and Its Successor States, ed. Stanley Bill and Simon Lewis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), pp. 84–112.

‘Forum: Globalising Early Modern Central and Eastern European Art’, co-authored with Robert Born, Tomasz Grusiecki, Suzanna Ivanič, Ruth Sargent Noyes, and Robyn Radway, Art East Central (2022). http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/14105

‘Kyiv’s Church of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Portal of Orthodox Ecumenism’, Palaeoslavica XXVII, no. 2 (2019): 1–48.

‘The Encrypted Narrative of Reconstructed Cossack Baroque Forms’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 31, nos. 1–4 (2009–10): 471–519. Also published in Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth, ed. Serhii Plokhy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 471–519.

‘In Fedor Solntsev’s Footsteps: Adrian Prakhov and the Restoration of the Medieval Past in Late-Nineteenth-Century Kiev’, in Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past, ed. Cynthia Hyla Whittaker (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 83–108.

‘Dethroning the Prince: Princely Benefaction and Female Patronage in Medieval Kyiv’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 29, nos. 1–4 (2007): 61–108.

‘Kievan Rus′’ and twenty-five catalogue entries, in The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), pp. 156–57, 193–94, 247, 281–307, 313–19.

‘Rebuilding a Monumental Past’, East European Perspectives – J. B. Rudnyckyj Distinguished Lecture Series, Department of German and Slavic Languages, University of Manitoba, Lecture VII (2001). https://umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/grants/rudnyckyj_lecture/lecture_8.htm

Edited books:

Майстри нашого мистецтва (Київ: Сучасність, 2006).

Perceptions of Byzantium and Its Neighbors (843–1261) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Teaching and supervision

Dr Pevny welcomes enquiries from prospective MPhil and PhD students whose projects engage with the cultural, artistic, religious, social, or intellectual histories of Rus′, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe more broadly. She is especially interested in projects that reconsider familiar historical narratives by bringing overlooked people, experiences, objects, monuments, regions, communities, and cultural connections into view.

Potential areas for graduate research include:

  • the peoples, societies, art, architecture, and material culture of Rus′;
  • medieval and early modern Kyiv and the cultural histories of other centres of the Rus′ lands;
  • women, gender, family, patronage, and social roles in medieval and early modern Eastern Europe;
  • Byzantine and Eastern Christian art, ritual, devotional culture, and religious experience;
  • relations between Rus′, Byzantium, Western and Central Europe, the Black Sea world, and the Eurasian steppe;
  • the visual and material cultures of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ruthenian lands;
  • religious interaction among Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and other communities;
  • medieval concepts of beauty, sensory experience, emotion, and sacred presence;
  • the movement and translation of people, images, objects, texts, beliefs, and artistic forms across cultural boundaries;
  • cultural memory and competing claims to the inheritance of Rus′;
  • the construction of Ruthenian, Muscovite, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, regional, religious, gendered, and imperial identities;
  • the historiography and representation of Ukraine and Eastern Europe;
  • cultural heritage, conservation, restoration, and the ideological transformation of historic monuments;
  • nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Ukrainian art and visual culture;
  • questions of empire, colonialism, decolonisation, and the politics of historical interpretation in Eastern Europe.

PhD students:

  • Rosemary Finlinson
  • Amelian Gardner-Thorpe
  • Stepan Blinder
  • Constance Uzwyshyn
  • Alice Mumford
  • Ganna Kvit

Course contact for:

  • SL2: The History and Culture of Early Rus′
  • SL3: The Making of Ukraine: History and Culture of Early Modernity

These papers introduce students to questions that remain strikingly relevant today: Who could claim the inheritance of Rus′? How were political and religious identities created? What happens when cultures meet across frontiers? How do works of art and architecture communicate authority, faith, memory, and belonging? And how has the past been mobilised in modern debates about Eastern Europe?