Two years of twinning: University of St Andrews and National University of Ostroh Academy

Dr Emily Finer (EF): I think we're both teaching-oriented universities.  We are small institutions that care a lot about the student experience. This is an atmosphere that we cultivate without a detriment to our research outputs. We are institutions where it's entirely acceptable and normal for a professor at the very top of their research career to talk about how much they enjoy teaching.

We found this similar atmosphere at Ostroh, they're very proud that they aren’t a huge urban University. They're in a small, beautiful place with a lovely campus, where people love to live.  They have cultivated a strong university community similar to St Andrews where people really know each other.

Smaller institutions also have a willingness to work with other universities. We have wonderful relationships with other Scottish universities and want to work together, rather than compete. We found this to be a similar attitude to Ostroh. Particularly that they were very happy to work with our existing partners at the Centre for Urban History in Lviv.

EF: Public Humanities is one of our major research areas. We (Professor Victoria Donovan and myself) used this grant to continue our research.

The UK-Ukraine R&I twinning grants scheme allowed us to make connections and build on existing projects. When this grant was announced, we reacted very quickly. We had already, for example, brought a sanctuary scholar over from Melitopol State Pedagogical University and funded a children's writer from Kyiv who's now doing a creative writing PhD with me at St Andrews.

With the ‘Testimonies from the War’ project – a collaboration archiving testimonies about the forced displacement of Ukrainians – we worked with colleagues, including in Ostroh, to interview people affected by the war in Poland, Luxembourg, Germany, and of course displaced people in Scotland.  Had we not had the UK-Ukraine R&I grant, I’m not sure we would have been able to do it.

Through the grant, we were also able to bring two museum directors from east Ukraine over to St Andrews. They had both been involved in evacuating their collections, at risk because of the war, to safety – I can’t think of anyone better placed to discuss advancing public humanities.

Engaging our Ukrainian colleagues with Public Humanities in the UK was important too. When our colleagues from Ostroh were visiting, we went to Durham to visit the Miners Hall, also known as the ‘Pitman’s Parliament’. This was a visit that our colleagues from the Ukrainian East found very moving because they were doing the same thing, rebuilding and trying to reclaim their industrial heritage.  

Colleagues from the School of Computer Science, Dr Olexandr Konovalov and Dr Alan Miller, helped organise a large professional book scanner to be sent to Ostroh, facilitated by this grant. So in the midst of war, lots of people worked together to transport this expensive and large piece of equipment because they felt there was value in scanning and preserving valuable books, manuscripts and documents. Especially since this is a war directed against culture, protecting and advancing public humanities felt like an important thing to do. 

EF: I would firstly like to thank our colleagues at Ostroh for coming here, they really went above and beyond. We found their visit to be a reciprocal experience – it was enriching to host them. Two of them also were able to bring their children thanks to the dependents’ allowance in this grant.

Their visit was also a real gift to our new Ukrainian community in St Andrews, who include students, scholars and PhD students. Victoria and I have really worked to create a sense of community here in Fife and having the colleagues from Ostroh here helped to consolidate that community. We were also able to employ a professional from the local Ukrainian community on the project. A published author, she was delighted to discover her book, which one of PhD students had ordered, in our university library.

We were able to develop a real sense of community here, with a constant stream of people in my office talking about life and taking walks on the beach, eating in each other’s houses. They were able to watch graduation and get involved in things going on locally. They were also interested in local activism and the politics behind the UCU strikes.

We also used the grant money to help fund other colleagues back in Ukraine to do non-residential fellowships, something we learned about from the Centre for Urban History in Lviv. Given the fact that men cannot leave the country because of martial law, it meant that we were able to spread the funding in a more gender equitable way. This also led to the Global Office creating opportunities for undergraduates at Ostroh to do study abroad at St Andrews.

Ukrainian residential fellows:

EF: Given our previous experience of working in Lviv and our good working relationship with the Centre for Urban History, we found it much easier to organise the workshop in the Ukraine than in the UK, even in wartime.

We felt that, as we were expecting people to travel here, they should expect us to travel there if it met risk assessment requirements.  It had to represent the relationship that we have of mutual respect, particularly in terms of urban history research, in which they are world leaders.

EF: Those of us that work in history typically work with sources from a long time ago and we really feel the gaps in what we do and do not have. In this war, that is taking place in a digitally connected world, we felt there was an opportunity to gather more evidence to try to mitigate that problem in the future.

The ‘Testimonies from the War’ project collects contemporary stories from people who have been displaced and people still in Ukraine about what's happened to them since the start of the full-scale invasion. We collaborated on this project because Ukrainians tell us that it is important to share their experiences. We hope that Russia will be held accountable for their actions – and that the project will contribute evidence of war crimes and abuses.

Having the right interviewers was important. One of our residential fellows is a psychologist, and another a journalist, so they were able to conduct ethically informed interviews. But one of the rather amazing things was that I think everybody that was interviewed for the project in Scotland wanted their names to be used. It was the first time they had had the chance to tell their story to someone who really listened and also to tell their story in Ukrainian. The interviews were done by Ukrainians and for Ukrainians.

The grant also allowed us to be flexible and this was something we valued because it meant that we could jump on opportunities as they came up.

EF: The overall picture is that St Andrews continues to work together with Ostroh on a range of projects and research. I also think that some of the methods and practises that we used in this grant are possibly applicable to other situations. Because who would have thought that we would be able to host six Ukrainians and two under 10s in St Andrews for six weeks in the middle of a war. It has expanded the University’s understanding of what collaboration means.

EF: I don't think we could have hoped for more than that. That is exactly what we wanted to use the grant for, and it is wonderful that Maksym felt that way, it’s certainly mutual.