Shining a light on Ukraine: Dr Marnie Howlett and the Oxford Ukraine Hub

The Oxford Ukraine Hub (OUH) launched in November 2024, one of three new hubs led by academics across the Social Sciences Division. The OUH serves as an interdisciplinary network to connect the exceptional breadth and depth of expertise across multiple disciplines at Oxford with international researchers and practitioners working on, and interested in, issues related to Ukraine. Dr Marnie Howlett (Departmental Lecturer in Russian and East European Politics) is a driving force behind the OUH, sitting on the steering group with colleagues from the Faculties of History (Zbigniew Wojnowski and Yevhen Yashchuk), Medieval and Modern Languages (Panayiotis Xenophontos and Polly Jones), and Law (Ievgeniia Kopytsia), and the School of Geography and the Environment (Jonathon Turnbull).

Dr Howlett’s interest in Ukraine began when she was growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada, within a large Ukrainian diaspora community. She grew up learning Ukrainian and practising Ukrainian traditions, including dancing at a semi-professional level. This background led Dr Howlett to study Ukrainian at the University of Saskatchewan as part of a degree in International Studies. She visited Ukraine around the time of the Euromaidan protests in 2013 and returned in 2014 to study at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and volunteer with orphaned children and families affected by the war in Donbas. As she recalls, ‘I saw such significant geopolitical shifts following the protests and beginning of the war, I decided at that point to pursue Ukraine and Ukraine-related topics for the rest of my career.’  This interest brought Dr Howlett to the UK to study for a PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dr Howlett’s research centred on nationalism and identity in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, examining the grassroots impacts of how states are built and borders drawn through the experiences of people living in borderland areas. Using Ukraine as a case study, she conducted extensive fieldwork along different borders to understand what statehood and territory mean to the people living there. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, many places that Dr Howlett had lived and people she had worked closely with during her field research were suddenly on the front lines of a war, bringing her work into extreme focus.

Since February 2022, she has run five public opinion surveys in Ukraine, asking Ukrainians about their views on the war, peace, territorial concessions, and what they would be willing to negotiate in order to end the conflict. Dr Howlett says, ‘In one of my projects, I’m interviewing 200 frontline soldiers to understand why they volunteered to fight. These are people who were not soldiers before 24 February 2022 – they were teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, who on the day of the invasion volunteered… I’m trying to preserve in real time 200 stories of people who had no military experience, but, for some reason, were prompted to go defend their country, whether that be for nationalism, territory, or something else.’

This work is the background to Dr Howlett’s involvement in the OUH. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many events focusing on the country and conflict have taken place at Oxford, but Ukraine has not been covered comprehensively within the curricula. As a result, she started to have conversations with colleagues about how to give Ukraine more of a focus. The interdisciplinary hubs funded by the Social Sciences Division presented an interesting opportunity for colleagues working in different fields across the University to come together and share expertise. Their bid for funding was successful and now the 18-month project is underway, with the hope that Ukrainian studies will become more embedded and institutionalised at Oxford going forward. Their first event was a well-attended hybrid workshop, ‘Ukrainian Environmentalisms’, in January 2025, and more regular events are scheduled that include speakers from across the UK, Europe, and Ukraine. Workshop participants are also submitting materials so that their work can be made globally accessible for anyone who wants to incorporate Ukraine into their curriculum.

The organising team and speakers from the first OUH workshop on 31 January 2025