PhD Student of Mariupol University – Recipient of Shevchenko Scientific Society Scholarship in USA

The entire civilized world stands with Ukraine in its difficult struggle for independence. Thanks to generous donations, the Shevchenko Emergency Fund of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the USA has awarded scholarships to fifty Ukrainian scholars, writers, and artists affected by the war. Among them is Yevhen Horb, a postgraduate student of the “Cultural Studies” educational and scientific program at Mariupol State University.

Yevhen about the fund in 2022 when he came across the scholarship program on social media. At that time, such opportunities were becoming quite common. He applied but did not receive financial support. Three years later, luck finally smiled on him.

The scholarship provides a one-time payment of $2,000, a six-month membership in the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the USA, a profile page on the organization’s website, and access to a corporate email address.

Yevhen began pursuing academic research actively during the final years of his bachelor studies, when he was majoring in history. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation dedicated to the intellectual biography of Aleksander Brückner, a Polish-German cultural historian born in Ternopil, who remains almost unknown in Ukraine. At the same time, Yevhen is being published in Poland, where 12 of his popular scientific books on military history of the 17th–19th centuries have already been printed, with another forthcoming.

The research project Yevhen submitted to the scholarship competition focuses on the social history of the Jewish community in Mariupol during the Nazi occupation. He is working on this project outside his PhD studies. He set out to reconstruct the events of that time because, for many years, coverage of the Holocaust in Mariupol relied primarily on Soviet archival documents.

Over the course of three years, Yevhen has worked with oral testimonies preserved in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (USA), as well as documents from the German Federal Archives, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Archives and Records Administration (USA), the Hoover Institution (USA), and other authoritative institutions.

This recognition has great symbolic significance, as it shows that your work has been noticed and that you are moving in the right direction. It is extremely important to present your research to a broad international experts in your field to receive feedback, useful advice, and even connections that can benefit future research, 

– says Yevhen Horb, PhD student of Mariupol State University. 

As trite as it may seem, in today’s difficult realities, scholarship funds often go toward basic daily needs. However, Yevhen also plans to invest part of the funds in his own academic and professional development, namely English language courses, scholarly literature, and publications.