The Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs, is pleased to release the 2024-25 Year in Review. This entry joins a longstanding, award-winning publication series that highlights the news, stories, and people of the institute each year, focusing on gratitude and hope. This issue is dedicated in loving memory to Elizabeth E. Nanovic (1934-2025), one of the institute’s founding benefactors. It may be read online at https://go.nd.edu/NanovicYIR.
This issue’s center feature focuses on the inaugural Ukrainian Studies Hub conference, “Revolutions of Hope: Resilience and Recovery in Ukraine,” held March 6–8, 2025. This multi-disciplinary, global conference convened scholars from across the United States and Europe to focus on the latest research on Ukraine and in Ukrainian studies. It also brought together art, music, film, and prayer, adding to the holistic message of hope, which Taras Dobko, rector of Ukrainian Catholic University, described in his submitted article as a “hope to rely on and to act on.”
The feature includes articles submitted by participants and speakers, highlights from exhibits by Ukrainian photographer Iva Sidash and Canadian artist Lesia Maruschak, and photographs from “A Night of Ukrainian Poetry and Music,” a special presentation by poets Natalka Bilotserkivets, Daryna Gladun ’26 MFA, and Halyna Kruk (with translations by Ali Kinsella), as well as the Bandura Ensemble of North America and the Indiana Slavic Choir.
Additional photos from the conference are compiled in an online album.
As the public debut of the Ukrainian Studies Hub, this event will have an enduring legacy. In her address, Sophia Wilson, president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, described the importance of the Hub:
“This is where people are going to learn more about Ukraine, and support the idea, as Ukrainians do, that justice and human rights matter. And that’s what we all need to fight for.”
In addition to the feature on the conference, this issue of the Year in Review shares student stories, faculty achievements, research projects and outcomes, collaborations with both international partners and other Notre Dame units, and the many opportunities facilitated by the Nanovic Institute throughout the 2024-25 academic year to discuss important issues and topics facing Europe and the world. It highlights the institute’s reach across a wide geographic range of Europe—from restorative justice lessons learned in Norway to critical statistical work that will impact human lives in Malta, and much more—and an equally broad set of disciplines, including art, literature, history, political science, sustainability, anthropology, film, and others.
In his closing letter, Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics at the Keough School, suggested that “any deep community is both a community of memory and a community of hope. Our institute will make an effort to strengthen the hope of our students that this world can be transformed.”
This issue of the Year in Review features artwork by Anastassia Cassady, a South Bend-based artist of Ukrainian heritage. In addition to painting the artwork on the cover, four featured profiles, and within the conference story, Cassady also wrote the icon of the Theotokos, now in Lviv, Ukraine, presented to Archbishop Borys Gudziak, Metropolitan-Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia and president of Ukrainian Catholic University, during the conference.