Serhiy Lepyavko
Fellow 2024/2025
History
Chernihiv National Teachers' Training University
Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University
slepyavko@fas.harvard.edu
Bio
Serhiy Lepyavko is a Professor of History at Nizhyn Gogol State University in Ukraine. He completed his PhD [kandidat nauk] in Ukrainian History in 1992 and his doktor nauk in 2000, both from the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He began his career studying the history of Ukrainian Cossacks in the 16th century and working in archives across Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Russia. Later, he expanded his research interests to cover the period of the 15th through 18th centuries. His research themes include the political, military, social history of Ukraine, and international relations between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Khanate. Serhiy Lepyavko has published the monographs, Cossack Wars of the Late 16th Century in Ukraine (1996 and 2022) and The Ukrainian Cossacks Within the Context of International Relations, 1561-1591 (1999). He has also studied the history of Ukrainian Cossacks as a military corporation within the context of the Great Frontier theory and has conducted comparative studies of borders between different civilizations. In 2003-2004, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder and has also lectured at Columbia University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Serhiy Lepyavko held fellowships from the Polish Foundation “Kasa im. Józefa Mianowskiego”, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Over the last 15 years, he has studied the history of Chernihiv, one of the oldest cities in Ukraine, and has published eight books on this topic. His current project is a continuation and completion of his research from the previous decades.
Serhiy Lepyavko is a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war. In 2022, he joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine and took part in the defense of Chernihiv.
Comparative Studies in Ukrainian History (Mid-14th to Late 18th Century)
Comparative history is an intellectual resource, the possibilities of which have not yet been fully utilized by historians of Ukraine. The history of Ukraine in the late medieval and early modern periods cannot be comprehended without such geopolitical events and processes as the plague of the mid-14th century, the spread of firearms, the Ottoman and Muscovy expansions, the discovery of America, the demise of feudalism, religious wars, the growth of European empires, etc. They directly or indirectly influenced its fate. And it is the comparative history that helps us to see this best. In this project, the main historical events and processes related to Ukraine are presented in a comparative perspective. Accordingly, the main emphasis of the research is on comparisons and analogies that can be found in the history of Ukraine, comparing it with the European and world history of that time. When history is spoken of as a “teacher of life,” this refers to its ability to provide examples of how similar social problems were solved at different times, in different circumstances, by different nations. In this respect, comparative history is a kind of substitute for experimentation in the natural sciences. We have the opportunity to compare similar historical events and processes, their causes and consequences, and thus look for historical patterns in them. In this way, many events in the history of Ukraine look completely different than before. Ukrainian historians have repeatedly used comparisons in their research, so this work is conceived as a large anthology of comparative subjects, both already known and first proposed by the author. The historical analogies are analyzed and discussed in terms of their value and relevance.