Featured Student Stories

Think about the last time you visited a cultural museum. While reading the placards, did you consider the stories that have remained untold? Grace Mahoney does, and her graduate work focuses on uncovering and telling those stories.

Grace is a doctoral student in the Slavic Languages and Literatures department. She studies the ways in which museums, literature, and memorials shape how history is told in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Russia and Ukraine. Her fascination with the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian literature, especially dystopian and satirical literature, spurred a study-abroad experience in St. Petersburg, Russia while pursuing her undergraduate degree at Seattle University. After graduating, she completed a year-long Fulbright Scholarship in Ukraine before starting her PhD at Michigan. Now, she studies Russian and Ukrainian language, literature, culture, and visual art concurrently with her work in the UM Museum Studies graduate certificate program.

Often, true understanding of a region’s culture comes from immersing oneself in it. When Grace traveled to St. Petersburg for her study-abroad program, it was “an eye-opening experience,” especially coming from her “super progressive, liberal bubble in Seattle.” She didn’t anticipate specializing in Slavic studies, but she was inspired by the many writers and artists who pushed back against government corruption and other issues. She hopes to present a more nuanced understanding of Slavic cultures by curating these stories, especially since “so much of what we [in the US] understand about Russia [comes] through our media [and] movies.” Grace will soon head to Ukraine to do fieldwork for her dissertation and to engage in “coffee conversation” with locals in order to learn about their experiences.

Grace’s dissertation research examines museums, literature, and memorials through memory studies. To do this, she uncovers memories of historical events from everyday people and compares them to the overall national narrative. The national narrative often suppresses the viewpoints of marginalized groups, simplifying and distorting history. This creates a disparity between stories of everyday life and those told by government media. To work against this disparity, Grace works with the idea of “multidirectional memory,” which brings individual experiences together in a cohesive way, rather than treating some memories as more significant than others.

Grace says her work can often be discouraging -- uncovering the untold stories of mass violence, imprisonment, and government repression isn’t generally happy work. But she says there are motivating days too, like the days she gets to learn about people who are working hard to make life better by pushing back against pervasive discrimination. She hopes that her research will show that having a diverse and problematic history does not diminish a state’s sovereignty or credibility. Instead, a difficult past can uniquely equip a state to handle the challenges that come with building a civil society.

Having passed her qualifying exams, Grace’s days consist of assistant teaching for courses in the Slavic department; planning her dissertation project; volunteering at the Ukrainian American Archives and Museum in Hamtramck, MI; and hosting a writing workshop for graduate students in her department. As part of her goal to encourage more frequent and low-stakes discussion amongst scholars, Grace also edits for the Ukrainian publication Krytyka, which is run through the Harvard Ukrainian Institute and is widely read in the U.S. and abroad. She notes that encouraging such discussion can be challenging: “PhDs are qualified and equipped for all sorts of work, but the sort of work that demands making claims and statements on a quick basis...we’re really scared of doing that.” But in dynamic times such as these, she believes that being able to quickly write an opinion piece and lend expertise can “really bear weight on our voting habits...and political opinions.”

When you think of World War II and the Holocaust, what country comes to mind? Did you, like most, answer Germany? For Sara Ruiz, the answer is different. She studies anti-semitism in the Soviet Union post World War II, analyzing how people there did or did not talk about the Holocaust. She says, “The Soviet Union is very frequently left out of this Holocaust narrative” despite the fact that approximately one third of all Jews killed in the Holocaust were Soviet citizens.

Currently, Sara is analyzing Life and Fate, a Russian novel by Vasily Grossman, which has been called the 20th century War and Peace. She describes it as “a big, sweeping, epic novel about all these different individuals and how they’re affected by the war.” In some ways, she says, the book is a “standard Soviet novel for its time,” but it also centers around a Jewish protagonist whose mother dies in the Holocaust. Sara is investigating how the author creates this unexpected link between the stories of the Soviet Union and of the Holocaust.

In the big picture, Sara’s research interests dive deeper into the experience of World War II in the Soviet Union and how mass violence influenced people’s conceptions of themselves. What did it mean to be Soviet under Stalin? How did World War II impact Soviet identity? How do individuals process violence in their lives, especially when they are not allowed to talk about it freely?

Sara’s ongoing work involves literary analysis, but these questions can also be explored through historical and philosophical lenses. As a student in the Slavic department, Sara is afforded the opportunity to choose from and combine these methods; this enables her to think beyond the confines of traditional academic disciplines and to make new connections that might otherwise be missed.

However, Sara has not always studied Slavic history and culture. She started college as a biochemistry major at the University of Chicago, but after taking Russian on a whim, her path changed drastically. She graduated with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures and then spent six months teaching English in Russia. Ultimately, her love of history and literature brought her back to academia to join the smallest department at the University of Michigan.

The decision to come to Michigan for her graduate studies was an easy one for Sara. “Most humanities departments… [claim to be] interdisciplinary,” she says, “...but Michigan actually is.” Fittingly, a research assistantship outside her home department—translating and summarizing Russian texts for a professor in the department of Political Science—introduced Sara to her current research, a topic she might not have otherwise considered.

Though both the Holocaust and the Soviet Union have been studied extensively, there is more work yet to be done. “We haven’t figured out the Holocaust yet. We haven’t figured out the Soviet Union yet,” says Sara, as she emphasizes the two-way nature of this connection. “To understand more about the Holocaust, we need to include the experience of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, and then we can learn something about the Soviet Union by examining how the Holocaust was discussed there.”

Sara admits that this topic can be an emotionally exhausting one, but since starting graduate school, she feels a sense of responsibility—especially as we are losing the firsthand voices of Holocaust survivors—to keep this conversation going.