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Tetiana Perga received her Ph.D. from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. She has worked at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for over 30 years and has participated in numerous international conferences and programs funded by various foundations. Currently, she is affiliated with the Technical University of Berlin. Her current project, “Waste in Totalitarian Regimes: Recycling in the Early Soviet Union. Ukrainian Context,” deals with the social, economic, and ideological dimensions of waste collection and recycling in 1920s–1930s Ukraine. She is a member of the European Society for Environmental History and the Leo Baeck Institute Research Group in Jewish Environmental History. Additionally, she serves as an expert for the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and is a member of the editorial boards of two Ukrainian scientific journals. She is also a participant in UGHI, where she is writing the environmental history of Ukraine.

“Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country generated about 450 million tons of waste annually, of which only 3–6% was sent for recycling. In contrast to the present situation, a hundred years ago, waste was the object of fierce competition. Both enterprises and individuals made considerable efforts and showed remarkable ingenuity to obtain it. This presentation examines the lesser-known history of the development of state waste recycling policy in Ukraine during the 1920s - a period when waste began to be viewed as a strategic resource essential for economic development. It highlights the specific Ukrainian context, the practices, methods, spaces, and actors involved in waste collection under conditions of chronic material shortages, forced industrialization, social transformation, the project of creating the “new Soviet person,” and the Holodomor of 1932–1933.”

Nataliia Laas is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently working on a book project on waste and socialist environmental thinking titled “A Soviet Consumer Republic: Environmental Citizenship and the Economy of Waste in the Post-WWII Soviet Union.” Her articles appeared in Slavic Review and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and her research has been supported by multiple grants, among which the most recent one is the 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Laas received her PhD in History from Brandeis University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University and Yale University.

“By the late 1980s, Ukrainian society became thoroughly engrossed in radiation- and nitrate-poisoning panics over toxic waste found in food and water. Concerns over waste represented a form of mass environmental thinking under socialism that defined the proper relations between the economy and the environment. Politicized “waste anxieties” prompted people to defend their consumer and ecological rights and to reimagine their relationship with the socialist state through the concept of environmental citizenship. This presentation contributes to debates about how the invisibility of modern toxins affects environmental health, popular activism, and state demographic and ecological policies. I will address the questions of how the scientific and historical knowledge about invisible toxins such as radiation and nitrates circulated among the broader Soviet public; how invisible toxins became visible (e.g., through pain, bioindicators, or technological devices); and how socialist citizens made this invisibility politically observable by asserting new rights and demanding new laws during perestroika.”

Dmytro Yesypenko is affiliated with the Kule Folklore Centre and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the �鶹��Ƶ, where he contributes to projects on Ukrainian Canadian heritage and cultural history. He holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in Philology from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and is completing a PhD in Transnational and Comparative Literatures at the �鶹��Ƶ. His research bridges literary studies and cultural history, encompassing medical humanities, scholarly editing, Central and Eastern European history, and diaspora cultures. He co-authored Lena and Thomas Gushul: Life in Front and Behind the Camera and edited Borys Hrinchenko: Novels and .

“My talk looks at how people in nineteenth-century Europe imagined and explained epidemics—where they came from, how they spread, and what they meant. Drawing on the once-popular miasmatic theory that linked disease to pollution and decay, I explore how writers such as Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Shevchenko, and Franko turned these fears and sufferings into powerful stories—the masterpieces of the European “epidemic library.” Their poems and novels show how the plague could be seen as something exotic and distant, or painfully close and familiar. I also reflect on how these seemingly old, yet deeply resonant, images of contagion continue to echo in modern Ukrainian culture and music today.”

About the Moderator:

Oleksii Chebotarov is a guest lecturer in Environmental History at the Central European University in Vienna. He is also a research fellow with the KLIMER: Climate, Environment and Energy research group at the University of Oslo and with the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St. Gallen. Previously, he held research and teaching positions at the University of Vienna, the University of St. Gallen, New Europe College in Bucharest, the Center for Urban History in Lviv, and the Ukrainian Catholic University. He earned his PhD in Social Studies from the University of St. Gallen in 2021.
Most recent publication: Oleksii Chebotarov and Viktoriya Sereda, eds., Ukraine as a Migration Nexus: Perspectives on Historical and Current Population Movements (Budapest: Central European University Press; Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025).

Photograph is provided by Netishyn City Museum of Local Lore (Нетішинський міський краєзнавчий музей). Credit: Viktor Voikovskyi (Віктор Войковський).

This seminar is part of the international series “Rethinking Ukraine’s Environment: War, Ecocide, and Beyond,” which aims to foster a deeper understanding of historical human–environment relationships—a vital factor in addressing Ukraine’s current environmental challenges and envisioning a secure and sustainable future.

Read more about the seminar series here.