Liliia Tsyganenko
Liliia is a historian specialising in southern Ukraine, gender studies, the impact of late Stalinism, memory studies, transnational connections, migration and repatriation. A professor at Izmail State University of the Humanities, she holds a PhD in history. She has authored 260 publications, including monographs, textbooks and document collections and visited Regensburg as a fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2022–2024) and the Denkraum Ukraine programme (2025, Regensburg). Her academic work bridges regional history with broader European contexts of cultural heritage, borderlands and ethnic diversity.
Words that didn’t arrive: women’s letters, lost connections and the Red Cross archive as a chronicle of migrant silence
Liliia’s project explores letters written by Soviet women to the Red Cross after WWII, seeking lost loved ones. These epistolary traces reveal ruptures, silence and attempts to reconnect. Framed through dis:connectivity, the study links historical trauma to present-day migration and separation. Combining gender studies, post-memory, and archival affect, it recovers unheard voices and proposes new tools for memory research. Her archival work in Munich will focus on Russian and Ukrainian letters, tracing how absence becomes a form of historical presence.
Have a look at Liliia’s research poster about her project.