The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure from a number of perspectives—Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western—across the centuries, with plenty of overlap, assembling together a single, fragmented, but nonetheless collective narrative (3). Khmelnytsky’s seventeenth-century Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is—depending on your point-of-view—an event of national liberation, treacherous factionalism, murderous pogrom, or personal vendetta, (again) with plenty of overlap. And the image of the Cossack warrior, the free horseman on the open steppe, serves as many narratives, right up to the present day with Mr. Putin’s twenty-first century Ukrainian land grab. On today’s podcast, Professor Glaser speaks about this remarkable figure and the issues at stake.
Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, and also Director of the Jewish Studies Program at UCSD. Dr. Glaser is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russias Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (2012), and editor, with David Weintraub, of Protelpen: Americas Rebel Yiddish Poets (2012). She has also written a number of scholarly and popular articles including a recent piece for the New York times about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.
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