Olha Martynyuk (MA in 2010) is currently a Senior Lecturer at the National Technical University "Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute". In this same academic institution she has finished a doctoral program and defended her dissertation in February 2017. She has been a fellow researcher at the Institute for Human Studies (Vienna, 2011-2012), the German Historical Institute in Moscow (2013, 2014) and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (Fulbright program, 2018-2019).
Apart from History of Nationalism and Civil Society, she is interested in Urban Environmental Studies and Public history. In December and 2015 she co-organized a conference "Living in a Modern City: Kyiv of the Late 19th-mid 20th Century" and co-edited an academic volume with conference papers afterwards. Her academic work about practices of public gatherings in early 20th century Kyiv was used by a group of artists for staging performance at Kyiv Biennale (October 2015). She has curated a temporary historical exhibition at open space of National History Museum of Ukraine about the Bicycle Craze of 1890s. The documentary film "The Russian Woodpecker," to which she has contributed a good share of historical research, won Sundance World Prize in 2015.
Studying at CEU was not easy, but very rewarding. We had to organize time very effectively in order to submit multiple written assignments, read tons of literature, speed-research and meet hundreds of new people. The courses in intellectual history, urban development, comparative nationalism studies shaped my thinking for many following years. Nowadays, no matter what I do, accomplish another research task or travel around the world, I always come back in memory to the knowledge and emotional experiences that I've gained during in a wonderful year of my MA studies in Budapest.