Kateryna Burkush

Kateryna Burkush is a social historian of labour in the late Soviet Union, currently holding a DAAD-funded fellowship at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (October 2023–July 2024 and October 2024–March 2025). Her academic trajectory includes research fellowships at New Europe College (Bucharest), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, alongside teaching at the European School of Social and Political Sciences (Université Catholique de Lille, 2022).

She received her doctoral degree from the European University Institute (Florence) in 2019. Her research focuses on work and migration in socialist contexts, particularly examining labor migration's localized impacts in Ukraine's western borderlands across political regimes. Core expertise spans the history of socialist economies, labour history, modern Ukrainian history, women’s and gender history, and oral history methodologies.

Dr. Burkush's current book project, Inglorious Heroes of Labour: Seasonal Workers and the Transformation of the Late Soviet Countryside, investigates how flexible labor markets became institutionalized in post-WWII Soviet rural economies through Transcarpathia's case study. Her publications consistently challenge the notion that Soviet seasonal labor belonged to the 'shadow economy,' demonstrating its formal integration into state systems through archival, oral, and legal sources.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from New Europe College, IWM Vienna, Wiko Berlin, and the DAAD. While no formal lab affiliations are noted, her work emphasizes collaborative oral history methods and cross-institutional archival research in Eastern Europe.