Dr Olena Palko is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests lie in the field of early Soviet cultural history and the interwar history of Eastern Europe. She was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia in 2017 and has held research fellowships at Humboldt University (Berlin) and Basel University. She also holds a Degree of ‘Candidate of Sciences’ (kandydat nauk) from the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Olena is a co-ordinator of a digital project, Shadows of Empire: contesting territorial imaginations and borders in modern Europe, conducted at the University of St. Gallen. Olena Palko is a co-convener of the BASEES Study Group for Minority History.

Her first book, Making Ukraine Soviet. Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) was awarded the Prize for the Best Book in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture (2019-20) from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. She is also a co-editor of an edited collection Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing Borders in Twentieth Century, forthcoming in McGill Queens University Press in the spring of 2022.