The events of this week, including the first Ukrainian armed foray into Crimea and the likely death of Wagner warlord Prigozhin in a plane crash in Russia, will appear in academic theses and books in due course (articles somewhat more quickly) but we can already see a substantial rise in doctoral students’ focus on Ukraine, in Cambridge, the British Isles, and further afield.  This blog post looks at entries in Cambridge’s repository, in the UTREES database, and in the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Abstracting & Indexing Service.

Ukrainian has been a major part of Slavonic Studies in Cambridge for many years now, and its success can be seen in the significant number of Ukraine-focused Slavonic Studies PhDs from just the 2020s so far alone.  The links below go to the University’s Apollo repository, where many of these are fully available.

• Aside from the norm: artistic sexual/gender dissent and nonnormative formations in Ukraine / Olena Dmytryk (our amazing former colleague in the department).
• From Informal Social Capital to Public (Self)-Service: Exploring Digital Civil Society in Post-2013 Ukraine / Mariia Molodyk.
• ‘A Fragment of Wholeness’: The Making of the Poetic Subject in Vasyl Stus’s Palimpsests / Bohdan Tokarskyi.
• Media and Identity in Wartime Donbas, 2014-2017 / Jon Roozenbeek.
• Voices of the War in Donbas: Exploring Identities in the Affected Communities Through the Prism of War Songs / Iryna Shuvalova.

There are, of course, theses being written and submitted about Ukraine beyond the Slavonic Studies section.  Apollo is not the easiest catalogue to use; it depends more on keywords provided by authors rather than any controlled vocabulary like Library of Congress Subject Headings and the search functionality can feel a little clunky.  Apollo’s records are periodically ingested into iDiscover, eg the record for Bohdan’s thesis, and thesis records will be tagged as theses, so it is possible to do a keyword search like cambridge ukrain* (to capture the University as the awarding body and variations of Ukraine, Ukrainian, etc) and then narrow down the results by thesis under Resource Type.  Here are the results I got today, ordered by date.  You’ll see that Olena’s thesis record hasn’t hit iDiscover yet.

What about theses about Ukraine outside Cambridge?  A major bonus here is the UTREES database, which is described as follows on the MHRA website.

University Theses in Russian, Soviet, and East European Studies 1907–, or UTREES, is a bibliographical database of research in the British Isles. The database began in 2009 and has been continuously extended from the printed volume, most recently with 200 recent theses added in January 2023. The current editor is Olga Topol, who continues the work of Gregory Walker and J. S. G. Simmons.

• Lists details of over 6,500 doctoral and selected masters’ theses from British and Irish universities.
• Covers research relating to Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, and the area of the former USSR, including Central Asia, the Caucasus and Siberia.
• Subjects include art, crime, economics, energy, finance, gender studies, health, history, international relations, linguistics, human rights, literature, media, security, minorities, music, politics, religion, and society.
• Offers links to the full text of many theses.
• Search by keyword, author, subject, area, institution or date.
• Regularly updated.

The UTREES database is accessed via a page where you need to agree to have cookies installed to go further.  At the moment, the database’s software does not treat letters or characters outside the standard English alphabet very kindly, but please don’t be put off.  UTREES is a fantastic resource, if a bit of a challenge to search.  Its long history means that it’s particularly useful for tracking peaks and troughs of doctoral interest in particular places or languages over time.

What I find works best is to go into Resources>Quick Search.  For the purposes of today’s blog post, I then: selected Ukraine and Ukrainian (by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on each of them) under ‘Members of Area/Language’; wrote Ukraine in the ‘search word(s)’ box, and ticked “partial word match” under it; and then chose in ‘Order by’ to order by timestamp and then selected Descending; and then I pressed Search.  The results then showed in groups of 20, so to make the 213 results that this search resulted in today easier to deal with, I went up to the File tab and selected Export HTML.  This resulted in the online list I’ve saved here as a PDF.

The ordering of the results of the search by timestamp is the closest I could get to ordering by date of thesis, but the timestamp refers to its upload/edit on the UTREES site, hence the order being a bit out.  But the full list of results is super for browsing and comparing.  I spotted that the thesis date standardly appears after the author’s name, full stop, and a space.  So a search for “. 199” would capture theses completed in the 1990s but be unlikely to pick up “199” in thesis titles.  Looking at the 1990s up to the current day, I got the following results.

• 2020s – 31
• 2010s – 76
• 2000s – 60
• 1990s – 128

There’s a big bulge in the 1990s, which I wonder might reflect at least in part an explosion in interest in all things Ukrainian following its independence (celebrated this week) in 1991.  The >50% drop-off in the 2000s then sees a >25% increase from that decade into the 2010s.  The 2020s is clearly set to increase significantly on the previous decade, with nearly half the 2010s number while we are only at 2023 (with presumably quite a few 2022 theses alone still to be added).

To find out more about a specific thesis and how you might access it, go into its record from the ordinary results list using the magnifying glass symbol (if you’re interested in going back to the results list, please right-click on the symbol and select opening the link in a new tab).  Where there is some chance of an e-copy of the thesis, you’ll find a link to the British Library’s Ethos catalogue, where you’ll see whether the thesis can be accessed either via Ethos itself or via the student’s home institution’s repository, like this record for a Nottingham thesis.  You can, of course, also search Ethos for theses.

Not finished yet!  There were three inspirations for this blog post – Olena’s PhD submission, a talk about UTREES at a conference earlier this year, and a blog post from our Electronic Collection Management colleagues about the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Abstracting & Indexing Service (PQDT) newly moving to the Web of Science platform.  Per the advice of that blog post, I selected that index from the ‘Search in’ dropdown list, and then I did a simple search for Ukrain*.  The results are much more international, and there are things like a snazzy tool for analysing the results (eg you can look at annual numbers per year (2022 was the largest year so far) and country (the US came top by far)).

As with all these things, we have to remember that results can only use the data available.  With UTREES and ProQuest, there’ll be an inevitable gap between a thesis being submitted to its home institution and its record appearing on these external databases.  While the UTREES editors go out to find relevant theses, ProQuest presumably depends on their submission through established channels.  Looking at the country analysis, only three countries are represented by more than 100 theses from their institutions (US, Canada, England) and of the rest (not many) only Turkey has over 50.  Ukraine itself does not feature.  It’s therefore important to know what we are looking at and what we cannot see.

Finally, there is also an A-Z e-resources list for thesis databases.  I’ll ask my colleagues to add UTREES (and Apollo, except there might be a reason why they haven’t got it there already).

Mel Bach