REEEC New Directions Lecture: Sophia Wilson, "Maidan: Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution”
- Event Type
- Lecture
- Sponsor
- REEEC
- Location
- 306 Coble Hall (801 S. Wright St., Champaign, IL 61820)
- Date
- Feb 26, 2026 4:00 pm
- Speaker
- Dr. Sophia Wilson (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Associate Professor of Political Science)
- Cost
- Free and open to the public
- Contact
- REEEC
- reec@illinois.edu
- Views
- 6
- Originating Calendar
- Russian, E. European & Eurasian Center: Speakers
Sophia Wilson will discuss her book, Maidan: Ukraine's Democratic Revolution - a powerful grassroots movement that restored democracy to a country slipping into authoritarianism. Her study of the Ukrainian Revolution of 2013-14 gives a carefully researched account of the underbelly of the resistance process, investigating how participants self-organized to create the resistance, why the peaceful movement eventually turned to violence, and how the revolutionary process changed those who came to change the country. The Ukrainian state used violence and violations of due process to suppress the resistance, thereby declaring new boundaries in rights relations. Wilson's book shows how the people pushed back in multiple arenas – the protest square, courtrooms, hospitals, churches, and media – to successfully challenge the constitutionality of the state’s actions.
Dr. Sophia Wilson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and the President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. She was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) in 2015, and taught at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (HUSI) in 2017, 2019 and 2025. She was a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Law, Society and Culture at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in 2012-2013. In October of 2023, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin, as she began her work on a new book, comparing three occupations of Ukraine: by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and modern Russia.