College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Liberal Arts and Sciences Liberal Arts and Sciences

This event is hosted by Center for African Studies and its “Africans in Europe” Working Group with support from the Center for European Studies and the Department of History.

Event Speakers:

Damilola Osideko is a medical doctor who migrated from his home country of Nigeria to Ukraine for his medical education; he obtained his MD from Ukraine’s Karazin Kharkiv National University in 2019. Since, he has developed two years’ experience working in the Kharkiv Clinic and the Infectious Disease Hospital, also of Kharkiv. He fled to Hungary soon after the war between Ukraine and Russia began, and he will join us from there.

Hilary Lynd is a PhD Candidate in Soviet and African History at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Johannesburg where as a researcher at the History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, she is exploring comparisons and connections between South Africa and the Soviet Union — before, during, and after the simultaneous collapses of apartheid and socialism. Recently, she wrote about South Africa’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for South Africa’s Business Day and the online journal, Africa is a Country.

Thom Loyd holds a PhD in Russian History from Georgetown University, and has studied the intersections of Ukrainian and global anti-imperialisms. He recently wrote for the Washington Post on the long history of African students in Ukraine. His current book project is a history of late socialism through the lens of the thousands of African students who studied in Soviet universities in the post-Stalin period.