Plans & Prospects 2023

Curiosity and risk
Dr Kateryna Kovalchuk is a Ukrainian medieval historian whose research focuses on Byzantine legend. She
joined Wolfson College in 2022, her two-year stay made possible thanks to the generosity of the many alumni
who responded so generously to our Giving Day appeal for at-risk scholars in May 2022. She sat down with our
Communications Team to discuss her work for an edition of Wolfson’s Pivot Points podcast.
Visiting Scholar, 2022
Dr Kateryna Kovalchuk values her
curiosity. Without it, “everything
becomes insipid.” Curiosity, she says,
is “quintessential” to her research into
the legends and myths of Byzantine
civilisation; but as becomes apparent
over the course of our conversation, for
Kateryna, curiosity isn’t something that
can safely be indulged in the security of
the library. The way Kateryna describes
it, her curiosity involves real risk, and
has led her into the unknown on more
than one occasion over the last three
decades.
Coming of age in post-Soviet Ukraine,
Kateryna’s first academic passion was
for the literatures of ancient Greece and
Rome, and she recalls how she would
have stayed in Lviv to pursue a doctorate
in Classical Philology were it not for a
series of chance encounters. A brochure
caught her eye in the library one day,
“and flicking through the pages, I saw
the programme in medieval studies, and
my heart started pumping. I melted.”
She had been working as amanuensis to
20
one of her professors, who at the same
moment was contacted by colleagues
in Hungary seeking a deserving student
to enrol on a medieval studies course.
Circumstances had conspired to direct
Kateryna’s attention towards the world
of the Byzantine Empire, famous for
its lavish iconography, mosaics and
intricate goldwork, and origins shrouded
in myth; her curiosity was hooked. In
the first of many migrations, she found
herself studying at the Central European
University in Budapest. “It was extremely
hard, excruciatingly hard, because it
was the first time I had done something
in English,” she tells me, “the level of
scholarship was higher. I was deprived of
sleep. But it was absolutely fascinating.”
At the time, travelling abroad to study
was an unheard-of rarity, and it meant
leaving behind family for the first time.
But Kateryna took the risk, and she
speaks fondly of her years in Budapest:
the department was welcoming, tightknit
and egalitarian, with her professors
insisting on students calling them by
their nicknames, and the intensity of the
programme encouraged close friendships
among the students. Her curiosity had
paid off. Kateryna is keen to emphasise
that curiosity isn’t an easy thing to
come to terms with; even in her early
career, regularly moving countries took
its toll. “I did have to make choices, and
they were hard choices.” Judging from
the intertwined strands of her life and
research, Kateryna’s academic curiosity
has been a source of strength in the
face of the enormous challenges she,
her communities, and her home country
have had to confront in the last few
years. It has given her ways to live with
what she calls “bewilderment,” quoting
the poet Rumi; sometimes even to
embrace it.
Kateryna’s work principally concentrates
on Byzantine narratives of church and
monastery foundations. Nowadays, she
says, we have a tendency to dismiss
the more fanciful accounts set down
in the manuscripts: “they are based on
events, people, coordinates that exist