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Flag of Ukraine                                        Cover of The Economist, March 8-11, 2022

Amidst the inhumanity of President Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and savage war on its people is Putin’s historically inaccurate, false, irredentist reconstruction of the Ukrainian past. President Putin’s discursive perversion of Ukrainian cultural heritage has been materialized by his wanton destruction of cultural heritage sites across Ukraine. President Putin’s misuse of the past as an excuse for brutal violence is abhorrent. He is in complete defiance of the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the Hague Convention’s First (1954) and Second Protocols (1999). Even more deplorable than the devastation being wrought on Ukraine’s tangible cultural heritage is President Putin’s targeted decimation of innocent civilian lives, an action that is completely unacceptable by international human rights doctrines as well as international norms of warfare.

                                               SOLIDARITY WITH UKRAINE

CHAMP is the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy at the University of Illinois. CHAMP is a strategic research unit dedicated to the critical study of cultural heritage and museum practices around the world. CHAMP offers an outstanding education in these areas with almost three dozen faculty members who teach a range of courses and conduct research across the globe, including in the United States. More than a dozen graduate students work with CHAMP at any one time, pursuing our interdisciplinary graduate minor in Heritage Studies and the interdisciplinary graduate minor in Museum Studies. CHAMP sponsors lectures, campus and international conferences, film series and other events and it has an active publication program of thematic edited volumes. CHAMP partners with other international heritage centers including Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage at the Univerity of Birmingham, UK and the Critical Heritage Studies Network at Stockholm University, Sweden. Please explore this website to learn more.