Nadieszda Kizenko

Professor of History, University at Albany, United States

Nadieszda Kizenko is a professor of history and the director of religious studies at the University at Albany (State University of New York). Her books include A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (Heldt Prize winner, Penn State, 2000), Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford, 2021), and the co-edited Orthodoxy in Two Manifestations? The Conflict in Ukraine as Expression of a Fault Line in World Orthodoxy (Peter Lang, 2022). In 2023–24 she was a Senior Research Scholar at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music, where she studied how the liturgies of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine reflect different notions and different experiences of history, identity, memory, victimhood, and sacrifice. Her research has been supported by foundations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Research Exchanges Board, the American Councils Research Scholar Program, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the German Research Foundation.