Putin’s Holy War: Sacred Memory and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Sean Griffin is an Associate Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the history of the Orthodox Church and its role in the sacralization of political power—from the liturgy and chronicles of medieval Kyiv to the arthouse cinema and wartime propaganda of Putin’s Russia. Dr. Griffin’s first book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, was published by Cambridge University Press and won two international book awards: the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize and the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize.