Dr. Aileen Friesen will give the 71st annual Menno Simons Lectures at Bethel College Oct. 29-30, focused on a historical topic with current resonance: revolution in Ukraine.

All lectures are in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center, at 7 p.m. Oct. 29, and at 11 a.m. (regular Bethel College convocation) and 7 p.m. Oct. 30.

Opportunity for audience discussion will follow each lecture. They are free and open to the public.

Friesen’s overall topic for her three-lecture series is “The Mennonites in Revolutionary Ukraine.”

Friesen, a scholar of Mennonite and Russian history, was on the Bethel campus in 2018 as a presenter for the conference “Mennonites and the Holocaust.”

She spoke about her research into the contrasting fates of Mennonites and Jews under Nazi occupation in World War II Ukraine, telling a chilling story about the massacre of 3,700 Jews from Zaporizhia in the early spring of 1942, at which at least one Mennonite was present.

A month later, Mennonites gathered to celebrate Easter in nearby Chortitza, rejoicing that after more than a decade of Soviet repression, the Germans had allowed them to reopen their churches and resume “normal life.”

Friesen’s personal history includes Mennonite ancestors on both sides who came to North America from Russia – maternal in the 1920s from the Soviet Union, paternal in the 1870s from Imperial Russia.

After teaching at the University of Alberta, Friesen came to the University of Winnipeg in 2018, where she is associate professor of Mennonite Studies and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies.

She is also executive director of the Plett Foundation, which supports historical research projects dedicated to Mennonite culture and origins, and editor of its annual publication, Preservings.

Friesen’s own research interests include the history of Mennonites, especially their experiences in the Russian empire/the Soviet Union and Latin America; modern European history; and the history of migration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

She has a B.A. from the University of Manitoba and an M.A. from Carleton University, Ottawa. She earned a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta.

Friesen has written numerous articles in her areas of research interest. Her first published book-length project was The Russian Mennonite Story: The Heritage Cruise Lectures (Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies, 2018), recently reissued as The Mennonite Story in Ukraine, in which she collected and edited the work of the late historian Paul Toews.

In 2020, the University of Toronto Press published Friesen’s book Colonizing Russia’s Promised Land: Orthodoxy and Community on the Siberian Steppes.

The titles of Friesen’s three Bethel lectures are “Violence Among Neighbors: Revolution and Tragedy in Southern Ukraine,” “Beyond the Red Gate: Mennonites and Emigration from Southern Ukraine,” and “In Love We Remain: Family and Loss Under Stalin.”

The John P. and Carolina Schrag Kaufman family established the Menno Simons Lectureship Endowment to promote research and public lectures by recognized scholars relating to Anabaptist-Mennonite history, thought, life and culture, past and present. Since 1997, the family of William E. and Meta Goering Juhnke has also contributed substantially to the endowment. Both families have their roots in the Moundridge area.

Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see http://www.bethelks.edu