Since 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian war has shaken the global order—and transformed countless individual lives. Drawing on years of personal correspondence, interviews, and diary entries, historian Danielle Leavitt follows seven Ukrainians through the first year and a half of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Tracing how individuals navigate the challenges of conflict, displacement, and daily survival, she bridges historical analysis and lived experience to reveal how the past and its stories shape the present. Told in staggering human detail that feels both palpable and resonant, By the Second Spring offers a window into the human dimensions of war—where history, memory, and survival intersect every day. In this talk, Leavitt tells the story of Ukraine’s war in seven lives and reflects on what it means to write a people-centered history of the present.

Danielle Leavitt is a historian of modern Ukraine and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in Russian and Ukrainian relations, human age, generation, and gender. Her work examines the function of generation and human age in Soviet history and works to insert the stories of underrepresented populations, such as the elderly and women, into consequential debates about stagnation, cultural life, Soviet collapse, post-Soviet economic and political development, and the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Dr. Leavitt’s first book, By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (2025, FSG), charted the lives of seven Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Based on a unique set of online diaries, Leavitt contextualized her seven subjects, Ukrainian society, and its predicaments for a wide audience, introducing readers to a rigorous but accessible history of Ukraine, the Soviet Union, its collapse, and Russia’s historical relationship with its neighbors.

Leavitt received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2023. From 2023-2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

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