Mariya Romanova

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Of Ukrainian origin, I defended my thesis entitled "French Foreign Policy and Ukraine from the End of World War I to 1921" and received the "very honorable" distinction on June 2, 2016. I specialized in the history of the Great War and the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions.

From 2005 to 2006, I taught 20th-century history to a final-year class of twenty students at a high school in Kyiv, three hours a week. In 2007, I was a monitor for a master's degree in history at the University of Kyiv.

Having settled permanently in France, with a residence permit allowing me to work, I would like to integrate my work into an educational or journalistic project and share my historical knowledge, as well as that of my native languages and the associated civilizational issues.

As you know, my country of origin, Ukraine, has been at war since November 2014. Since that date, in parallel with my thesis, I worked as a freelance journalist-correspondent in Paris for the Ukrainian radio station "Free Europe," an affiliate of the BBC, for eight months. I published articles in Ukrainian about the actions of the diaspora in Paris. Among the topics covered, I focused on the sale of French "Mistral" warships to Russia. I interviewed Eva Joly during a demonstration by the Green Party in front of the Ukrainian embassy. I also spoke with Remy Pauvros, President of the Franco-Ukrainian Friendship Group at the National Assembly; and Jean-Paul Costa, former President of the European Court of Human Rights. As an assistant director at France Télévision, I was responsible for German-French translation and documentary research for three months in 2014 on the project "Apocalypse Verdun."