Heritage Destruction and the War on Ukraine

A common motivation of scholars, regardless of their discipline, is to conduct research that has the ambition and potential to contribute to contemporary, ongoing debates. There is an understandable desire that research outputs are relevant, up-to-date, and take the opportunity to reflect on the most important questions and issues occupying the discipline at that particular moment in time and to situate them in the context of current events. At a certain point, however, as a project nears completion, there is the inevitable reality that a line must be drawn, and a resultant acceptance that there is a possibility that events may develop dramatically during the period between submission of a piece of scholarship and its eventual publication. Certain developments in scholarship can be foreseen and factored in, but global events, events that may fundamentally engage and perhaps dramatically influence our respective disciplines, are inherently unpredictable.