Virtual Lecture: "After Chornobyl: Post-Soviet Memory, Generations, and Trauma in Ukrainian Literature" with Dr. Tamara Hundorova -- University of Washington

This event is part of the lecture series on Ukrainian history and culture at the University of Washington in the spring of 2022.

ABOUT THE LECTURE
In Ukrainian literature, the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster has come to signify the crisis of totalitarian representation and a distrust in the Soviet Union's grand narratives. As a post-totalitarian trauma, the Chornobyl catastrophe has also defined a new post-Soviet Ukrainian literature. Dr. Tamara Hundorova's presentation will focus on the questions of post-Soviet memory, generational gaps, and authorial identities of writers from Yury Andrukhovych to Oksana Zabuzhko and Serhiy Zhadan to explore the aftereffects of the Chornobyl catastrophe as central to the main paradigmatic shift in contemporary Ukrainian literature. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Prof. Tamara Hundorova is Head of the Department of Literary Theory at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv), Associate Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and Dean at the Ukrainian Free University (Munich). She is the author of numerous books and articles on modernism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial studies, and history of Ukrainian literature, including, most recently, "The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s" (Academic Studies Press, 2019). Prof. Hundorova has taught at Harvard University (USA), University of Toronto University (Canada), Greifswald University (Germany), Ukrainian Free University (Germany), Kyiv-Mohyla University (Ukraine), Kyiv National University (Ukraine); she has also held numerous prestigious international fellowships, including, twice, the Fulbright Scholarship.