Join the KU Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) in welcoming Dr. Oksana Lutsyshyna (University of Texas at Austin). Dr. Lutsyshyna will give a talk titled "Literature as the Past and the Future: Decolonizing the Ukrainian Present," on Tuesday March 19, 2024 at 4pm in Forum A of the KU Burge Union.

How is Ukraine, largely alienated from its rich literary and epistemic legacy by Russian colonialism and Soviet totalitarianism, returning to, or at times, discovering its own sense of self? In this lecture, Oksana Lutsyshyna will discuss the new significance that the Ukrainian literature gained in the recent years for both Ukrainian and global audiences. She will address the notion of decolonization, often mystifying and always context-specific, and its manifestations in and through literary history. The lecture will rely on Walter Benjamin’s concepts of dialectics at a standstill and Walter Mignolo’s theorizing on the problem of decoloniality, and draw on examples from classical and contemporary Ukrainian literary works.

Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer, translator, academic, and poet, author of three novels, collection of short stories, and five books of poetry, the latest of them published in the English translation in 2019 (Persephone Blues, Arrowsmith). For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, she was awarded Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). She is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.