Yuliya Ilchuk
As a Ukrainian citizen and a scholar who teaches cultural history of Eastern Slavic civilization, I condemn Russia’s war of aggression against the people of Ukraine. Russian army funded by the Russian state has been unlawfully using military power to kill and torture civilians, to abduct children, to rape women, to destroy Ukrainian culture and the state in order to force Ukraine to divert it from its course towards a democratic, inclusive, educated society in which everybody can realize their full potential. I am committed to use the soft power of Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures to educate future world leaders about the differences between the Slavs, the rich history of Ukrainian culture in the Russian Empire and the profound role of the Ukrainian culture in the modern world.
Yuliya Ilchuk's first book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid by situating them in the in-between space of Russian and Ukrainian cultures. Studies of hybridity have also informed her recent research projects on othering, protest culture, and memory on the move as socio-cultural responses to the war in Ukraine. Ilchuk's most recent book project, tentatively entitled The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits the major issues of memory studies—collective memory and trauma, post-memory, remembrance, memorials, and reconciliation—and shifts the discussion to the social and cultural dimensions of forgetting. Ilchuk has recently published two volumes of the translated Ukrainian poetry and the co-edited two-volume anthology Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910s-mid-1930s: a Cultural Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2026).
2026-2027 Courses:
SLAVIC 233 Memory Matters
This course explores the growing field of memory studies and various modes of memory-forgetting in the post-Soviet society and culture. The "memory boom" in post-1991 Russia and Eastern Europe has significantly altered the way the post-socialist subjects remember, forget, or imagine their Soviet legacy. The course proposes a critical appraisal of memory studies as an opportunity for engaging in a genuine interdisciplinary endeavor. It starts by introducing students to the main theories and concepts of memory studies (collective memory, cultural memory, sites of memory, memory scape, counter-memory, mediated memory). In the second part of the course, we will study literary and cinematographic representations of memory and forgetting through the concepts of post-memory, second-generation memory, memory of eye-witnesses and perpetrators, memory of the displaced persons, and amnesia and memory loss . And finally, we will engage in comparing the social practices of selective remembering and forgetting of the memory of the WWII and Soviet legacy in present-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
SLAVIC 104N
The course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the history of the late Soviet utopian project of the "atomic cities" to the intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic responses that the Chernobyl catastrophe generated in the post-Soviet Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian societies. During the course, we will study environmental, social, and ecological consequences of the Chernobyl disaster and analyze its many representations in fictional, cinematographic, oral histories, map projects, VR, photography, and other media in order to understand how the disaster resonates across space and time. We will consider such issues as urban and technological utopias of the late Soviet Union, representations of the disaster; ethics; health and disease; the body and its deconstruction; ecology and climate; the appropriation of disaster narratives and disaster tourism; the media and cover-ups; and faith and religion.
SLAVIC 138 Ecology Across Cultures
The course examines ecologies as distinct worldviews rooted in environmental contexts. By engaging with the literature and culture of different historical periods and different parts of the world, the course explores the following questions like: Is it true that exploitation of nature arises from unjust societies? Can we learn about natural conservation through folklore? How can feminism advance our understanding of ecology? What images of the Earth appear in popular science and where do they come from? What is the role of nature in technological utopias? How do colonial histories intersect with climate change? The materials for the course range from critical essays and social media to literary, visual, film, sociological, and historical documents (all in translation). The course culminates in a research project developed individually or in a group and presented in the poster presentation during the last week of classes.
SLAVIC 147/347 Modernism in Eastern Europe
What makes modernism in Eastern Europe distinctive from its Western counterpart? Is the national form of modernism even possible? How did modernist poets, prose writers, and filmmakers from the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires respond to the turbulent events of the first half of the 20th century? This course explore these questions through close readings of works by the prominent Eastern European and Russian writers (Mykhail Semenko, Pavlo Tychyna, Jaroslav Hašek, Stanisław Witkiewicz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Bulgakov), visual artists (Kazimir Malevych, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boychuk), and cinematographers (Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein). We will examine aesthetic theories and concepts, such as defamiliarization, skaz, siujet, dialogism, drawing on literary theory that emerged from the literary debates of the 1920s (e.g., Shklovsky, Tynianov, Eikhenbaum, Bakhtin). All texts will be assigned in English.
