Join CSEEES for our Graduate Student Lecture. Our autumn 2025 lecture entitled "Women Narrating Ukraine Otherwise: Herstories from Literature, Theater and Film" will be given by Mykyta Tyshchenko (Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures).
A light lunch will be provided to in-person attendees, please register for this talk using the link below. Registration will close on Wednesday, October 29.
Register for the in-person session here!
Abstract
This talk will examine how contemporary Ukrainian women authors engage historical narrative as a postcolonial strategy across literature and film. Focusing on works produced between the Orange Revolution and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Tyshchenko argues that reenactments and fictionalizations of history serve as a means of national self-actualization and cultural resistance. His literary analysis highlights how Oksana Zabuzhko, Lina Kostenko, and Sofia Andrukhovych reconstruct family and national memory through fragmented yet coherent narrative forms. In film, Tyshchenko explores how directors Kateryna Hornostay, Iryna Tsilyk, and Nadiia Parfan navigate war, trauma, and Soviet legacies through intimate storytelling and aesthetic innovation. Across these texts, women emerge as custodians of collective memory, articulating a distinctly Ukrainian postcolonial sensibility.
Speaker Bio
Mykyta Tyshchenko is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University’s Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. He hails from Dzhankoy in northern Crimea and was raised in Zaporizhzhia. During his studies in Kyiv, he majored in English and the history of Western literature at Kyiv National Linguistic University. While in college, he freelanced as a guide and worked as a tutor in English and French, and has continued teaching languages since. Mykyta has instructed Russian at Pomona College, for STARTALK (University of Pittsburgh), and at Ohio State, where he has taught both Russian and Ukrainian.
