Research Colloquium | Vitaly Chernetsky (Kansas) Traumatic Rhymes: Contemporary Ukrainian Refugee Experience and the Cultural Legacies of the 1940s Displacement

Abstract | The lecture links theoretical reflections on narrative temporality and trauma temporality (including those by Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Rothberg) with a literary-historical overview highlighting the pioneering articulation of the displacement theme in the work of the Ukrainian early Modernist writer Vasyl Stefanyk at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing with a closer discussion of the displacement-focused writings of several key authors reflecting on the experiences of the 1940s DP camps (such as Ulas Samchuk and Emma Andiievs’ka, with Andiievska’s A Novel about A Good Person as the key text that subverts both spatial and temporal coherence, as well as the border between the real and the illusory) and on the current refugee experience (such as Sophia Andrukhovych and Oksana Shchur in essays/nonfiction, Ievheniia Kuznetsova in prose fiction, and Iryna Shuvalova and Iia Kiva in poetry).

Bio | Vitaly Chernetsky will be a visiting fellow at the ScienceCampus in July 2026. A native of Odesa, Ukraine, Professor Chernetsky completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to the University of Kansas, he taught at Columbia University and at Miami University in Ohio. His research focuses on modern and contemporary cultures (literature, film, popular culture) of Ukraine, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, considered in a broader comparative/cross-regional and interdisciplinary contexts. He has also been researching globalization and its cultural aspects, postmodernism/postmodernity, Modernism/modernity, postcolonial theory & writing, questions of identity & community, diasporic cultures, nationalism & ethnicity, and broader issues in literary & cultural theory, cultural studies, film studies, feminist theory, gender and queer studies, and translation studies.

Chernetsky is the author of the book Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007), of five edited or co-edited volumes, and numerous articles and reviews. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local,is forthcoming. His published translations from Ukrainian and Russian into English include two novels, two poetry collections, and numerous shorter literary works, as well as scholarly articles and historical documents.