My Own Private Ukraine: Utopia and Queer Futurity in Dark Times

The Yale European Studies Council of the MacMillan Center presents Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas on “My Own Private Ukraine: Utopia and Queer Futurity in Dark Times.”
Location: HQ (Humanities Quadrangle), Rm 136, 320 York St.
Register to attend: https://bit.ly/YaleESC-EventRegistration
Engaging with the thought of queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Snedicker, as well as Ukrainian feminist literary scholar Solomiia Pavlychko, this talk explores the expressions of queer desire and utopian hope in Ukrainian literature and film, seeking sources for perseverance and optimism in the dark times of war. From pioneering articulations of queerness in the texts of Olha Kobylians’ka and Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi in the 1890s to the work of contemporary authors in prose, poetry, and film, it seeks to uncover and trace a persistent utopian impulse that survived and regrew despite the lengthy history of repression, violence, and trauma.
VITALY CHERNETSKY is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and an affiliate of Film and Media Studies, Jewish Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. A native of Odessa, Ukraine, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and previously taught at Columbia, Northeastern, and Miami University (Ohio). He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007; Ukrainian-language version, 2013) and of articles on modern and contemporary Slavic and East European literatures and cinema where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A book in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local, is in press. He co-edited a bilingual anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Letters from Ukraine (2016), and an annotated Ukrainian translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (2007), and guest-edited a special issue on Ukraine for the film studies e-journal KinoKultura (2009). His translations into English include Yuri Andrukhovych’s novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) and a volume of his selected poems, Songs for a Dead Rooster (2018, with Ostap Kin). He is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (2009-2018) and the current first vice president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S.
Sponsored By: The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Yale European Studies Council; Yale REEES Program; and Yale MacMillan Center