Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
"As if shells hit language, the debris from language may look like poems," wrote a Ukrainian novelist who turned into a poet and a war crimes investigator after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the aftermath of a Russian attack on Kramatorsk in 2023, she tragically became a victim of a war crime herself. Her name was Victoria Amelina. Her book of testimony, reportage, and memoir Looking at Women Looking at War was published posthumously in February 2025.
What is the role of writing in wartime when not only bodies, cities, and landscapes are hit by the enemy's shells but also the language itself? How have Ukrainian writers chronicled the war in their poetry and prose? What purpose does this record serve and what is its place in the world’s library? Dr Sasha Dovzhyk will discuss the documentation of Russia’s war in Ukrainian literature, reading from her documentary prose and dwelling on Amelina’s book, which Dovzhyk prepared for publication with Tetyana Teren, Yaryna Grusha, and Alex Amelin.
Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, editor, and cultural manager. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Birkbeck, and has taught at Birkbeck and UCL SSEES, worked as a special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London, and edited three books. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guardian, European Voices, New Lines, Index on Censorship, CNN, and others. She edits the London Ukrainian Review. Having lived in London for nine years, she has recently moved back to Ukraine to help set up INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange.
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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.
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LOCATION:Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall 100 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250228T220000Z DTEND:20250228T233000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR