Tamara Djermanovic
Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
September - December 2026
Supported by HURI with the Ksenia and Olexa Antypiv Ukrainian Fund and the Walter Bacad Endowment Fund
Research Project
IDENTCULTUKRAINE: Creating the Canon of Ukrainian Literature and Visual Arts
The IDENTCULTUKRAINE project aims to create a canon of Ukrainian literature and visual arts from the perspective of cultural identities and to establish, within Western European academia, a research field focused on Ukrainian culture and its identity. The ambition of the proposal is based on the premise that Ukraine, whose priorities include reclaiming its own culture and identity, has until recently been viewed primarily within the Russian cultural sphere. Academia has not questioned this discourse; rather, it has contributed to it.
Our aim is to analyze and identify authors and works that have contributed to the construction of Ukrainian culture, its identity, and its diversity. The criteria for establishing the canon departs from the three possible approaches suggested by the Ucrainica project: (1) Authors who were born in what is now Ukraine; (2) Literary texts and works of art that provide material for studying Ukrainian history; and (3) Texts and artistic oeuvres that have shaped the collective imagination regarding this geographical space and its cultural identity.
Yet while it is important to reclaim the figures of literature and art who were born in Ukraine and embody its cultural tradition, the research will approach the selected authors and themes both in the context of the history of Russia and Ukraine and their relations, and within the broader fields of comparative Literature, Aesthetics, and Arts.
The chronological framework spans the period from the first East Slavic union, Kievan Rus, to the present day, always through the lens of the main topic and not strictly following historical chronology.
Biography
Born in Belgrade in 1965, Tamara Djermanovic is a Full Professor of Slavic Philology in the Faculty of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain. She founded and runs the Seminar of Slavic Studies at her university.
In 1991, as the disintegration of Yugoslavia began, she left her home country and started a new chapter of her personal and professional life in Barcelona. Dr. Djermanovic holds a PhD in Humanities from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, which she earned in 2004. Her academic research has focused on the relationship between Russia and the West. For her doctoral studies, she approached this question through Dostoevsky's novels. Her dissertation “Dostoevsky Between Russia and the West: Notes from Underground, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov” (2004) was later published as a book in Spanish, Russian, and Serbian. In her postdoctoral research, she broadened her field of research to other topics, such as the iconography of Eastern Christianity and the aesthetics of Malevich, Kandinsky, and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Professor Djermanovic's work has increasingly turned toward studying, researching, and promoting Ukrainian culture. Her project IDENTCULTUKRAINE, for which she holds the HURI Fellowship, also aims to lay the groundwork for establishing a research field within Spanish academia dedicated to Ukrainian culture from the perspective of cultural identity/identities.
Among her eight published books are El universo de Dostoievski (Barcelona, 2021), Tarkovski y la cultura universal (Madrid, 2020), La construcción estética de Europa [Ed.] (Granada, 2014), and Viaje a mi país ya inexistente, retorno a la Antigua Yugoslavia (Barcelona, 2013). She is author of more than thirty book chapters and articles, including “La invasión de Ucrania en el contexto del duelo entre Rusia y Occidente” (Granada, 2023), “Antropología de los eslavos del sur en la obra de Andrić y Cvijić” (Madrid, 2016), ”Andrej Tarkovski i Fjodor Dostojevski: stvaralaštvo kao ideal” (Belgrade, 2025) and “Dostoevsky in Quixote’s Land” in The Routledge Companion to Dostoevsky for the 21st Century, forthcoming 2027. She is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País, where her opinion pieces address Ukraine and the ongoing war.