Tamara Hundorova

Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute

July - September 2025

Supported by HURI with the Stefan and Iwanna Rozankowskyj Ukrainian Fund

Research Project

Towards the Concept of Ukrainian Occidentalism: Discussing the 'Problem of the West' in Post-War Ukrainian DP Camps

This project develops Dr. Hundorova's previous work on decolonization in Ukrainian literature and culture (see "Transit Culture and Postcolonial Trauma", 2024). A new focus is the discussion of the problem of Europe and the concept of Occidentalism in the Ukrainian DP camps in the postwar period. In the context of decolonization, the debates on European identity have taken the form of a critique of Eurocentrism and have been linked to the thesis of the "provincialization of Europe" (D. Chakrabarty). The aim of this project is to analyze the post-World War II cultural and intellectual debates on the future of European civilization and the place of Ukraine in a new world. It examines the debate in the Ukrainian DP camps as a response to the situation of displacement and spiritual crisis in Europe, as well as to the anti-colonial movement developing in Asia and Africa at the time. Decolonization after World War II included not only former colonies, but also Eastern Europe. The project highlights the ambivalent nature of the concept of Occidentalism and explores its specificity as a platform for the maturation of Ukrainian existential cultural philosophy, the conceptualization of twentieth-century Ukrainian history, and the development of modern Ukrainian culture. The most important works of Ukrainian modernist literature, which emerged as an alternative to socialist realism, were written in the DP camps, and discussions about the Eurocentric Ukrainian canon and historiographical narrative, an alternative to the totalitarian Soviet version, started here.

Biography

Dr. Tamara Hundorova is Principal Research Fellow at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Ukraine), Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (USA), and Dean of the Ukrainian Free University (Germany). In 2023-2025,  she was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard in 2024. She is the author of many books including Tranzytna cul`tura i postcolonial`na travma (2024), Lesia Ukrainka. Knyhy Sybilly (2023), The Post-Chornobyl Library. The Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (2019), Tranzytna kul’tura. Symptomy postkolonial’noi travmy (2013), Kitsch i Literatura. Travestii (2008), Franko i/ne Kameniar (2006); Femina melancholica. Stat' i kul'tura v gendernij utopii Ol'hy Kobylians'koi (2002) and numerous publications on modernism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial studies, and history of Ukrainian literature. She taught the courses at Princeton and Harvard Universities (USA), Toronto University (Canada), Greifswald University (Germany), Ukrainian Free University (Germany), Kyiv-Mohyla University (Ukraine), Kyiv National University (Ukraine). She is a former Fulbright Scholar (1998, 2009), Visiting scholar of Monash University (Australia, 1991) and a recipient of the Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship (HURI, 2009), Shklar Fellowship (HURI, 2001-2002), Foreign visitors fellowship (Hokkaido University, 2004), MUNK School of Global Affair fellowship (University of Toronto, 2017), and Fellowship of Philipp Schwartz-Initiative of Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (University of Giessen, 2022).