Ingeborg Jandl-Konrad

Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute

July 2026 - March 2027

Supported by a fellowship from the Max Kade Foundation

Research Project

Parrhesia for Ukraine in Intermedial (Auto)Biographies

Autobiographical texts and media, such as photographs, drawings, video-clips, songs, performances or plurimedial art emerged early in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many of them reached a broad public through social media. As an accessible way to participate in discussions on the situation and to emphasize the need for action, autobiographical documents are a significant way of peaceful protest against the war of aggression. On the one hand, they have a community-building impact, and enable Ukrainians to preserve historical and emotional memories of significant events. On the other hand, the personal perspectives offer people from other backgrounds emotional access to the challenging historical context. By raising awareness of the ongoing aggression, they can help to mobilize the international community.

Methodologically, I connect artistic interventions for Ukraine to the ancient practice of parrhesia, which Foucault translated as frank and fearless speech. My research questions are: (1) How is parrhesia linked to autobiography? (2) How is it expressed through (inter)medial formats? (3) In what ways can parrhesia be useful in supporting peace-building processes? The project consists of three parts, each focusing on a different media format.

Biography

Ingeborg Jandl-Konrad is a Max Kade Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and an Assistant Professor (Universitätsassistentin) at the University of Vienna. In 2024 she completed her habilitation and was awarded the Venia Docendi for Slavic Literatures and Cultures. She also teaches an interdisciplinary course on Chernobyl for risk and disaster management students at Montanuniversität Leoben. 

In her third book, Ingeborg engaged with photographic and narrative discourses of war-trauma in post-Yugoslav literatures (De Gruyter 2025; Austrian Science Fund, FWF). She has developed two theoretical categories: “photo-text” and “speaking”, which also inform her ongoing research on artistic protest in the context of contemporary Ukraine. This research earned her the Christian Fiammengo Prize for Intercultural Understanding and International Relations. Ingeborg received her Ph.D. from the University of Graz, with a dissertation on perception and emotion in the emigré writer Gajto Gazdanov (Lang 2019). For this project she adopted a cognitive psychology perspective and was awarded a DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) as well as the dissertation award by the Austrian Society for Slavistics (ÖGSl). She has held fellowships at universities in Odesa, Moscow and Sarajevo.

Ingeborg’s areas of expertise include East and South Slavic literatures, war-affected narration and trauma, intermediality, medical humanities, concepts of the body, perception and emotion in literature as well as ethical dimensions of literature and culture.