The Invisible University for Ukraine cordially invites you to a poetry reading and discussion.
16:30–18:00 Evening Session on War Poetry
Speaker: Iryna Shuvalova (University of Oslo)
Moderator: Diána Vonnák (University of Stirling)
19:00–20:00 Iryna Shuvalova Poetry Readings (Iryna Shuvalova & Jordan Voltz)
Iryna Shuvalova is a Ukrainian poet, translator, and scholar. She is particularly interested in how political imaginaries are constructed through culture in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Shuvalova holds a Ph.D. in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright scholar. Her most recent scholarly publications in REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies explore identity narratives of the Russo-Ukrainian war through popular songs. Her current research examines how the symbolic space of ‘Russianness’ is manufactured by the occupying regime in Ukraine’s territories controlled by Russia. She authored five books of poetry, including Pray to the Empty Wells (2019), available in English. In 2009, she co-edited 120 Pages of ‘Sodom,’ the country’s first anthology of queer writing. Her poetry has been translated into 25 languages and published internationally, including in Modern Poetry in Translation, LitHub, Words Without Borders, and others. She is a member of PEN Ukraine. Her new poetry collection Endsongs is forthcoming in early 2024.
Diána Vonnák is a research fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her work focuses on how heritage institutions and professionals work in contexts of crisis, armed conflict, and rapid political change. She is interested in the changing division of labor between states, international actors, and different non-state actors in negotiating the recognition, management, and protection of heritage, in the afterlife of political projects, and the public negotiation of state collapse, independence, and the dissolution of empires. Since 2014, Vonnák have been working predominantly in Ukraine. Originally from Hungary, she was trained in Germany and in the UK. During her doctorate, Vonnák was a junior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and an affiliate researcher at Vienna University’s Doktoratskolleg Galizien. She obtained her PhD at Durham University in 2020. Besides her academic work, Vonnák is a literary author and translator. Her debut short story collection received the Margó Award in 2022. She translates Ukrainian poetry into Hungarian, most recently Harkiv Hotel, a collection of selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan (Jelenkor, 2023). In 2023–4 she is a fellow of the Berlin Art Academy, working on her second book.