Bio

Oleh Kotsyuba is a scholar of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Manager of Publications at Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute, and Chief Online Editor at Krytyka, an independent Ukrainian intellectual journal (www.krytyka.com). Dr. Kotsyuba specializes in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian 20th century and contemporary literature and culture.

He earned a "Degree of a Specialist“ (equivalent to a B.A. degree plus a professional teacher's degree) summa cum laude in German as Foreign Language and German Literature, English Language and Literature, and World Literature at the State (now – National) Pedagogical University of Ternopil, Ukraine, in 2002.

In 2006, he graduated from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) with a Master of Arts degree in English.

In 2008, he earned a Master of Arts degree summa cum laude in Comparative Literature, Computational Linguistics, and Computer Science at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

In 2015, he earned a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University with a dissertation entitled "Rules of Disengagement: Author, Audience, and Experimentation in Ukrainian and Russian Literature of the 1970s and 1980s."

Dr. Kotsyuba's research interests include:

  • Contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture, especially vis-à-vis Europe and Russia
  • Ukrainian and Russian literature in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods; Polish literature of the socialist period and afterwards
  • Literary process in countries under oppressive, socialist, or authoritarian regimes (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Cuba, Venezuela)
  • Colonial and post-colonial studies, concepts of state and nationhood, especially in former republics of the Soviet Union, including Central Asia
  • Conceptualizations of literary history in terms of "change," "disruption," and "continuity"
  • Russian-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Polish literary, cultural, and political relations
  • Soviet literature and film, in particular through the lens of sotsrealism
  • Feminist theory and gender studies in Eastern Europe

Conference Presentations

November 2017: Convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (Chicago, IL). Panel "Ukrainian Poetry of the 1970s and 1980s: Towards the Creation of an Alternative Cultural Identity. Presentation title: "Changing the Framework: Oleh Lysheha’s Interlocutors in Western Literature."

November 2016: Convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (Washington, DC). Panel: Back to the Future: Socialism in Contemporary Eastern European Culture, Politics, and Society. Presentation title: "Decommunized and Happy? Literary Reactions to Disappearing Soviet Symbols in Post-Maidan Ukraine, 2013-2016."

November 2013: Convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (Boston, MA). Panel: Modernist responses to a "revolutionary' predicament in Ukraine. Presentation title: “Continuity in Disruption: Post-1991 Ukrainian Literature and its Soviet Heritage.”
 

November 2012: Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (Seattle, WA). Panel: Contemporary Ukrainian Literature. Presentation topic: “The Old Face of the New Ukrainian Literature: Lina Kostenko’s Zapysky ukraïns’koho samašedšoho [Notes of a Ukrainian Madman].”
 

January 2010: Convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly: American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) (Los Angeles, CA). Panel: Sexuality and Ukrainian Literature. Presentation title: “Feminism vs. Patriotism: Oksana Zabužko’s Experiments with «Womb Voice» and Coarse Language.”