Professor Tetiana Grebeniuk

Am Planetarium 7 | 07743 Jena
Phone: +49 (0) 3641 9 44070
Mail: s_gtv[at]ukr[dot]net

Tetiana Grebeniuk is a doctor of philology and professor. She received her doctorate in 2011 from the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, with the thesis "Event in the system of fiction (on the material of Ukrainian prose from the end of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century)". She works as a professor at the Department of Cultural and Ukrainian Studies at the Zaporizhzhya State Medical and Pharmaceutical University and as a visiting professor at the Department of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Warsaw. She has taught elective courses at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich and the University of Potsdam, gives educational lectures for a wide audience in Ukraine and abroad, and actively participates in conferences and other academic events. Tetiana Grebeniuk is the author of 135 published works.

Research project at the Kolleg

Work of Memory and Identity Construction in Ukrainian Fiction of the Period of Independence

Works of fiction that evoke memories of the Soviet era have become very widespread since Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, and they are still quite popular with readers. The most significant memories in these works, recounted in the first-person or as embedded narratives, mostly relate to people’s daily lives in various Ukrainian regions right after their forced inclusion in the USSR, Ukrainians’ lives during Soviet rule, and immediately after the fall of the USSR. The texts convey how political repression, wars, forced deportations, and the Holodomor (1932-1933) were all employed to put an end to the Ukrainian people’s resistance to the communist regime.
After 1991, the vast media coverage of these collective traumas prompted a process of reevaluating the tenets of national identity in which anti-Soviet attitudes mostly transitioned into anti-Russian ones. The aforementioned works portray the changes in Ukrainian identity during these social (and personal) transformations. Both the national identity and individual identities are often shown to be rooted in familial recollections or conceived as a result of the discovery of a fact or artefact from the past that hooks a protagonist and causes their reassessment of values. This reevaluation is linked to recent political and social developments like Russia’s continuing colonization attempts and its beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Also, an integral part of the narrative of the works considered is permanent identity contestations – the struggle between incongruous views on the self-determination of Ukrainians.
On the basis of last scholarly studies, I will examine the ways of representation of trauma in the reviewed fiction, paying close attention to the oscillation between ideas of resiliency and reconciliation in the works against the changeable sociopolitical background of Ukraine in the various decades of the Independence period.

Main areas of research

• contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture
• memory and trauma studies
• postcolonial studies

Memberships

• American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL)
• Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
• Memory Studies Association (MSA)
•  Association for Women in Slavic Studies  (AWSS)
• Slow Memory COST Action (CA20105)