The Composition of Soil: The Holocaust and Holodomor in Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry

About the Lecture: 

At many points in modern history, Ukrainian identity has been bound up with the Ukrainian language, Christianity, and collective experiences of trauma as Ukrainians. In the wake of the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests, and throughout the ensuing war in Donbas, which escalated in 2022 with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, poets in Ukraine sought to correct the failures of both Soviet Nationalities Policy and post-Soviet Ukrainian national identity-formation by weaving Jewish, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar histories of collective trauma into their writing. In this talk, Amelia Glaser will discuss the recent work of poets including Marianna Kiyanovska, Halyna Kruk, and Iya Kiva, whose attempt to bridge seemingly irreconcilable histories are simultaneously a response to the ongoing war, and part of what scholars have identified as a recent shift from viewing Ukrainian identity as an ethnic category to a civic one. These poems help to probe a key question for Ukraine and beyond: what are the risks, opportunities, and responsibilities of contemporary writers who seek to find analogies for the Holocaust. 

About the Speaker: 

Amelia Glaser is a Professor of Literature at UC San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands (2012) and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020). She is the editor of Stories of Khmelytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (2015) and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics (2020). Her translations, from Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish, include Yaryna Chornohuz's dasein: defence of presence (Jantar, 2025), as well as Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (Arrowsmith, 2023) and Iya Kiva's Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Press, 2026), both co-translated with Yuliya Ilchuk . She is currently writing a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

This event is organized by the Center for Austrian Studies, and co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, and the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature