The LKVTI Literature Seminar will be held in English and will take place on Tuesday, 1 April, at 11 am in Jonas Balkevičius Auditorium.
This time, our speaker will be a post-doctoral fellow from the Centre for Studies in Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philology Daria Semenova.
The topic of her presentation:
How postcolonial studies can help research Eastern European literatures and cultures today
The abstract of the presentation:
Postcolonial criticism has been an important analytical strain in cultural and literary studies in Western academia since the 1970s. However, for the few notable exceptions, there has been a reluctance to apply the paradigm of postcolonial studies to the cultural aspects of the domination by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over the conquered territories and satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe. Some change has been brought by the understanding of the colonial nature of Russia's war against Ukraine and the need for continued cultural decolonization to counter the neo-imperial ambitions of the "Russian world." This presentation offers an introductory overview of the topic.
Daria Semenova is primarily interested in the potential of genre fiction to shape the readers’ understanding of the world and themselves. She obtained her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023, with a dissertation entitled “At Home and Away: Community Belonging in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Adventure Fiction, 1918-1960.” Her new research project is dedicated to space and memory in Ukrainian fiction for children and young adults since independence.
Those who cannot attend, please connect to the seminar via Zoom.
We look forward to seeing you all at the Seminar!