This event is online only.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute and the Jordan Center at New York University for a presentation of “Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s” (Academic Studies Press, 2024), featuring author Kateryna Zarembo and translator into English Tetiana Savchynska, in conversation with Mark Andryczyk.
This book offers a nuanced exploration of Donetsk and Luhansk regions prior to the 2014 Russian invasion. While the region, collectively known as Donbas, frequently appears in news headlines, it remains under-researched by scholars, and myths about it abound. Combining rigorous research and captivating narration, Kateryna Zarembo debunks common myths about the region, such as its long-standing gravitation towards Russia and its rejection of everything Ukrainian. Through multiple trips to the region and interviews with the locals, the author paints a very different picture of the region than the one often seen in the media: Donetsk and Luhansk were shedding their Soviet past and reestablishing themselves as Ukrainian up until the 2014 Russian invasion. Kateryna Zarembo takes the reader to pockets of the region most of us will never see, and amplifies the voices of locals whose agency has historically been denied first by the Soviet myth of Donbas, and then by the political elites of Ukraine. Since the 2014 Russian invasion, and especially since the full-scale war, the region has become the site of the most intense fighting, and many of the places mentioned in this book are now reduced to ruins. This book is an essential read to get to know the Ukrainian East and its people, now forever altered by the Russian invasion.
Kateryna Zarembo is a Ukrainian policy analyst, university lecturer, writer, and a mother of four. She holds an MA in European Studies from University College Dublin (Ireland) and a PhD from the National Institute for Strategic Studies (Kyiv, Ukraine). Her professional path combines three of her passions: policy analysis, academic research, and literature. She taught at Central European University, Technical University of Darmstadt, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and the Ukrainian Catholic University, and published in a variety of international outlets on the topics of international relations, security issues, and civil society. She is an associate fellow at the New Europe Center, and a volunteer with the medical battalion “Hospitallers.”
Tetiana Savchynska is a literary translator working between Ukrainian and English. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. Her work has been supported by multiple grants and residencies, including ArtOmi (USA), Banff International Literary Translation Center (Canada), and the National Centre for Writing (UK). Her writing and translations have appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Apofenie, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches literary translation at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.