research
My publications and research to date examine the culture of the long fin de siècle (c. 1880–1920) from a comparatist perspective with an emphasis on eastern Europe.
In the year of the 200th anniversary of Aubrey Beardsley's birth, I co-edited the book of Beardsley's writings for the Jewelled Tortoise series (MHRA, 2022).
My most recent essay for the Oxford Handbook of Decadence (2021) discusses the decadent literature of eastern Europe through the lens of political geography. During my Wellcome Trust-funded postdoctoral fellowship in medical humanities (2019), I studied conceptualisations of disease at the turn of the century.
Education
I have a PhD in English and Comparative Literature (Birkbeck, University of London) and two MA degrees: Victorian Studies (Birkbeck) and Cultural Studies (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy).
Academic publications
Book
Ukraine Lab: Global Security, Environment, Disinformation through the Prism of Ukraine, ed. by Sasha Dovzhyk (ibidem Verlag, 2023). [forthcoming]
Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. by Sasha Dovzhyk and Simon Wilson (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2022)
Ukrainian Cassandra: New Translations of Works by Lesia Ukrainka, ed. by Sasha Dovzhyk (Live Canon, 2023)
Peer-reviewed articles and chapters
'The "New People" of Decadence in Eastern Europe', in Oxford Handbook of Decadence, ed. by Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
‘The Grand Prince of Kyiv in Holland Park: The Statue of Saint Volodymyr’, in Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration, ed. by Alistair Robinson and Charlotte Grant (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
‘Beardsley Men in Russia: Modernising Decadent Masculinity’, Modernist Cultures, 16:22 (2021)
‘Aubrey Beardsley in the World of Art: The Russian Circulation’, British Art Studies, 18 (2020)
‘The Queer Little Grove: The Adoption of Aubrey Beardsley by Mikhail Kuzmin’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (2020)
research positions and teaching
I am currently an Associate Lecturer in Ukrainian Literature at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, UCL. I am also affiliated with Goldsmiths Decadence Research Centre as Distinguished Visiting Scholar.
I have worked as a research assistant on Professor Joanna Bourke's project Birkbeck Bicentenary History (2021-22).
In 2019, I held a full-time postdoctoral fellowship in medical humanities at Birkbeck, funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Between 2016 and 2020, I was an Associate Tutor at the Department of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck. For a year, I also taught at the Birkbeck Department of History of Art (2016-17).
I was a course convenor in Modern and Contemporary Literature for the Beckenham Further Education Group in 2020-21, and an invited lecturer on the Literatura course at the Ukrainian Institute London (2021-22).
conferences & events
The dissemination of knowledge and the communication of my research to the public has always been at the heart of my academic activities. Alongside my doctoral and postdoctoral research, I organised three international conferences, for all of which I successfully obtained funding.
ABirthday: Aubrey Beardsley turns 149
On 21 August 2021, Beardsley turned 149 years old while the Aubrey Beardsley Society celebrated its first year. Two Beardsleyites extraordinaire, Professor Margaret Stetz and Dr Kate Hext, helped us mark the occasion in style by speaking on the topics of utmost decadent interest. I organised the event on behalf of the Aubrey Beardsley Society in association with the British Association of Decadence Studies and Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. Recordings available here.
Forgotten Geographies in the Fin de Siècle (2016)
Co-organised with Leire Barrera-Medrano, this truly international conference attracted speakers from over twenty countries.
La Maladie Fin de Siècle: Decadence and Disease (2019)
The symposium explored the turn-of-the-century languages of illness through the combination of academic panels and première screenings of archival films.
the trial: the state of russia vs oleg sentsov (2019)
To vitalise the discussion around Ukrainian culture as a site of anti-colonial resistance and engage new audiences in this debate, I organised a free screening of The Trial: The State of Russia vs Oleg Sentsov (dir.: Askold Kurov, 2018) for Birkbeck Arts Week in 2019. It was followed by an academic panel (available as a podcast) which examined the documentary in the context of modern dissident practices and Crimean history of political repressions.
I co-produced the documentary performance of the Ukrainian Theatre of Displaced People at the symposium Depicting Donbas: Creative and Critical Responses to the War in Ukraine (co-organised by Dr Molly Flynn and Dr Uilleam Blacker, 2019).