Nataliia Horbach
Fellow 2025/2026
Literature
Zaporizhzhia National University
Open Society University Network/CEU Institute of Advanced Study, Budapest-Ukraine
horbachnathalia@gmail.com
Bio
Nataliia Horbach is a Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Ukrainian Literature at Zaporizhzhia National University. She graduated from Zaporizhzhia National University (1997). Her dissertation topic is “Historical Prose of Yurii Mushketyk” (2002).
Professional interests: ancient and contemporary Ukrainian literature, historical prose, literary imagology, memory and trauma studies. Her research interests include the artistic reception of the Holocaust in Ukrainian literature. She is the supervisor of the research topic “The Discourse of the Past in Ukrainian Literature: Reception of Trauma and Measurements of Memory”.
She has published about 30 articles on the topic of the Holocaust in literature and is the co-author of a collective (“The Holocaust: Artistic Dimensions of Ukrainian Prose”, 2019) and a single monograph (“Artistic Reception of the Holocaust: Ukrainian Context”, 2021). They focus on prose works by Ukrainian writers, immigrants from Ukraine and their descendants, which depict the fate of Jews during the WWІІ.
She was a participant in the winter school and a guest lecturer at the Institute of Slavic Philology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany, 2020). She has participated in seminars at the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies “Tkuma” (Ukraine, 2019–2023), the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies (Ukraine, 2020, 2021), the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Poland, 2023), the Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies (Israel, 2023), and the Centropa Institute (Ukraine, 2024). She has twice participated in the summer school of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (2020, 2021).
Individual Dimensions of Holocaust Memory in Non-fiction Literature
The picture of the literary reception of the Holocaust in Ukraine cannot be complete without the inclusion of non-fiction literature which, unlike fiction, is based on real events, and unlike scientific and historical research, reproduces a vivid picture of events and people's characters, subjectivity in the selection and structuring of material, in the assessment of events. This study focuses on the works of D. Humenna, I. Khoroshunova, A. Sharandachenko, D. Malakov, Y. Chykyrysov, D. Hlotser, K. Kramer, M. Hauptman, etc., which are dedicated to the circumstances of World War II in Ukrainian territories. The purpose of the study is to analyse the representation of the Holocaust in these works. The aim is to clarify the worldview, individual-style, narrative features of works whose authors addressed the topic of the Holocaust; to trace the concepts of depicting the genocide of Jews and Roma depending on a specific era as well as the individual factors of the authors; to expand ideas about the Holocaust as part of Ukrainian history, in particular, the ethnicity- and gender-based experience of surviving the Holocaust, the fate of children, problems of collaboration, etc. in non-fiction literature; and to consider the role of non-fiction literature in shaping memory discourse about the tragedy of the Holocaust.