Tamara Hundorova
Fellow 2025/2026
Literary Studies
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv Shevchenko Institute of Literature
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
hundorova@gmail.com
Bio
Dr. Tamara Hundorova is Principal Research Fellow at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Ukraine), Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (USA), and Dean of the Ukrainian Free University (Germany). In 2023-2025, she was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard in 2024. She is the author of many books including Tranzytna cul`tura i postcolonial`na travma (2024), Lesia Ukrainka. Knyhy Sybilly (2023), The Post-Chornobyl Library. The Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (2019), Tranzytna kul’tura. Symptomy postkolonial’noi travmy (2013), Kitsch i Literatura. Travestii (2008), Franko i/ne Kameniar (2006); Femina melancholica. Stat' i kul'tura v gendernij utopii Ol'hy Kobylians'koi (2002) and numerous publications on modernism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial studies, and history of Ukrainian literature. She taught the courses at Princeton and Harvard Universities (USA), Toronto University (Canada), Greifswald University (Germany), Ukrainian Free University (Germany), Kyiv-Mohyla University (Ukraine), Kyiv National University (Ukraine). She is a former Fulbright Scholar (1998, 2009), Visiting scholar of Monash University (Australia, 1991) and a recipient of the Jacyk Distinguished Fellowship (HURI, 2009), Shklar Fellowship (HURI, 2001-2002), Foreign visitors fellowship (Hokkaido University, 2004), MUNK School of Global Affair fellowship (University of Toronto, 2017), and Fellowship of Philipp Schwartz-Initiative of Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (University of Giessen, 2022).
The Idea of Occidentalism and Post-World War Ukrainian Cultural Imagination (1945–1949)
This project examines the intellectual debates in Ukrainian displaced persons (DP) camps in 1945–1949 regarding the postwar “crisis of Europe” and how these debates shaped the Ukrainian immigrant culture. It focuses on analyzing the concept of the West within the framework of Occidentalism studies and in the context of 20th-century Ukrainian literature.
The idea of this project is framed by Occidentalism studies that emerged in the late 20th century to reconsider the specificity of Western modernity and deconstruct the concept of Eurocentrism. The project investigates how discussions about Western cultural canons and European historiographies were reflected in the artistic imaginations of Ukrainian refugees and manifested in literary works written and published in DP camps. Another aspect of the project involves analyzing Ukrainian refugee intellectuals’ attempts to revive prewar modernist and avant-garde traditions, particularly the neoclassical movement (Mykola Zerov, among others) and Mykola Khvylovy’s “Asian Renaissance.”
The place of Ukrainian literature in the Western cultural canon played an essential role in discussions, producing the concept of “grand literature.” This concept originated in the Artistic Ukrainian Movement (1945–1948), a powerful cultural and intellectual movement in the DP camps.
I explore how discussions about European identity correlate with the philosophy of displacement, existentialism, rethinking provincialism, and the modernization of Ukrainian culture in the middle of the twentieth century. The project focuses on the ideas of two prominent intellectuals of that time—Volodymyr Yaniv (1908–1991) and Yuri Shevelov (1908–2002), who represented the two main versions of Occidentalisms in Ukrainian postwar imagination—the nationalist and the decolonial.