Sur-Place Fellows

Nataliia Vusatiuk is a junior researcher at the Department of Manuscripts and Textual Studies of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Philology at the Department of literature of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. Her doctoral project is entitled The Literary Critical Discourse of the Kyiv Neoclassicists.

She has published articles and book chapters on the history of the Ukrainian modernism and literary criticism of the 1920–1930s. She was a scholarship holder of the Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa (2022) and a fellow of the New Europe College in Bucharest (2023–2024). Together with Andrii Portnov she edited a German-Ukrainian edition of Oswald Burghardt`s anthology “Dichtung der Verdammten” (Arco-Verlag, 2025).

KIU-Research project “The Experience of War in the Ego-Documents and Poetry by Oswald Burghardt and Maksym Rylskyi” reconstructs the period of 1939–1945 in biographies of the renowned Ukrainian writers, critics and translators Oswald Burghardt and Maksym Rylskyi and explores their views on the Second World War. It reveals how the anti-militarist discourse in the poetry of two authors differs depending on the cultural milieu to which each of them belonged – the official Soviet or the emigrant national one.

Research interests:

Ukrainian literary modernism
History of literary criticism
German-Ukrainian cultural relations

Denys Chyk, born in 1981, holds a Ph.D. and D.Sc. in Comparative Literature and currently serves as a professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and their Teaching Methods at Taras Shevchenko Regional Humanitarian Pedagogical Academy in Kremenets, Ukraine.
He is the author of many works on contemporary issues of comparative literature and Ukrainian literature, including the monograph “Longo sed proximus intervallo: жанрові системи української та англійської прози кінця XVIII – середини ХІХ ст.” (2017). Since 2011, he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the annual academic journal “Kremenets Comparative Studies”. Since the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Denys Chyk has engaged in volunteering as a member of the Volunteer Centre “Kremenets. Army. SOS!!!”

KIU-Research project “Lviv. War. Word: Narratives of Memory, Trauma and City in Ukrainian Literature of 2022-2024.” The project aims to study how emotional constructs influenced the urban landscape of the Western-Ukrainian city Lviv, depicted in wartime fiction. During the work on the project, it will be clarified the authors’ experiences of individual and collective memory (especially traumatic), which express the images of Lviv as a big city during the war. It will also be interesting to correlate fiction pieces with public memory, considering them as symbolic messages in which separate meanings are encoded.

Research interests:

• literary genres studies
• imagology
• comparative typology