(This blog was originally posted on the Birkbeck Department of English and Humanities Blog on 3 May 2019.) 

Sasha Dovzhyk recently completed her PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Birkbeck. She is now a Wellcome Trust-funded postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck School of Arts exploring the tropes of disease in the arts of Decadence.  Here she discusses the symposium Depicting Donbas (25–26 April 2019), a joint initiative between UCL SSEES and Birkbeck.        

Poets and writers, theatre directors and performers, documentary photographers, historians, and literary scholars: the participants of the symposium Depicting Donbas (25–26 April) represented a truly cross-disciplinary congregation. What united them was the recognition of the ongoing war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, essential for their creative practice and academic work. They were invited to London by the symposium’s organisers, Molly Flynn (Birkbeck) and Uilleam Blacker (UCL SSEES), to advance our understanding of the European war which has already taken 13,000 lives. As we mark five years since the annexation of Crimea and the launch of Russian military campaign in Donbas, this symposium could not but be more urgent.

(more…)