UKRAINETT+ Conference Keynote Speaker: Uilleam Blacker
As part of the annual UKRAINETT+ conference, The War and Beyond: Perspectives on Ukrainian Culture and Society (Bergen 14–15 October 2025), we invite you to join us for Uilleam Blacker’s public keynote lecture.
The lecture will be live-streamed from Bergen on the 14th of October 14.00 – 15.00. A link will be available here. The presentation time may be adjusted. Please check our website regularly for the most up-to-date information
Ukraine has, in its various incarnations over the centuries, always been on the edge and in-between. It has caught been between empires, nationalisms, and totalitarianisms. This position has often meant that Ukrainian culture not only existed in and across multiple political entities, but was also marginalised, denigrated, even violently attacked within them. Given this history of fragmentation and repression, it may seem challenging to create a coherent, linear history of Ukrainian culture. But is such a history necessary, or even desirable? This talk will interrogate Ukraine’s complex history not only as a source of difficulty, but as a catalyst for invention, experiment, resilience, and creative and sometimes confrontational engagement not only with the many other cultures that have intersected on the territory of Ukraine, but with global culture more broadly.
Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor of Ukrainian and East European Culture at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European studies and a translator of Ukrainian literature. He is the author of Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe (2019), co-author of Remembering Katyn (2012) and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (2013).
He has written on Ukraine for The Guardian, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement and others, and his translations have appeared in The Guardian, The White Review, Words without Borders and others. He is currently writing a book on Ukraine’s rich, multilingual literary landscape in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Photo credit: Anastasia Telikova