Writing the Impossible in Eastern Europe: Biography and Autobiography Amid Trauma
Description
Is it possible to write the self without also always narrating trauma? Is it actually possible to write the self at all? Writing a biography or even an autobiography or memoir has an implication of authority, of expertise. This kind of writing often stakes a claim of ownership, and in the worst cases can even attempts to colonize the self or the other. In best case scenarios, the writer explicitly acknowledges the limits of what they are doing. In worst case scenarios, an autobiography, and even a biography becomes a deeply narcissistic project. What happens when these complications around biography and autobiography are combined with the experience of deep, ongoing trauma? This panel seeks contributions that examine these questions particularly in the light of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the oppression of the Roma people throughout Eastern Europe, the growing anti-immigrant, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ+ movements, as well as the exceedingly urgent attempts at Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (coping with the past) honoring the last living survivors of the Holocaust.
Possible, albeit not exhaustive themes are:
-testimonial writing in Central and Eastern Europe
-prison memoirs
-memory and nostalgia
-trauma as the failure of the human (the post- and anti- human)
-the monstrous
-biography/autobiography/antibiography
-rewriting history/anti-history
-narrative (im)possibility
-silence
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Maryna Romanets is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of two monographs, Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature and Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave, and coeditor of Beauty, Violence, Representation. Her edited collection on contemporary Central and Eastern European neo-Gothic is forthcoming in 2026.
Speaker Bio
Matthew M. Mucha is a PhD Candidate from the Centre of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto with Collaborative Specializations in Diaspora & Transnational Studies and Women & Gender Studies.
His current research project, entitled “Dictatorial Cultures Across the Luzon Strait: Gendered Memory in the Martial Law Literatures of Taiwan and the Philippines,” is a comparative literary analysis of novels by women authors about martial law trauma in the Philippines and Taiwan.
Speaker Bio
Drago Momcilovic is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His teaching and research interests include Balkan literature and film, contemporary world literature and popular culture, and narratives of monstrosity and stardom.
Speaker Bio
Dragana Obradović is an associate professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is author of Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation. She has published articles on graphic novels and post-socialist feminist cinema. Most recently, her article "An Artistic Challenge to the Culture of Forgetting in Serbia: Audiovisual Discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's Depth 2" was published in Slavic Review (Winter 2023).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Kirill Veselkin is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at UT Austin. He earned BA and MA degrees in Journalism from Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2023–24, he held a Fulbright Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center, working with David Foster Wallace’s typescripts. His current research explores (post)nuclear narratives and the intersections of post-WWII American and late/post-Soviet literature.
Speaker Bio
Eva R Hudecova is a Lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. In addition to her research and teaching on contemporary Central European literature, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, she translates from the Slovak, German, French, Czech, and Hungarian. Her forthcoming publication is “The Eastern European Monster Reclaimed: Finding a Voice in a Post-Socialist, Post-Colonial World” in Postcoloniality and Neo-Gothic Fictions.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Jesús Garza is Associate Professor of Slavic & Eurasian Studies and Director of the Texas Language Center at U Texas - Austin. He has published articles in MLJ, Foreign Language Annuals, Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Language Journal, and Current History. His co-edited volume, Diversity and Decolonization in Teaching Russian Studies came out in August 2025. He is working on a new manuscript on the travels of Vladimir Vysotsky in the Americas in the 1970s.