Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, University of Chicago
DARYA TSYMBALYUK
Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, University of Chicago
Professional Interests: environmental humanities, artistic research, critical theory, decolonial praxis
Why did you decide to join the Shevchenko Scientific Society?
The Shevchenko Scientific Society is one of the pillars of modern Ukraine’s intellectual history. As a result of the history of subjugation and incorporation of Ukrainian lands into different political regimes, the work and sometimes the very existence of many Ukrainian institutional initiatives, including the Shevchenko Scientific Society, have been disrupted or even terminated. Given the conditions of rupture, political instability, and violence, which today manifest in the form of the Russian invasion, institutions such as the Shevchenko Scientific Society, which have been able to preserve continuity, are especially important. This long intellectual history is what distinguishes the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and at the same time, I am very excited to see new directions being explored and introduced under the leadership of Professor Vitaly Chernetsky, which testifies to the changing and dynamic nature of Ukrainian Studies.
How did your interest in Ukrainian culture and society influence your career path?
My academic research on Ukraine grew out of my critical-creative work with communities in Ukraine in the wake of the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2014. In 2015, together with Julia Filipieva and Victor Zasypkin we started a participatory art project Donbas Odyssey, for which we interviewed people displaced from Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, and based on their stories and mental maps of their hometowns that they had made during our interviews, we organized interventions in public spaces of cities of Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv, as well as art exhibitions. When I started my graduate education as an Erasmus Mundus MA student, I thought I would be continuing my BA track of German and Italian Studies, and it was my MA advisor and later my PhD advisor Professor Victoria Donovan at the University of St Andrews, who recognized the value of my work with displaced communities in Ukraine and pulled me towards Slavic Studies as a field. That said, working on Ukraine, and also working in the field of environmental humanities and engaging with approaches in artistic research, I used to feel slightly like an outsider. The 2022 escalation of the war to a full-scale invasion only intensified these feelings, where I strongly felt that knowledge was an existential affair, which did not always fit into dominant academic understandings of what counted as knowledge and what the role of a scholar was in the world. Growing disillusioned with the possibility of conducting interdisciplinary and multimodal work that I felt passionate about, I was thinking of shifting away from the field, if I had not met my incredible colleagues at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, and that is how my work on Ukraine shaped my career path. The joy of my current position is that it allows me to both have a deep focus on Ukraine and pursue my interdisciplinary and critical-creative approaches both in research and in teaching, and I am really honored to have this opportunity.
How has the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War impacted your research?
This spring I taught a course on autotheory/autoethnography, and I thought a lot about my own academic trajectory and the relationship between knowledge-making and life. I came to academia in 2015 with a project on war and displacement, which, from an MA thesis, grew into a PhD dissertation. Just a couple of months after I submitted my PhD dissertation in December 2021 and entered the academic job market, Russia escalated its war to a full-scale invasion. Hence, the context of the ongoing violence of the war has profoundly shaped my understanding of knowledge and its role in society, which is why I often say that for me knowledge has a deeply existential aspect. Thematically, the war is at the heart of my scholarship, as my research deals with displacement and environmental destruction, but the war also cuts deeper than that; it shapes the very form that my work takes. Hence, I realized that I am often engaged in the making of what I call “urgent forms”, whether these are interventions in public space such as the ones we did with Donbas Odyssey, short essays, film essays, or drawing workshops. My latest book, Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War, is another example of an urgent form: it was written very quickly; it blends autoethnographic writing together with more canonical forms of analysis; the flow of narration is at times disrupted by the impossibility to find a language; traditional academic conclusion is absent, and most importantly, the book aims to engage readers outside academic circles. The latter aspect is central and directly linked to the constant feeling of urgency, conditioned by the war: the desire to have a conversation with a broader world.
What is your current project?
My first monograph, Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War, came out with Polity in June this year, and I had the honor of launching it at the Shevchenko Scientific Society in August. As I mentioned earlier, I call this book an urgent form, as it was written in a span of a year from scratch and in a context of constant ongoing destruction on the ground, where the places were sometimes disappearing faster than I managed to write about them. It was written with the intention to intervene and uphold the conversation on Ukraine overall, and the environmental destruction in particular. My next project is returning to the research conducted during my PhD dissertation, which grew out of my engagement with Donbas Odyssey and focused on stories about plants in narratives of displacement in Ukraine. I submitted my final PhD draft in December 2021, so a lot has changed, and most importantly, I have changed as a scholar and a thinker, so I am looking forward to revisiting that material and developing it further.
What career advice would you give to new members of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the United States?
I don’t know if this is necessarily career advice, but I would encourage early-career scholars like myself not to be afraid of taking intellectual risks. I have not had a straightforward career trajectory, including my undergrad training in visual arts, German, and Italian, and my commitment to art practice and to making public-facing work, whether in the form of writing or image-making. As a scholar coming from Ukraine, my career path was also determined by visas, challenges of securing funding, and precarity. I have been very lucky with most supportive mentors and intellectual communities, and at the same time, I met scholars and often established senior scholars who questioned the relevance of my art practice or public-facing engagement in relation to my scholarly work, the relevance of researching plants, or the interdisciplinary nature of my research. As a younger scholar, I did not have much confidence in my work and did not know enough about academia, and I felt a lot of insecurity and anxiety about not fitting into existing frames and not following the more expected trajectories. However, I strongly believe that without experimentation – and it is important to remember that experimentation also always includes failure – there is no originality, and that is why I think it is worth taking risks. Looking back now, I can tell that some of the work that is dearest to me grew out of ideas that I thought would be risky or illegible: my PhD research on plants and displacement grew out of my fascination with a drawing of a ficus on one of Donbas Odyssey’s maps; Ecocide in Ukraine grew out of a short essay on war and mushroom picking; and a film essay I made as an experiment for myself and a way of documenting my conversations with my mother unexpectedly got exhibited in places I would have never thought about. I cannot say that it has always been a smooth journey, but it keeps feeding my intellectual curiosity and keeps me surprised.