Vitaly Chernetsky
President 2024
Vitaly Chernetsky is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. A native of Ukraine, he began his university education at Moscow State University, and continued it at Duke University, arriving in the US as an exchange student in the fall of 1989. He received his MA (1993) and PhD (1996) in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to KU in 2013, he taught at Columbia, Northeastern, and Miami University (Ohio), and has held research fellowships at Cornell and Harvard. At KU, he also served as CREES Director from 2015 to 2020, and is currently on the executive committee of the Jewish Studies Program and the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Chernetsky is an ASEEES/AAASS member since 1993 and an active member of Q*ASEEES. He is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and the current First Vice President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S., the autonomous U.S. branch of the oldest Ukrainian learned society, founded in 1873.
Chernetsky’s profile as an educator and researcher combines comprehensive and wide-ranging work on Ukrainian, Russian, and other Slavic literatures and cultures with a variety of cross-disciplinary engagements, most notably with film, gender and LGBTQ+ studies, Jewish studies, translation studies, and diaspora/migration studies. Throughout his academic career, he has striven to help bridge the relative isolation in which Ukrainian studies—and even more broadly, Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies—often find themselves within the humanities and the social sciences. He has consistently sought to bring Ukraine and the broader East European/Eurasian region and its cultural riches to the forefront of global attention, and to help global socio-cultural developments illuminate the evolution, current state, and promise of Ukraine and the broader region and their cultures and societies.
He is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007; Ukrainian-language edition 2013; co-winner, AAUS book prize; winner, best Ukrainian book in the humanities, Ukraine’s Book of the Year awards) and of numerous articles on modern and contemporary Russian and Ukrainian culture where he seeks to highlight cross-regional and cross-disciplinary contexts. A monograph in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local is forthcoming from Krytyka, Ukraine’s leading academic publisher. His other publications include an annotated Ukrainian translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (winner, best foreign book in the humanities, Ukraine’s Book of the Year awards), and translations of the novels The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015) by one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary authors, Yuri Andrukhovych; both were awarded the AAUS translation prize.
Chernetsky is the editor of the Ukrainian Studies book series at Academic Studies Press, and serves on the board of nine periodicals, ranging from Slovo i chas, Ukraine’s leading literary criticism journal, to Wroclaw Studies in Post-Totalitarianism and Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies. His teaching experience includes a broad range of courses on Russian, Ukrainian, East European, and comparative literature, Soviet, post-Soviet, and East European cinema, literary and cultural theory, gender studies, and Russian and Ukrainian language.
He is strongly committed to upholding ASEEES’s principles of diversity and inclusion, its longstanding dedication to interdisciplinary engagement and inquiry, and its efforts to support the research and professional development of young scholars in our field.