HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

June - September 2024
Supported by HURI with the Ksenia & Olexa Antypiv Ukrainian Fund and the Orest Hladky & Maria Lubomyra Kohutiak Hladky Fund

HURI Research Project

The Unsettling Krymskyi: Fragmentation, Fluidity, Nonconformity

Alex Averbuch's current project at HURI, which is part of a larger research on queerness in the Ukrainian context, is dedicated to the work and life of the Ukrainian modernist author Ahatanhel Krymsky. Drawing on both published works and archival sources, it investigates Krymsky’s sexuality, his fluid ethnonational identity, and the muddled textuality of his writings. It addresses such key concepts of modernism as performativity, mythmaking, and mask-wearing, and the various transgressions that challenged the presumed binarity and inviolability of religion and morality, sexuality, and ethnonationality. The project also offers a range of unpublished, annotated primary sources as a tool for further research on Krymsky, and on Ukrainian modernism more generally, helping to inscribe them in the European literary tradition, and to aid scholars of Ukrainian modernism, queer theory, nationalism, and transcultural studies. 

Biography

Dr. Alex Averbuch is a scholar, poet, and translator. He earned his PhD in Slavic and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on the history of solicitory poetry in Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew. Averbuch’s research explores commodity culture; gender and critical race theory; epistolarity; photography; theatricality and performance; translation; and creative writing in foreign language pedagogy. He has published on Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish literature of the eighteenth century to the contemporary moment, in particular, on topics pertaining to womanhood, queerness, homoeroticism, gendered otherization, material culture, performativity, and constructs of power, as well as on intercultural and trans-epochal phenomena in Eastern Slavic and Jewish literatures. On these and other topics he has published articles in major journals in Slavic and Jewish studies (Russian Review, SEEJ, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Russian Literature, AJS Review, East European Jewish Affairs). Averbuch is the author of three books of poetry and an array of literary translations between Hebrew, Ukrainian, Russian, and English. His latest book Zhydivs’kyi korol' (The Jewish King) was a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest state award for works of culture. Averbuch is active in promoting Ukrainian-Jewish relations. He has translated into Hebrew and published over thirty selections of poetry by contemporary Ukrainian poets. Currently he is compiling and editing an anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew translation. Alex is a recent Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University for AY 2023-2024.