Lidia Stefanowska

Lidia Stefanowska

Literary scholar
Lidia  Stefanowska

She is currently an adjunct and full-time research associate at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw). Stefanowska's ties with Harvard and the Ukrainian Research Institute go back more than a decade. It is at Harvard that she received both her M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1999) in Ukrainian Literature. Since then she has returned to teach the course "Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Literature: Tradition and the Avant-Garde" at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute (2001). She has also taught at the National Ivan Franko University of Lviv and at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In her articles, reviews and analyses, she focuses on such earlier and more recent representatives of twentieth-century Ukrainian literature as Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Valerii Shevchuk, Yuri Andrukhovych, Taras Prokhasko, Yuri Izdryk, and the poetic group Bu-Ba-Bu. She has also translated into Polish works by Izdryk, Prokhasko, Liudmyla Taran, Yuri Pozaiak, Vasyl Holoborodko, and Viktor Neborak.

During her five-month fellowship at HURI beginning in September, Stefanowska will be working on a book with the provisional title "Between Vision and Construction: the Poetics of Bohdan Ihor Antonych". Bohdan Ihor Antonych, who lived and worked in Lviv in the 1920s and 1930s, is one of the most distinguished Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. His poetic legacy was deliberately overlooked and obscured in the Soviet Ukraine, and even after he was "rediscovered" in the 1960s, his work was manipulated to fit it into the canon as a "materialist" writer. Even today critics have not yet fully acknowledged Antonych's importance in the evolution of Ukrainian poetry.

Stefanowska's fellowship is funded by the Dr. Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk endowed gift established to support postdoctoral research at HURI.