This symposium will explore the acts of writing, translation, and cultural production and preservation in the context of Ukraine. How do poets who are also translators move between these two practices? How does translation relate to political transition, and to the movement between historical epochs? How do war, colonization, and decolonization transform culture, and our ways of reading and listening?

1-1:10: Introduction

1:10-2:45: Roundtable with Sabrina Jaszi, Oksana Maksymchuk, and Ainsley Morse, moderated by Sophie Pinkham, followed by Q&A

2:45-3:15: Coffee break

3:15-4: Readings by Sasha Dugdale and Oksana Maksymchuk, with conversation and Q&A

4:00-5:15: Short talk on Ukraine’s music by Maria Sonevytsky, followed by a performance by Zozulka, with Q&A 

5:15-6: Reception

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry, The Strongbox, was published by Carcanet in 2024 and won the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem ‘Joy’ was awarded a Forward Prize in 2016.  Dugdale's translations have won PEN Awards and been shortlisted for the International Booker, the James Tait Black Prize and Warwick Prize for Women’s Writing amongst others. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory won the MLA Lois Roth Award. Her translations of new writing for theatre have been widely produced, including stagings by the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Public Theater in New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former editor of the international magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.

Sabrina Jaszi is a writer and literary translator working from Uzbek, Ukrainian, and Russian. Her translation with Roman Ivashkiv of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things (Academic Studies Press, 2024) was a finalist for the California Translation Prize and won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Best Translation award. Other translations include the fiction of Reed Grachev, O'tkir Hoshimov, Salomat Vafo, Semyon Lipkin, and Suhbat Aflatuni. She is the co-founder of Turkoslavia, a collective and journal devoted to Turkic and Slavic literature in translation, and a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, where she is writing a dissertation about Central Asian literature.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). It was long-listed for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2025 Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia (Pyramida, 2005) and Lovy (Smoloskyp, 2008) in the Ukrainian. She co-edited an anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2017) and co-translated several poetry collections, most recently, Alex Averbuch’s Furious Harvests (Harvard University Press, 2025). She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship (2019), the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association (2024), and other honors. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Literature department at UC-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and the languages of former Yugoslavia. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of post-WWII socialism, particularly unofficial or "underground" poetry, as well as the avant-garde, children's literature and contemporary poetry. Recent translation publications include the Odesan poet Maria Galina’s Communiqués (with Anna Halberstadt, Cicada Press 2024) and the novels of early Leningrad modernist Konstantin Vaginov (with Geoff Cebula, NYRB Classics, 2025); work by the Croatian conceptualist poet Vlado Martek is forthcoming (Pre-poetry, World Poetry Books 2026).  She was poetry translations editor for Ukrainian Soviet Modernism: Texts and Contexts (ed. Babak, Ilchuk, Ustinov; ASP, 2025) and is co-editing (with Ostap Kin) a Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Poetry Reader (World Poetry Books, 2027). 

Willa Roberts is a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, arranger/composer and teacher specializing in music from Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region, Turkey, and beyond. She is known for her evocative, rich, and versatile voice, as well as her precision, authenticity, musicality, and passionate engagement with community through music. Willa is featured with her vocal trio, Black Sea Hotel, on the Grammy Award-winning Yo-Yo Ma/Silk Road Ensemble’s album, Sing Me Home. Other recent projects include the soundtrack for the film Don’t Worry Darling, the soundtrack for Meow Wolf Denver’s installation, collaboration/performance with Kronos Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and solo performances in the Southwest premiere of Christopher Tin’s The Drop that Contained the Sea. Willa is musical director for both Sevda Choir and SACRa Theater Company.

Eva Salina is a passionate interpreter and instructor of Eastern European and global polyphonic vocal traditions. In 2016 she released “Lema Lema: Eva Salina Sings Šaban Bajramović,” recorded in New York and Serbia, on Vogiton Records and in 2018 followed it with “Sudbina: A Portrait of Vida Pavlović.” A two-time OneBeat alumna and a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Eva is devoted to innovation within tradition, participation as preservation and evolution, and collaborations which foster mutual understanding between cultures. She has taught courses and coached ensembles at New York University, Williams College, Yale University, Rutgers University, and Bard College. Since 2016, Eva has toured in a duo with Peter Stan, a Serbian/Romanian Romani accordionist, performing predominately Balkan Roma songs, and collaborates with singers and musicians across many other genres. Eva is musical director of Driftwood Community Chorus, Kingston Folk Choir, and Rhinecliff Folk Choir in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York State, and before that founded and led The Jalopy Chorus in Brooklyn, NY, for 10 years. In addition to her community music work, Eva teaches at various workshops and coaches professional and amateur singers and vocal ensembles in East European folk traditions.

Maria Sonevytsky is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music at Bard College. She is author of the award-winning book Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019), and Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023), part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. Professor Sonevytsky has published articles on folklore and nuclear experience after Chornobyl, epistemic imperialism after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Crimean Tatar Indigenous politics and expressive culture, among other subjects.  She is currently at work on her third book, tentatively titled Singing for Lenin in Soviet Ukraine: Children, Music, and the Communist Future. In addition to her scholarly writing, Prof. Sonevytsky is a singer and accordionist. 

Zozulka—meaning “cuckoo bird” in Ukrainian— is a trio devoted to the a cappella repertoires of Central and Eastern Ukraine. Eva Salina, Willa Roberts, and Maria Sonevytsky first sang together in 2011 as part of The Chernobyl Songs Project. They were coached by Professor Yevhen Yefremov from Kyiv, Ukraine – the ethnomusicologist and founder of Drevo, the folk group that kickstarted the revival of anti-Soviet folk practices in Ukraine in 1979. As part of the Chornobyl Songs Project, the trio learned to sing a haunting lyrical song with Professor Yefremov: Kalyna-malyna nad iarom stoiala. When the Chornobyl Songs Project concluded, Willa, Eva and Maria decided to explore more of this music, and to bring their own interpretations to the songs they learned. They named this new trio after the cuckoo bird that appears in many of these songs as the bearer of news, both good and bad. Zozulka has performed at venues ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the University of Toronto to intimate house shows and New York City bars. 

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities and the Institute for European Studies (IES).