“Understanding the Escalation of the War Between Russia and Ukraine” is the topic of OLLI’s latest lecture series presentation which will be held online via Zoom from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. (ET) on Friday, March 18. The presentation features Dr. Yuliya Ladygina, a Helena Rubinstein University endowed fellow in the humanities and assistant professor of Russian and global studies at Penn State. Dr. Ladygina will share information to provide a better understanding of the war happening in Ukraine. Find out more about its history, current developments, and global ramifications. Learn how the lives of everyday Russians and Ukrainians are impacted by these circumstances.
The presentation is made possible by OLLI at Penn State York as part of the OLLI Lecture Series. The free program is open to all Penn State faculty, staff, and students, as well as the York County community, but registration is required. This is OLLI’s fifth lecture in the series, which focuses on timely topics of interest.
“The OLLI Lecture Series was an idea of OLLI members Beth Gill-MacDonald and Sharon Christ. Our goal is to have one presentation each quarter and to choose topics that may not have been relevant when planning the current semester since our semester production works six to nine months in advance,” said Jennifer Geubtner-May, director of OLLI York. She also noted that the free series is a way to introduce people to OLLI.
To choose a topic for OLLI’s lecture series, Christ, Geubtner-May, and MacDonald brainstorm current events they believe OLLI members, as well as the York County community, would like to know more about from an expert in that field. The presentation on Russia and Ukraine was planned prior to the war breaking out.
About the Speaker
Dr. Ladygina’s research in Eastern European literatures and cultures focuses on questions of cultural memory and cultural exchange. Her monograph, Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist, (University of Toronto Press, 2019) stands out among her many published articles, reviews, conference presentations, and translations of Ukrainian literature into English. She is working on her second book project, The Reel Story of the Euromaidan and the Russian-Ukrainian War, which examines the post 2014 cycle of Ukrainian war films and their original perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization.
Prior to joining Penn State, Ladygina was a research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, a visiting professor of Russian at Williams College, and a teaching professor of Russian and the humanities at the University of the South (Sewanee) where she taught courses in Russian and comparative literature, film, rhetorical writing, Russian language, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Russian intellectual history. At Sewanee, she has also served as a director of the Sewanee Summer in Russia program.