Panel discussion with Epp Annus, Franziska Davies, and Darya Tsymbalyuk

In English

Shifting the focus of decolonial discourse from West to East, this panel looks at Eastern Europe’s pitfalls in the post-Soviet/socialist context. The panelists will discuss the Russian Empire and the USSR with regard to Ukraine and non-Russian communities still living within the Russian Federation, and how the Russian-centric view of Eastern Europe contributed to an underestimation of the destructive potential of Russian imperialism. Different meanings, similarities, and intertwinings of decolonization processes in the Ukrainian, Baltic, and Georgian contexts will be brought into focus, as well as the ways in which colonial violence affects the bodies of those under attack, and therefore, why decolonial work is embodied and experienced within bodies.

Epp Annus is Associate Professor at Tallinn University (Estonia) and she also lectures at Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018) and Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule (ed.; Routledge, 2018). She has written or co-authored three monographs and several collective volumes in Estonian. She is currently finishing a manuscript, Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990 (under contract with Cambridge UP). In addition to her work as a scholar she has published two novels, some poetry, and several children’s books.

Franziska Davies is a historian of East and East Central Europe at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich who specializes in modern Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian history. A collection of essays she edited, Ukraine in Europe. Dreams and Trauma of a Nation, was recently published in Germany.

Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researches, and draws. She received a PhD from the University of St Andrews (Scotland) in 2021 and since then has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, St Anthony’s College, University of Oxford, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and New Europe College, Bucharest. She is currently working on a book about the environmental impacts of Russia’s war on Ukraine (forthcoming from Polity).