Post-Chornobyl Era? The crisis of nuclear modernity and its repercussions in Ukraine and beyond

The Chornobyl nuclear plant explosion (26 April 1986) became a watershed event in the contemporary history of Ukraine, the USSR, and Eastern Europe in general. The explosion’s effects challenged scientific progress and socialist modernization under Soviet rule. This technological catastrophe of global dimension was perceived as a prelude to the collapse of the Soviet system and the resulting multifaceted transformation of the countries of Eastern Europe. How can we reinterpret the post-Chornobyl era from the perspective of the last forty years - as the postindustrial postmodern, a post-communist transformation, or a postcolonial stage - and how were the three processes interconnected?

Speakers:
Tamara Hundorova (Professor at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv)
Anna Veronika Wendland (Senior Researcher at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg

This conversation is part of a series of events within Bard College Berlin's Program for International Education and Social Change (PIESC)

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Tamara Hundorova is Professor at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv, and Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is the author of The post-Chornobyl library: Ukrainian literary postmodernism of the 1990s, Kyiv 2005 (English translation: Academic Studies Press, 2019).  

Anna Veronika Wendland is Senior Researcher at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg. She is the author of "Nuclear Power in Wartime: Zaporizhzhia NPP as a Test Case for Nuclear Safety," in: "Ukrainian Analytical Digest" Nr.3 (2023), 30-37; "Ukrainian Memory Spaces and Nuclear Technology. The Musealization of Chornobyl’s Disaster," in "Technology & Culture" 61 (2020), 1162-1177; "Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the Atom. Soviet nuclear technopolitics, crisis, and resilience at the imperial periphery," in "Cahiers du Monde Russe" 60 (2019), Nr. 2-3, 335-367. 

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: P98A Lecture Hall

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