Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity

In this presentation, Rory Finnin confronts the legacy of Russian and Soviet settler colonialism in Crimea and discusses the need for what historian Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi called ‘a Black Sea orientation’ in the field of Ukrainian Studies. Through examples of poetry and film, he also explores the idea of Crimea in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar cultures after 2014. 

SPEAKER

Dr Rory Finnin is University Associate Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He launched Cambridge Ukrainian Studies in 2008. Finnin received his PhD (with distinction) in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He also holds Certificates from the Harriman Institute and from the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. Finnin is also convener (with Sander van der Linden in Social Psychology) of the University’of Cambridge’s Disinformation and Media Literacy Special Interest Group. Rory Finnin’s primary research interest is the interplay of literature and national identity in Ukraine. He also studies Soviet Russian dissident literature, Turkish nationalist literature, and Crimean Tatar literature. His broader interests include solidarity studies, nationalism theory, human rights discourse, and problems of cultural memory in the region of the Black Sea. He is author of Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity, University of Toronto Press (April 2022) and co-author, with Alexander Etkind, Uillieam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo and Matilda Mroz, of Remembering Katyn, Polity Press (2012).