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Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East

14 March 2025, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm

Book cover for 'Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East'

A PIMs book discussion with Victoria Donovan, Uilleam Blacker and Volodymyr Kulikov

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

SSEES

Location

Masaryk room
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton street
London
WC1H 0BW

Join us for a conversation with Victoria Donovan on her latest book, Life in Spite of Everything. Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books, 2025), which explores the lived experiences of communities in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Since 2014, the region has been synonymous with conflict, its cities becoming tragic symbols of devastation. In this revelatory and deeply humane work, Donovan uncovers a different narrative—one that highlights the Donbas’s rich, multicultural history and the resilience of its people. Through immersive storytelling and conversations with curators, artists, railway workers, and young people growing up amid war, she amplifies local voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.

The discussion will feature Uilleam Blacker and Volodymyr Kulikov, who will engage with Donovan’s work and explore how history, memory, and identity intersect in the Donbas. This event offers a powerful and timely reflection on Ukraine’s past and present, celebrating its people’s tenacity, creativity, and independence.

Find out more about Places, Identities and Memories (PIMs).

About the Speaker

Victoria Donovan

Victoria Donovan
is a Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews. She works at the intersection of heritage studies, urban history, visual anthropology, and the public humanities. Her current research, exploring entangled colonialisms and industrial extraction with a focus on the Ukrainian East, has resulted in a wide variety of outputs, from academic and non-fiction writing, exhibitions, archives, community workshops, to artistic practice. Donovan’s work has received numerous prizes, including a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker Award, and in 2023, in partnership with the Centre for Urban History in Lviv a European Heritage/EuropaNostra Award for Citizens’ Engagement and Awareness Raising. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia, published with NIUP imprint at Cornell in 2019; Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas, with Darya Tsymbalyuk and others, published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in 2022.