Olena Bezhan

Trauma and Memory as Socio-Cultural Constructs and Their Representations in Holocaust Literature

Olena Bezhan, National Odesa Mechnikov University

bezhan.png

 

Olena Bezhan is a Ukrainian scholar based at the National Odesa Mechnikov University. She is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology. Her research areas include comparative works on the Holocaust and genocide studies in American, late Soviet, and Ukrainian literature, as well as comparative studies on trauma and memory as cultural concepts. Her current research focuses on trauma and memory as socio-cultural constructs and their representations in Holocaust literature. Olena Bezhan received her PhD in comparative literature in 2013 from the University of Dnipro with a dissertation on the Holocaust motifs in American and Russian literature. Dr. Bezhan teaches classical and contemporary foreign literature at the Odesa University. She was a visiting scholar at Polonia Academy in Czestochowa (Poland) in 2020, a senior fellow at Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) (Austria) in 2022–2023, and a nonresidential visiting scholar at Indiana University (USA) in 2023–2024.

Project Description

“Trauma and Memory as Socio-Cultural Constructs and Their Representations in Holocaust Literature”: considering the tragic events of the 20th century and the consequences they have on the social and cultural life of the 21st century, "memory" and "trauma” became the main constructs that determined the basic vectors of researching the Holocaust literature. Trauma studies are considered a phenomenon related to cultural memory, which means that it is studied in the temporal dimension. Memory and trauma began to be interpreted not only as mental and psychological phenomena, but as a social-cultural constructs, which are associated with complex psychological-cultural aspects of searching for self-identity. This project aims to investigate the texts of Ukrainian authors where common and different approaches to the Holocaust tragedy perception are traced.