Cinematic Donbas I

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable brings together scholars from Ukraine and the United States to discuss the collaborative development of a forthcoming volume on the cinema of the Donbas region. The project is a cooperative effort among faculty, graduate students, and researchers from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv and American institutions including Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Pittsburgh, the College of William & Mary, and Pennsylvania State University. The intention of this collection is, above all, to see the Donbas. The volume invites readers to engage with the region through the lens of the cinematographic apparatus and the interpretive tools of humanitarian scholarship. It traces the historical dramaturgy of Donbas’s visual culture—its construction as a heroic Soviet-industrial myth and its subsequent deconstruction in post-Soviet and contemporary Ukrainian cinema. This roundtable will explore the practical, intellectual, and ethical challenges of co-authoring and translating this body of work across multiple languages, institutions, and disciplinary contexts. Panelists will reflect on questions such as: How is the Donbas imagined and reimagined on screen across different political periods? What role does film play in shaping regional identity and memory? How can collaborative translation and editing serve both scholarly and pedagogical purposes, especially in wartime? Participants will also examine the editorial decisions that shaped the volume’s structure, its strategies for cultural framing, and the curatorial responsibility involved in selecting films and critical approaches. The discussion will emphasize the importance of scholarly networks in sustaining Ukrainian cultural research during the war and the necessity of cross-border cooperation in producing nuanced, accessible academic work on underrepresented regions. This session is not only a case study in regional cinema but also a broader reflection on methods of transnational scholarship—how collaborative academic practices can serve as forms of cultural solidarity, resistance, and historical inquiry in times of crisis.

Sub Unit

• Cinema, Television, Electronic Media

Chair

• Nancy Condee, U of Pittsburgh

Roundtable Speakers

• Yuliya V. Ladygina, Pennsylvania State U

• Maria Natalyuk, U of Pittsburgh

• Stanislav Menzelevskyi, Indiana U Bloomington

• Olena Pidhrushna, Taras Shevchenko National U of Kyiv (Ukraine)

Session Manager

• Aliide Naylor, Independent Scholar