Chernetsky Vitaly

Vitaly Chernetsky is a literary translator and a literary and film critic. Born in Odesa in 1970, he received his education at Moscow State University, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from Penn in 1996.

He has taught at Columbia, Northeastern, and Miami University. Since 2013, he is teaching at the University of Kansas as a faculty member in the Slavic Department and director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (since 2015). He is the current Vice President and Learned Secretary of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S. (since 2015) and past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (2009-2018).

Among his publications are the monograph Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (in English in 2007; in Ukrainian in 2013) and numerous articles and essays on literature, film, and popular culture. A volume of his selected essays in Ukrainian is forthcoming from Krytyka. Among his translations are two novels (The Moscoviad and Twelve Circles) and a volume of selected poems (with Ostap Kin) by Yuri Andrukhovych, a volume of experimental prose by the artist Alevtina Kakhidze, as well as poetry and fiction in anthologies and journals by such authors as Sophia Andrukhovych, Andriy Bondar, Petro Karmansky, Irena Karpa, Marianna Kiyanovska, Pavlo Korobchuk, Dmytro Lazutkin, Bohdana Matiyash, Viktor Neborak, Svitlana Povaliayeva, Hryhory Semenchuk, Ostap Slyvynsky, Iryna Tsilyk, Iryna Shuvalova, Pavlo Volvach, and Serhiy Zhadan. Among the grants he has received is the PEN/Heim grant to translate Sophia Andrukhovych’s novel Felix Austria into English.