Sharisa Aidukaitis
Bio:
Sharisa successfully defended her dissertation “Lyrics of Home and Nation: The Poetic Geographies of Anna Akhmatova and Lina Kostenko.” Through analyzing Russian and Ukrainian lyric poetry, Sharisa’s research intertwines the spatial turn in literary studies with digital humanities and national identity. During her time at U.Va., she presented at ten conferences, spanning the globe from Charlottesville to Canada to Croatia. She received multiple grants from the U.Va. Slavic Languages and Literatures department, a scholarship from the Summer Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and U.Va.’s Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Summer Research Award. She was an associate at the Summer Research Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also performed research at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and in literary and government archives in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Thesis Description:
Lyrics of Home and Nation: The Poetic Geographies of Anna Akhmatova and Lina Kostenko
Anna Akhmatova and Lina Kostenko create extensive, imaginative poetic geographies that span the corpora of their lyric poetry. They reinterpret places through the lens of nostalgia, longing, or regret, and recreate the cities and natural landmarks of the world in a manner that is simultaneously unique to them and reflective of their respective national historiographies. Akhmatova and Kostenko center their poetic geographies in St. Petersburg and Ukraine respectively, but both poets extend their geographic discussions to embrace the world at large. These poetic geographies reveal creative re-interpretations of actual physical spaces and provide insight into the poets’ national identities and worldviews.
