Romanets, Dr. Maryna

PhD (University of Saskatchewan), PhD (Ukrainian National Academy of Arts and Sciences), MA (Chernivtsi State University)

Acting Chair, English
Professor
Phone
Fax
250-960-5545
Office
CJMH-3079
Campus
Prince George

Biography

Professor Maryna Romanets specializes in contemporary, comparative, postcolonial, world, and women’s literatures, gender, sexuality and cultural studies, and contemporary critical theory. She has published articles and book chapters on the issues of representation and gender, sexual politics, cultural decolonization, postcolonialism and intertextual relations, politics and language, and translation theory and praxis. She is the author of Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature (2007) and coeditor of Beauty, Violence, Representation (2014, 2017). Her latest title, Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave, appeared in 2019, and she is currently working on an edited volume that examines European neo-Gothic cultural productions after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Research and Expertise

Dr. Romanets is interested in the channels of cultural decolonization, including the ways they draw on national psychohistories, intersect with national and international cultural flows, reconfigure existing sexual order and normative boundaries of masculinity and femininity, and call into question the procedures of representation implemented by dominant or canonical traditions. Her recent book on erotomaniac fictions examines transgressive potentials of the erotic and its impact on the rise of new social and political identities under postcolonial and post-totalitarian conditions. It expands on the ideas of her first book, which looks into textual strategies, employed by postcolonial authors, of invoking their respective traditions in order to forge imaginary ones and make imperial histories open for revision and contestation. She is currently working on an edited volume that focuses on contemporary European Gothic after the fall of
the Berlin Wall.

Research Fields
  • Culture
  • Gender and Women's Studies
Areas of Expertise
Contemporary literature, comparative literature, postcolonial and world literature, women’s literature, gender studies, sexuality studies, pornography studies, cultural studies, Gothic studies, contemporary critical theory
Languages Spoken
  • English
  • Russian
  • Ukrainian
Currently accepting graduate students
Supervises In
MA English, MA Gender Studies, MA Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate Supervisor Details
Being focused on the critique of imperialism in the sphere of culture, Dr. Romanets’s research is interdisciplinary and transcultural, drawing on the intersection of such analytical approaches as postcolonialism, representation, intertextuality, sexuality, and gender. In addition to literature, it deals with a variety of cultural forms, such as advertising, mass and social media, visual art, and film. Her peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters appeared in Canada, the USA, Sweden, Spain, the UK, Ukraine, and France. Her two monographs, Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave and Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature, both funded by SSHRC, map virtually untouched aspects of cultural decolonization. Erotomaniac Fictions, published in 2019 by Routledge, one of the world’s leading academic publishers with a reputation for cutting-edge, ground-breaking research, was nominated for the CAS/Taylor and Francis Book Prize in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and for the CAUS Biannual Book Prize in 2020.
Available to be contacted by the media as a subject matter expert

Selected Publications

Books

Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Beauty, Violence, Representation, co-edited with Lisa Dickson. New York: Routledge, 2017 (paperback).

Beauty, Violence, Representation, co-edited with Lisa Dickson. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Irish and Ukrainian Literature. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2007 (refereed SPPS series).

Journal Articles

“Postcoloniality and Neo-Gothic Fictions in the Post-Soviet Space,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 61, no. 4 (2019): 373–385.

“’Orients’ of the Mind: Deviance, Sexual Enlightenment, and True Love in Fredericks’s Degenerate Empress, Vynnychuk’s Zhytiie haremnoie (Life in the Harem), and Parker’s Roxelana & Suleyman,” Canadian Comparative Literature Review 44, no. 1 (2017): 95–110.

“Virtual Warfare: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Propaganda in the Russo-Ukrainian War,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 159–177.

“Taxonomies of Desire in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and P. J. Parker’s Roxelana & Suleyman,” International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics 2, no. 4 (2016): 190–194.

“History, Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Yuri Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 56, nos. 1–2 (2014): 135–154.

“An Ethno-Reading of the Imperial Harem in David Frederick’s Degenerate Empress and Yuri Vynnychuk’s Life in the Harem.” Studies in Literary Criticism 40, no. 2 (2013): 194–201.

“Out of the Soviet Closet: Yurko Pokalchuk’s ‘Erotomaniac’ Fictions.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 53, nos. 2–3–4 (2011): 361–378.

“Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Gogol’s ‘Viy.’” Gogol Studies 18, no. 1 (2010): 264–276.

“Postcolonial On/scenity: Sexualization of Political Space in Post-Independence Ukraine.” Ukrainian Culture After Communism: CASS Special Issue 44, nos. 1–2. Ed. Serhy Yekelchyk. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009. 178–199.

“Translation as Transmutation: Pharaoh’s Daughters in Astrakhan Cloaks.” Interculturality and Translation: International Review 2 (2006): 149–176.

“Travellers, Cartographers, Lovers: Ideologies of Exploratory Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry.” Nordic Irish Studies 3 (2004): 18–35.

“His Stories Becoming Histories: Lina Kostenko’s Poetic Martyr-Drama.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 45, nos. 3–4 (2003): 317–336.

“Degenerating the Myth of Transhistorical Masculinity: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Cú Chulainn Cycle.” Nordic Irish Studies 2, no. 1 (2003): 57–74.

“Cartographers of Desire: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Versus the Love Canon in Irish Poetry.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 29, nos. 2–3 (2002): 316–336.

“Erotic Assemblages: Field Research, Palimpsests, and What Lies Beneath.” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 27, nos.1–2 (2002): 273–285.

Book Chapters

“On Monsters and Demons: Valerii Shevchuk’s Neo-Baroque Erotica.” Being and the Canon. Ed. Pavlo Mykhed. Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, 2016. 310–325.

“Introduction: Beauty, Violence, Representation,” with Lisa Dickson. Beauty, Violence, Representation. Ed. Lisa Dickson and Maryna Romanets. New York: Routledge, 2014. 1–26.

“Bir Metinlerarası Haz Bahçesi Olarak Roxolana'nın Anıları” (Memoirs of Roxolana as an Intertextual Garden). Avrupa Edebiyatı, Tarihi ve Kültüründe Hurrem Sultan. Ed. Galina I. Yermolenko. Trans. Ferit Burak Aydar, Defne Karakaya, Suna Kılıç, and Saliha Nilüfer. Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2013. 191–210.

“Roxolana’s Memoirs as a Garden of Intertextual Delight.” The Greatest Empress of the East: Roxolana in European History and Culture. Ed. Galina Yermolenko. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. 125–139.

“The (Translato)logic of Spectrality: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and her English Doubles.” Liminal Border¬¬lands: Ireland Past, Present, Future. Ed. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. 173–196.

“Transgressive Violence, Mad Intertextuality, and Aesthetics of Convulsion.” Discourses of Violence—Violence of Discourses: Critical Interventions, Transgressive Readings and Post-National Negotiations. Vol.1. Ed. Dirk Wiemann et al. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005. 41–54.

“Ideologies of the Second Coming in the Ukrainian Postcolonial Playground.” Perspectives on Modern Pornography, 1800-2000. Ed. Lisa Z. Sigel. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 205–231.

“Travesties, Transvestisms, and Transgressions: Cross-dressings and Re-dresses in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Poetry.” Beyond Borders: IASIL Essays in Modern Irish Writing. Ed. Neil Sammells. Bath: Sulis Press, 2004. 191–202.

“Pain, Desire, and Disgust: Morphologies of the Flesh in the Prose of Zabuzhko, Izdryk, and Pokalchuk.” Gender and Culture. Ed. Vira Aheieva and Svitlana Oksamytna. Kyiv: Fact, 2001. 110–120.