About

Yuliya V. Ladygina is an Associate Professor of Slavic and Global and International Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego, earned in 2013, as well as an M.A. and B.A. in German Philology from T.H. Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, Ukraine, obtained in 2001 and 2000 respectively. Her research focuses on Eastern European literatures and cultures, with particular emphasis on questions of cultural memory and cultural exchange. She is the author of 'Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist,' published by the University of Toronto Press in 2019. Currently, she is working on her second book project titled 'The Reel Story of Russia’s War against Ukraine,' which examines Ukrainian war films produced after 2014 and their perspectives on modern war and mediatization. Her scholarly articles have appeared or are forthcoming in several refereed journals, including East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, and East European Jewish Affairs. Prior to her position at Penn State, Ladygina was a Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Williams College, and a Teaching Assistant Professor of Russian and Humanities at The University of the South (Sewanee). There, she taught courses on Russian and comparative literature, film, rhetorical writing, Russian language, and European and Russian intellectual history, and served as director of the Sewanee Summer in Russia Program.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Art
• History
• Law
• Literature
• Art history
• Aesthetics
• Archaeology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Women’s War Beyond the Violated Body: Maryna Er Gorbach’s <i>Klondike</i> and Feminist Cinematic Method

  Journal of War and Culture Studies · 2026-04-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Klondike. Dir. Maryna Er Gorbach. Ukraine: Kedr Film, 2022. 100 minutes. Color.

  Slavic Review · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • History

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Cyborgs vs. Vatniks: Hybridity, Weaponized Information, and Mediatized Reality in Recent Ukrainian War Films

  Studies in World Cinema · 2023-10-30

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Focusing on Akhtem Seitablaiev’s blockbuster Kiborhy: Heroi ne vmyraiut ( Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die , 2017) and Sergei Loznitsa’s auteur production Donbass (2018), this article argues that the 2014–2022 cycle of Ukrainian war films merits critical attention as an astute record of conspicuous social transformations in pre-full-scale-invasion Ukraine and for their original perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization. The article uses postcolonial and cyborg theories of hybridity, Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, and the Marxist notion of “false consciousness” to illustrate how post-Soviet, postcolonial, and post-truth aspects of war-torn Ukraine conflate in Seitablaiev’s and Loznitsa’s works to highlight the recent shift in the nature of warfare itself. As the two films unequivocally demonstrate, the latter is defined not so much by high-tech armed operations and direct annihilation of the opponent as by contactless warfare, as well as by its consequences for those directly influenced by it.

  PublisherDOI

• Cyborgs vs. Vatniks: Hybridity, Weaponized Information, and Mediatized Reality in Recent Ukrainian War Films

  East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies · 2022 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  Focusing on Akhtem Seitablaiev’s blockbuster Kiborhy: Heroi ne vmyraiut' (Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die, 2017) and Sergei Loznitsa’s auteur production Donbass (2018), this article argues that the latest cycle of Ukrainian war films merits critical attention as an astute record of conspicuous social transformations in today’s Ukraine and as a medium that presents an original perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization, the latter being a relatively new theme in war films broadly defined. The article uses post-colonial and cyborg theories of hybridity, Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, and the Marxist notion of “false consciousness” to illustrate how post-Soviet, post-colonial, and post-truth aspects of war-torn Ukraine conflate in Seitablaev’s and Loznitsa’s works to bring to the fore a recent shift in the nature of warfare itself. As the two films unequivocally demonstrate, the latter is defined not so much by high-tech armed operations and direct annihilation of the opponent as by contactless warfare, as well as its consequences for those directly influenced by it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Past and Its Presence: A Study of Multidirectional Memory in Akhtem Seitablaiev’s <i>87 Children</i> (2017)

  East European Jewish Affairs · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  This article examines Akhtem Seitablaiev’s 2017 film, 87 Children, which depicts Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars through the prism of another genocide – the Nazis’ 1941–1943 murder of Crimean Jews. It uses Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory to illustrate how the history of the Holocaust, Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars, and the personal story of the film’s protagonists conflate in Seitablaiev’s work in an attempt both to foreground silenced pasts and to comment on the pernicious instrumentalization of history in Putin’s Crimea. Seitablaiev makes an important contribution to the deconstruction of competition and hierarchies within traumatic histories of the peninsula, offering new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice – all of which are found in the specificities, overlaps, and echoes of different historical experiences that continue to shape current events in post-annexation Crimea.

  PublisherDOI