Alex Averbuch

About

Alex Averbuch is an interdisciplinary scholar, poet, and translator. His research explores intercultural and transepochal phenomena in Eastern European and Jewish literatures and cultures from the eighteenth century to the present, with a special focus on Ukraine. His studies of queerness, ethno-gendered otherization, postcoloniality and decoloniality, propaganda, totalitarianism, visual and material cultures, and epistolarity have been published in such journals in Slavic and Jewish studies as Slavic and East European Journal, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Krytyka, AJS Review, East European Jewish Affairs, Russian Review, and Russian Literature. He is coeditor of the volume Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance: Twentieth-Century Ukraine and Letter Writing. His current book project investigates totalitarianism, propaganda, and censorship through the case study of WWII-era Ukrainian forced laborers and prisoners of war. It explores their letter writing and photography both as visual and textual propaganda, as well as means of resistance – as creative transmitters of news and secret messages, as works of literature, and as historical sources. As part of this project, in 2024 he launched an exhibit of these laborers' photographs and letters at Harvard University.

Since 2021 he runs a research group on queer and gender studies in the Slavic context, with monthly online seminars. Additionally, in collaboration with the Kule Center for Ukrainian- Canadian Folklore, he organized and continues to curate a digital archive for the “Writings From the War” project, which collects testimonials of Ukrainians about their experience of Russia’s war on Ukraine. 

He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2022, and has since been a Killam postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, as well as a research fellow of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies, the Blavatnik Archive, and Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Alex is the author of several books of poetry, over a hundred publications of his own creative writing, and over sixty selections of literary translations spanning Ukrainian, Hebrew, Russian, and English. His poems have appeared in English translation in Beloit, Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Birmingham Poetry Review, Plume, Words Without Borders, Sugar House Review, Constellations, and Common Knowledge, as well as in anthologies in English, Italian, French, Hebrew, Finnish, Estonian, and Polish translation. His works have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His book Zhydivs’kyi korol’ (The Jewish King) was a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature. In 2020, he organized the Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry, from which he edited a special section in an issue of Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations dedicated to the participants’ works.