Antonina Berezovenko
Antonina Berezovenko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ukrainian Language, Literature, and Culture in the Faculty of Linguistics at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.” Currently, she is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for East-European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University.
She graduated from Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Philology and Linguistics from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1993. From 1996-1997, she was a Fulbright Professor at Columbia University, and from 1999-2007 on its faculty. At Columbia University, she developed and taught a variety of courses, among which were: “The Development of Ukrainian Language in the XX Century,” “Language Development in a Post-Totalitarian Space,” and “Language and Society: Power, Identity and Ideology.” She also ran a roundtable, “Language Policy and Language Situation in Ukraine,” at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.
Her recent research interests are focused on the problems of national identity, post-totalitarian societies, linguo-semiotic analysis, and language policy. She has been working on a comparative analysis of the dynamics of the formation of the phenomenon of national identity in Ukraine and Bulgaria in the 20th and 21st centuries. Partial results of this research are presented in a chapter “Making the Future – Remaking the Past: Historical Narrative in the State-Building Process in Today’s Ukraine” in Living the Independence Dream (forthcoming with Vernon Press, 2023).
Berezovenko serves as an editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Philological Herald.” For two terms she served as a member of the Book Prize Committee of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies. She was also a Scholarly Secretary of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies between 2002 and 2007 and has been an active member of ASEEES for more than twenty years, organizing panels and roundtables for the ASEEES conferences, and participating on an annual basis.
Today, when the world is going through the crisis caused by the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, she recognizes the important role ASEEES can play in addressing the most burning tasks in our field. Namely: by vigorously supporting the decolonization of the field, a resolution adopted by ASEEES in response to Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine; by supporting ASEEES’s focus on the promotion of honest and unbiased research that deepens humanitarian knowledge and is capable of resisting politically engaged distortions in the sphere of scholarship; by actively supporting efforts to build diversity in the field; by making the field free of obscuring of those topics or subfields that were once undermined; and by facilitating international cooperation between scholars in the field.