Iryna Starovoyt is a poet and cultural studies scholar, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University, virtual writer-in-residence at Trent University and Durham College and Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. She holds a PhD from Lviv University (2001). Prof. Starovoyt teaches Modernist Women Writers and Activists, Critical and Creative Thinking, History of Ideas and Cultural Practices. Member of PEN Ukraine, she authored three volumes of poetry and a number of essays. Her poetry touches upon the neglected 20th century generational memories and new traumatic context of its retelling in Eastern Europe and particularly in Ukraine. She has published widely on Ukrainian literary narratives of becoming and belonging, ethics and sensitivity of memory, conflictual postimperial mental mapping, displacement, and about moving from tragedy to epic while writing through pain, war and trauma. She is on the board of the annual Lviv Book Forum, Culture Congress, Drahoman Prize and serves as the Head of the Jury for the transnational literary prize UNESCO’s City of Literature based in Lviv. Prof. Starovoyt spent years of work to recover and reopen modernist Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg, once a transnational cultural hotspot and vibrant cosmopolitan city, to nowadays Ukrainians. Starovoyt cohosts Plany na zavtra / Plans for Tomorrow thought collective and space for discussion on YouTube. She was part of the program committee for Stanislaw Lem Centennial (2021). As a memory activist and educator she has been awarded the Key to the City award from the Lviv City Mayor.
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