How is heroic imagery created in wartime Ukraine? What roles do literary figures, pop culture heroes, and newly emerging visual symbols play in shaping collective narratives of resistance? This lecture analyses the main sources of Ukraine’s wartime heroic iconography from reimagined national writers to global superhero tropes and grassroots digital art. Join us as we explore how literature, popculture, and visual storytelling intertwine to create powerful symbols of national resistance.
Dr. Alina Mozolevska is an associate professor in the Faculty of Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine). In 2015, she received a PhD in Linguistics with a major in romance languages from Taras Shevchenko National University (Kyiv, Ukraine). She has held research fellowships at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France, 2017) and UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University (Germany, 2022). Mozolevska was also a visiting VolksWagenStiftung fellow at Saarland University (Germany, 2022–2023). She is a member of the research group Prisma Ukraïna 'War, Migration and Memory' (Forum Transregionale Studien, Germany, since 2022) and HEPP Research group (University of Helsinki, Finland, since 2022). She is currently an academic guest fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany, 2024-2025). Her research interests include media studies, discourse analysis, and border studies, and she has published on borders and identity in literary and political discourses.