Congratulations to our team at the 2025 ICCEES World Congress

We are pleased to share that this week, Dr. Oleksandr Pankieiev , Director of the Kule Folklore Centre (KuFC) and Kule Chair, along with Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, Huculak Chair, and Dmytro Yesypenko, Sustainable Ukrainian Canadian Heritage (SUCH) Coordinator and Ph.D. candidate at KuFC, presented their research at the XI World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES), held at University College London.

26 July 2025

kule at iccees congress

In one of the panels, Dmytro Yesypenko examined how epidemic metaphors illuminate war and trauma in Ukrainian literature. Dr. Anna Antonova, Coordinator of the Disrupted Ukrainian Scholars and Students (DUSS) Program and a valued friend of our Centre, analyzed shifting linguistic identities in war-themed prose through the lens of translation.

At another panel, Dr. Pankieiev delivered a presentation — one of the few at the Congress focused on folklore — titled “The Trickster Motifs in the Digital Folklore of the Russo-Ukrainian War.” He also participated in the roundtable discussion “Russia’s War and the Transformation of World Order ‘from Below’: Disruption, Global Fragmentation, Local Agency, and the Transboundary.”

Dr. Khanenko-Friesen contributed to two roundtables — one on the Ukrainian diaspora and another on archival activism during the war — and chaired the panel “Silenced and Declassified Archives in Eastern Europe.