Date: Friday, 21st November 2025
Time: 11am-1pm
Venue: HI Seminar Room H204
This event is free, but please register on (opens in a new window)EVENTBRITE to attend.
Lunch will be provided as part of the event.
Haunting Times: Ghosted Memory and Epistemic Revenants in Zhadan’s Ukraine (Voroshilovgrad, 2010) and Bulawayo’s Zimbabwe (Glory, 2022)
Serhiy Zhadan’s novel Voroshilovgrad (2010) is set in a fictional Ukraine in the early 2000s, an imaginative world where the dead and the living intermingle; NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (2022) in a fictional Zimbabwe in the 2010s, where the protagonist encounters ghosts from a past that has not been dealt with. The talk and discussion will consider how the novels expose the repressive practice of epistemic ghosting and stage the resistant practice of epistemic haunting. Those who have been ghosted return, bringing (back) memories and history that complicate linear and singular memory management.
Sarah Colvin held chairs at the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Warwick before becoming Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her research and teaching interests include the areas of literary aesthetics, cultural production and social justice, the political novel and prisoner writing as well as narrative theory and narrative ethics. She is PI of the Cambridge team for the Horizon Europe project Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (www.caponeu.eu). Her recent publications include the monographs Literature and Epistemic Injustice: Power and Resistance in the Contemporary Novel (Routledge 2026) and Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by its Prisoners (Reaktion Books 2022) and the edited collections Epistemic Justice and Creative Agency: Global Perspectives on Literature and Film (with Stephanie Galasso, Routledge 2023) and Sharon Dodua Otoo: Literature, Politics, Possibility (with Tara Talwar Windsor, Wiley 2024).
