Photo credits:
Danish Saroee

Valentyna Savchyn

Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Translation Studies, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv


Valentyna Savchyn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Translation Studies and
Contrastive Linguistics of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She earned her PhD in
Translation Studies from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2007. Her
dissertation, Innovation of Mykola Lukash in the History of Ukrainian Literary Translation,
was recognised as the best doctoral research in translation of the year 2006. She has held
visiting fellowships at the University of Rzeszów (2017), the University of Turku (2018), the
Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna (2022) and was a guest researcher at Stockholm
University (2019–20).

Savchyn’s research focuses on the history of literary translation in Ukraine and the role of
translators, literary translation and dictionaries in the totalitarian society. She has published
over a hundred articles and book chapters which offer a multi-layered approach to the historical
contextualisation of literary translation in Soviet Ukraine, including contributions to collective
volumes such as Translation and Power (2020), National Identity in Literary Translation (2019),
and Translation Today: Literary Translation in Focus (2019). She is perhaps best known for her
monograph Mykola Lukash as a Pillar of Ukrainian Literary Translation (2014, in Ukrainian) and
her recent study on literary translation and Ukrainian translators in Soviet labour camps (East/
West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
, 8 (2), 2021).

While at SCAS, she will work on a book entitled Translation as Resistance: Language, Politics and
Cultural Colonialism in Post-Stalinist Soviet Ukraine
. Its key premise is that in certain repressive
contexts translation acquires special significance as a means of resisting the dominant culture, and
that translators have to do more than just translate.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2022-23.