Larissa Babij, A KIND OF REFUGEE

In conversation with Maria Sonevytsky, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music, Bard College.

FREE. Registration Requested

A percentage of the proceeds from book sales at this event will be donated to support ongoing humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

American-born Larissa Babij was at home in Kyiv when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Her grandparents left Ukraine almost 80 years ago amidst the violence of World War II, and now she is fleeing the advancing Russian army. A Kind of Refugee chronicles the first year of all-out war in Ukraine through vivid dispatches that Babij sent to readers abroad.

In cities flooded with refugees and bustling with humanitarian aid efforts, or while supporting an innovative military unit making DIY drones, Babij examines Ukrainian cultures of cooperation. Reflecting on her American upbringing, she ponders the premium that Western societies―shaped by the traumatic history of WW II―place on security. When she returns to Kyiv, sirens, Russian missile strikes, and long periods of darkness organize her days.
This moving account of taking responsibility for your home and your history concludes with several essays on theater published between 2015 and 2021. Written with a fierce love for Ukraine and its people, this book is a testament to the courage of ordinary people committed to freedom while defending their homeland.

Larissa Babij is a Ukrainian-American writer, translator, and dancer based in Kyiv, Ukraine, since 2005. She holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, USA, and an MA in Cultural Studies from the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” in Ukraine. She is also a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. Her writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Arrowsmith Journal, The Odessa Review, Springerin, and other publications. She reports on living in Ukraine at war and participating in the country’s civic-military defense at A Kind of Refugee

Maria Sonevytsky’s research focuses on post-Soviet Ukraine, where she has pursued interests including folklore revivals after state socialism and the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on the revival of rural musical repertoires. In 2011, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, she founded the Chernobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World, a public ethnomusicology program that sought to broaden awareness about the cultural impact of nuclear disaster by reviving ritual song repertoires from rural communities near the accident site that had dispersed after 1986. The project culminated with multimedia performances in four cities and a Smithsonian Folkways recording. She is the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (2019), winner of the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society; journal articles in Music & Politics, Public Culture, The World of Music, and Journal of Popular Music Studies; and several book chapters. Other areas of interest include critical organology, the science of musical instruments; and Soviet children’s music. Sonevytsky is also an accordionist, vocalist, and pianist. She taught at Bard for several years beginning in 2014 and then taught in the Music Department at the University of California, Berkeley. BA, Barnard College; PhD, Columbia University; postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and University of Toronto.

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