Dr Kateryna Yeremieieva
URIS Fellow Spring 2026
Dr. Kateryna Yeremieieva is a Ukrainian cultural historian and media scholar whose research examines silence as a form of public communication in wartime contexts. Rather than treating silence as absence, her work conceptualises it as a socially structured, emotionally charged, and ethically contested practice.
Focusing on Ukraine since 2014, she analyses how silence becomes visible, interpreted, and morally evaluated within digital and media publics. Her research contributes to broader discussions on media, memory, civic responsibility, and public ethics in societies shaped by war and crisis.
Education and academic background
Dr. Yeremieieva holds a PhD in Ukrainian history from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (2016). Her doctoral dissertation examined political humour in Soviet Ukraine, a topic that also forms the basis of her first book, Striking with Satire: The Magazine Perets in the Socio-Cultural Context of Soviet Ukraine (published in Ukrainian, 2018).
She has taught Ukrainian history and political science at the Ukrainian State University of Railway Transport and has extensive expertise in Soviet and post-Soviet political culture, censorship, and implicit communication.
From 2022 to 2025, she was based at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where she worked on a DFG-funded book project on inappropriate humour in Ukraine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
ContactResearch project
Contested Silence: Vigilance, Voice, and the Ethics of Non-Speech in Ukraine
During her fellowship at the University of Basel, Dr. Yeremieieva will further develop her project Contested Silence: Vigilance, Voice, and the Ethics of Non-Speech in Ukraine. The project investigates how silence has shifted from a marginal concern to a central object of moral judgement in Ukrainian wartime discourse.
Focusing on the period from 2014 to the present, and especially the early months of the full-scale invasion in 2022, it analyses how digital publics monitor and interpret silence – particularly that of artists, intellectuals, and other symbolic spokespersons. Drawing on discourse analysis and digital ethnography, the project examines viral appeals, public controversies, commemorative rituals, and visual culture to show how silence can be read as dignity, trauma, strategy, or betrayal.
Further research interests: history of Ukraine, Soviet culture, humour studies, vigilance culture, gender studies, media and visual culture.
Teaching at the University of Basel
Dr. Yeremieieva will offer a BA/MA-level course titled Contested Silence: Communication, Ethics, and Vigilance in Eastern Europe.
The course introduces students to silence as a key analytical category in the study of politics, media, and memory. Combining theoretical frameworks with case-based analysis, it explores silence across Soviet, post-socialist, and contemporary Ukrainian contexts. Students engage with digital media, visual culture, satire, and commemorative practices, developing their own case studies while critically reflecting on voice, agency, and the moral boundaries of public expression in times of crisis.
Events in Basel with Kateryna
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Lecture by Kateryna Yeremieieva (Kharkiv/Basel) in the context of the research colloquium “Current Research on Eastern European History”. The preparatory texts can be found on ADAM. If you are unable to register on ADAM, please contact kai.willms@unibas.ch.
tba, 18.00–20.00h, Alte Universität Basel, Rheinsprung 9, Seminarraum –201
Workshop on Silence, Voice, and Visibility in Eastern Europe: Case Studies
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This study day examines silence as a socially and politically charged practice through a series of case studies from Eastern Europe. Across disciplines, the contributions address silence in relation to violence, memory, marginalisation, and representation, highlighting its ethical and methodological implications.
27 March 2026, 13.00–20.00, Slavic Seminar Basel
More information soon!
