Profile of Svitlana Pidoprygora
Svitlana Pidoprygora was a professor at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine). She completed her PhD thesis (kandydat filolohichnykh nauk) on Ukrainian historical fiction in 2008. In her second dissertation (doktor filolohichnykh nauk, Doctor of Philological Sciences), she analyzed Ukrainian experimental fiction of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Since 2018, her primary research focus has been on Ukrainian comics and graphic novels. Throughout her academic career, she has authored over 80 academic publications, including two monographs and two collective volumes. She has participated in numerous academic conferences both in Ukraine and internationally, and has co-organized conferences, workshops, and exhibitions. She is also a member of academic associations. She has served as a jury member for the International Competition Koronayija Slova and is a member of the expert committee of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
She worked as a short-term guest lecturer at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and the University of Innsbruck (Austria), and received several research fellowships in Germany and Switzerland. She is currently continuing her research project at the University of Innsbruck with the support of MSCA4Ukraine. Her project explores the representations of Ukraine in national and international comics since 1991, focusing on how comics, as part of a broader media ecosystem, reflect and shape public perceptions of Ukraine by analyzing their artistic, genre-specific, and stylistic responses to shifting global political and cultural contexts.