Our University community is proud to share that the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, US, has welcomed two KNU scholars for 2025-26 via the Fulbright Scholars Program. Mariia Grytsenko, Assistant Professor at the Educational and Scientific Institute of Philology, and Oleksandr Gon, Professor at the Educational and Scientific Institute of International Relations, are joining the Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Mariia Grytsenko will co-teach the introductory Ukrainian language sequence and assist in the enhancement of its curriculum during her two-semester stay. She will also assist with the further development of UKR 100 Ukrainian Culture and Civilization, thereby enriching the department’s broader offerings in Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies. Beyond her academic responsibilities, Grytsenko will co-advise the Ukrainian Student Society and play a vital role in planning and coordinating a variety of extracurricular and outreach initiatives.
Grytsenko specializes in English-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English translation and regularly teaches courses that integrate theoretical approaches with applied practice in the field of translation studies. She received her PhD in translation studies from Taras Shevchenko National University in 2017.
Grytsenko is the co-author of three textbooks and has written multiple articles on translation and interpreting. She also has extensive professional experience as an interpreter, having collaborated with major international cultural institutions such as the DocuDays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival and the Odessa International Film Festival.
The title of Oleksandr Gon’s Fulbright Visiting Scholar project is “Ezra Pound and Yurii Klen: Contexts of Two Modern Unfinished Epics,” which examines Pound’s “The Cantos” (1917–1968) and Klen’s “Popil imperii” (The Ashes of Empires, 1943–1947). Building on his earlier work, Gon argues that while both texts reveal structural affinities in artistic vision and idiom, they diverge in poetics and ideology – Klen’s post-Romantic teleology contrasts with Pound’s cyclical and mythological method. Framing this as a poetic “ver(s)ification of history,” Gon highlights how modernist long poems reimagine the relationship between lyric subjectivity and epic tradition and offers fresh insight into transatlantic exchanges in 20th-century literature.
Gon earned his PhD in Philology from the Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in 2018. His scholarly interests include comparative literature, translation politics, and the intermedial study of narrative in both fiction and music. He has co-authored five textbooks on English-Ukrainian translation and is the author of two monographs: “Swinburne’s Poetry in the Context of Fin de Siècle” (1996) and “Paradigmatics of the Lyric and Epic in Ezra Pound’s Cantos” (2017).
Sincere congratulations to our colleagues who are now representing KNU and Ukrainian science at Penn State College! Let your stay be fruitful and productive!
