Discursive (De)construction of Ukrainian National Identity: From Totalitarianism to Democracy

Research Area 1. Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Nataliia Romanyshyn, born in Lutsk, Volyn region in Ukraine. She graduated in Philology at Volyn State University where she continued her PhD studies in the field of communication and lingual pragmatics.

She has worked as an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at Lviv Polytechnic National University since 2006, where she also completed her postdoctoral research. The results of the research conducted between 2014 to 2022 are presented in numerous scientific publications and a monograph “National identity in the poetry of English Romanticism”, Lviv, Publishing house of Lviv Polytechnics, (2021).This work examines the cognitive, conceptual, and discursive dimensions of national identity, approaching it as a product of individual and collective cognition articulated through literary and cultural discourse. The interdisciplinary methodology developed in these studies, combining cognitive, linguistic, discursive, and literary analysis, subsequently provided the basis for investigating how the conceptual and axiological structures of Ukrainian national identity are reconfigured under the influence of sociopolitical transformation and war. Her research has therefore expanded from the study of literary representations of identity to a broader analysis of the linguistic, cultural, and symbolic processes through which national identity, collective memory, and societal values are constructed, contested, and transformed. This trajectory shaped her CEFRES Non-Residential Fellowship project, Discursive (De)construction of Ukrainian National Identity: From Totalitarianism to Democracy (2023–2024). In 2024–2025, she continued this research through the High-Level Scientific Stays Programme for Ukrainian Researchers at Eur’ORBEM, CNRS–Sorbonne Université, and CEFRES, with the project Resonance and Remembrance: Literary and Public Narratives of Commemoration in Ukraine. Her subsequent UMIFRE fellowship at CEFRES and Eur’ORBEM in 2025–2026 focuses on Ukrainian National Identity and Memory in Wartime Discourse: Literary Strategies and Symbolic Reconfiguration.

In 2026–2027, she will further develop this research during an UMIFRE fellowship at CEFRES and CELISO, Sorbonne Université, through the project From Literary Narratives to Living Voices: Cognitive and Axiological Models in Contemporary Ukrainian War Discourse. The purpose of the latter research is to investigate the contemporary Ukrainian war discourse as a space in which society narrates, negotiates, and reconfigures its core values. The research examines how literary texts produced in response to the Russian-Ukrainian war actively participate in the formation of a new axiological-conceptual paradigm of Ukrainian society. Its scholarly novelty lies in revealing the mechanisms of social consciousness, mental and discursive processes through which wartime experience is reinterpreted, symbolically processed, and transformed into a collective cultural resource. Through corpus-assisted, cognitive-linguistic, semiotic, sociolinguistic and literary-discursive analysis, the research will map the embodiment of key value concepts, metaphorical models, narrative frames, and symbolic structures. The proposed research is strongly aligned with CEFRES’ Research Area # 1 on displacements, dépaysements, and discrepancies, in which displacement concerns not only people, borders, and communities, but also ideas, concepts, values, memory practices, and forms of cultural self-understanding. Ukrainian wartime literature becomes a living field for analyzing dépaysement both as a forced change of landscape and as an intellectual method. The project thus directly responds to CEFRES’ interest in cultural translation, reception contexts, discrepancies in social representations, and the circulation of intellectual and cultural practices, offering an empirically rich and theoretically innovative Ukrainian case.

CV

Training courses

University Leadership Development: Strengthening Competencies to Enhance the Quality of Educational Programmes, including professional development in teaching excellence, October 2025–February 2026, Certificate No. BS 0020260046.

UCU Business School and Lviv Polytechnic National University
https://staff.lpnu.ua/person

Developing Academic Integrity and Responsibility, within the project Fostering Academic Integrity and Responsibility: EU Policy (101085834 – FAIR-ERASMUS-JMO-2022-HEI-TCH-RSCH, 2022–2025), 40 hours (1.3 ECTS credits), 29 January–5 February 2024.

Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University

Professional Development Programme for Academic and Teaching Staff: “Using Language Corpora in Teaching Philological Disciplines and Linguistic Research”, organised by Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) within the DAAD-funded programme Ukraine Digital: Ensuring Academic Success in Times of Crisis, 90 hours (3 ECTS credits), 16 September–18 December 2024.

Certificate No. 94 TPS-2024, issued on 27 December 2024.
Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Professional responsibilities 

• Guarantor of Educational program, Master level, specialty 035 “Philology”  
• Member of the project group for accreditation of Educational program, PhD level, speciality 035 “Philology”  
• Member of the quality management system group at the Department of Applied Linguistics. I am currently working on the development of international cooperation of the department. On my initiative, a Framework Agreement on Cooperation was signed between the University of Wroclaw and the Lviv Polytechnic National University. 
• Organization of the summer school “Applied Linguistics in the European educational space” from 6.05 to 10.06 2021. In cooperation with the Institute of English Philology of the University of Wroclaw. 
• Member of the scientific and organizational Committee of International Conference Beyond Language 2025 (Warsaw-Cracow-Poznan-Lviv)
• UAM Corpus Tool, WordSmith Tools, AntConc, SentiStrength, LIWC, SDL Trados 
• Lexical databases WordNet та FrameNet, text corpora BNC, COCA, MOVA.info, GRAK 

Peer-review activities for academic publications indexed in international bibliographic databases:

• Reviewer for the proceedings of the COLINS conferences (2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023): https://colins.in.ua/
• Reviewer for the proceedings of the CSIT conferences (2021, 2022, and 2023): https://csit.ieee.org.ua
• Reviewer for Styles of Communication, published by the University of Bucharest.
• Reviewer for Anglica Wratislaviensia, published by the University of Wrocław: https://czasopisma.uwr.edu.pl/awr/issue/view/958/665
• Co-author of the grant application to National Fund of Researches of Ukraine Dynamics of Ukrainian language space in the context of socio-cultural and political transformations of society, National Fund of Research of Ukraine,  (2021)

Grants, Mobilities and Fellowships

• CEEPUS Mobility grant – The Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland (May 2022)
• ERASMUS+ Teaching Mobility The Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland (14-19 November 2022)
• Coordinator of the international educational project “Postgraduate Course in Conference Interpreting – Lviv Polytechnic National University,” implemented during the first and second semesters of the 2024–2025 academic year, Project No. EP-14/2024-2025, 1 October 2024–31 July 2025.
• Scientific Internship and Guest Lecturer, University of Wroclaw, Faculty of English Studies, Translation and Multiculturalism (March 7-21, 2024)
• Scientific Internship and Guest Lectirer, University of Wroclaw, Coleguim of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies, Discourse and Socio-Cultural Identity in Teaching Humanities (April 7-20, 2025)
• Scientific Internshipand Guest lecturer, University of Wroclaw, Coleguim of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies, Interdisciplinary approaches to Teaching translation and Interpreting in European Educational Space (March16-28, 2026).
• CEFRES Non-residential fellowship for Ukrainian researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences.CEFRES, French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague.  Project title: Discursive (De)construction of Ukrainian National Identity: From Totalitarianism to Democracy (2023-2024)
• CFA Program of High-Level Scientific Stays for Ukrainian Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences. Eur’Orbem (UMR 8224) Cultures et sociétés d’Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane, French research unit (CNRS and Sorbonne Université).CEFRES, French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague. Project title: “Resonance and Remembrance: Literary and Public Narratives of Commemoration in Ukraine” (2024-2025)
• UMIFRE (Unités mixtes des instituts français de recherche à l’étranger) Joint Units of French Research Institutes Abroad.CERFES French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague. Eur’Orbem (UMR 8224) Cultures et sociétés d’Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane, French research unit (CNRS and Sorbonne Université). Residential fellowship for Ukrainian researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences. Project title: Ukrainian National Identity and Memory in Wartime Discourse: Literary Strategies and Symbolic Reconfiguration (2025-2026)
• UMIFRE (Unités mixtes des instituts français de recherche à l’étranger) Joint Units of French Research Institutes Abroad. CERFES French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague. CELISO, Centre de Linguistique en Sorbonne, Center of Linguistics in Sorbonne. Residential fellowship for Ukrainian researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences. Project title: From Literary Narratives to Living Voices (Cognitve and Axiological Models in Contemporary Ukrainian War Discourse ) (2026-2027)

Publications

• Romanyshyn N. ,Albota S. Implementation of Conference Interpreting Courses, in Ukrainian Education Process: European Integration Context in a collective monograph Ukraine’s capacity to implement the sustainable development program in the context of full-scale armed aggression. Baltija Publishing, 2025. The work was carried out within the framework of a grant from the European Union (European Union grant EP-14/2024-2025 “Postgraduate Course of Conference Interpreting – Lviv Polytechnic National University – 1st and 2nd Semester 2024– 2025”). p 235-248.Nataliia, Romanyshyn; Dilai, Marianna; Handera, Yuliia; Petrova, Inna; Popenko, Viktoriia; Shchipkova, Anastasiia; et al. (2026). Parallel corpus of EU documents (English-Ukrainian). Figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32676366.v1
• Romanyshyn N. Artistic conceptualization of native land in William Wordsworth’s poetry // Academic Journal of Modern Philology. – 2021. – Vol. 12. – P. 137–146.
• Nataliya Romanyshyn. Concept land in XIX-XX centuries Ukrainian poetic discourse / Славістичні студії. Етнолінгвістика і міжкультурна комунікація. – Видавництво Католицького Люблінського Університету Іоанна Павла II, Люблін 2018. – С. 9-27. (Slavic studies. Ethnolinguistics and intercultural communication. – Publishing House of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland).
• Romanyshyn N. Anthropological dimentions of natural and cultural context in John Keat’s poetry: the dialog between poet and motherland // Лінгвістичні студії. – 2018. – Вип. 36. – С. 84–93. (Index Copernicus International).
• Romanyshyn N. Antiquity and Englishness as literary aesthetic forms of national identity in John Keats’ poetry // Вісник Київського національного лінгвістичного університету. Серія “Філологія”. – 2020. – том 23(1). – С. 41–50.
• Olena Levchenko,Nataliia Romanyshyn.The Concept of “Volia” in the Modern Ukrainian Language: A Corpus-Based Approach to the Analysis of Conceptual Content // Academic Journal of Modern Philology, Vol. 27 (2025), 237–264
• Nataliia Romanyshyn. The Ukrainian Language and Identity under Soviet Totalitarism: Discursive Practices and Ideological Impositions // Academic Journal of Modern Philology, Vol. 27 (2025), 299–327.
• Romanyshyn N. , Albota S. “European Integration Processes and their Impact on the Training of Master’s Degree Interpreters in the Field of Foreign Language Competence”, In:  Innovations in Education and Science in the Context of European Integration. Baltija Publishing, 2025, pp. 250-266. The work was carried out within the framework of a grant from the European Union (European Union grant EP-14/2024-2025 “Postgraduate Course of Conference Interpreting – Lviv Polytechnic National University – 1st and 2nd Semester 2024–2025”).

Monographs 

• Nataliia Romanyshyn. National identity in the poetry of English Romanticism, Lviv, Lviv Politechnics Publishing house, 2021, 536 p.
• Data of Textual corpora in linguistic researches/ eds. V.A. Shyrokov, O/P/ Levchenko, N.I. Romanyshyn, I.A. Bekhta, Lviv, Lviv Politechnics Publishing house, 2015.
• Romanyshyn Nataliya. Concept “Language” in the poetry of the 20th century / Ucrainica VI. Problemy jazyka, literatury a kultury. – Universita Palackiego v Olomoucsi, Olomouc, 2014. – s.311-315
• Multidimentional space of philology: collective monograph, Chernivtsi: Yu. Fedkovych Chernivtsi national University, 2020.
• Romanyshyn, S. Albota, Revitalization of Ukrainian Cultural Memory in War-Time Context (Based on The Example of Ukrainian Language Discursive Conceptualization). In: Philology and philological education in the digital transformation era: European dimensions, national context, intercultural communication: collective monograph / Riga: Baltija Publishing, 2024. c.454-484.
• Nataliia Romanyshyn. Artistic conceptualization from the perspective of Roman Ingarden’s aesthetics. In: Roman Ingarden’s Heritage in Multicultural Investigations (M. Dowlashewich, M. Garciarz, eds.). Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2024.
• Romanyshyn N. Інформація. Мова. Інтелект. Том 2: колективна монографія /Romanyshyn. – Київ-Варшава: Український мовно-інформаційний фонд НАН України, 2023. – 116 c.