Under the Virgin’s Veil: Monastic Spirituality, Gender, and Power in Stefan Iavors′kyi’s Sermon to the Nuns of the Ascension Convent in Kyiv
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A lecture by Maria Grazia Bartolini, Visiting Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard
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About the Speaker
Dr. Maria Grazia Bartolini is an Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Milan. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Language and Literatures from the University of Milan in 2010 and Dr. Habil in Slavic studies in 2017. She has a BA degree with honors from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the religious culture of early modern Ukraine, with special attention to the intersection of preaching, memory, and visual arts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, the political and social aspects of homiletic and hagiographical texts, and the reception of Christian Neoplatonism in the East Slavic region. Her monographs include Piznai samoho sebe (2017), a study on Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism, which was awarded the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize; In the Tight Triangle of the Night. The Early Poetry of Yuriy Tarnawsky between Modernism and Postmodernism (Academic Studies Press, 2024); and The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Series; forthcoming in late 2025). Her articles on memory, meditation, and visual imagery in early modern Ukraine were awarded the Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) Best Article Prize in 2017 and 2020 and an Honorable Mention from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2021. Dr. Bartolini was Research Fellow at HURI in 2024.
This event is organized by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies series.
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