Colgate is honored to welcome award-winning Ukrainian writer, poet, translator, and literary and film critic Volodymyr Rafeyenko for a conversation about language, identity, and being human in the 21st century. Originally a Russophone Ukrainian writer from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, following the 2014 invasion, and infinitely more so since the full-scale 2022 invasion, Rafeyenko has discontinued the use of Russian in his writing and now writes solely in Ukrainian. His literary work, even in English translation, forces readers to confront this linguistic and cultural reorientation while grappling with the immediate reality of kinetic, epistemic, and cultural violence in the 21st century.

The event will also feature a public reading from Rafeyenko’s most recent play Signals of Being or Verbum Caro Factum Est (English translation published in November 2025 by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute), which details the first days of the 2022 full-scale invasion. Signals of Being shows a diverse cast of living, dead, and imagined characters who cope with their entrapment and impending mass murder by advancing russian forces. 

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program, the Program in Core Communities, the Division of University Studies, the Department of History, the Keck Center for Language Study, the Sylvia Ellins Fund for the Teaching and Learning of Diversity,  the Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions, and the Robert H.N. Ho Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative.