The Essay “The Un/Executed Renaissance” by Dr. Bohdan Tokarsky, currently at the University of Potsdam, was published in open access Essay series Essays of the Forum Transregionale Studien, Bd. 8, EUTIM/Prisma Ukraïna (2021).
Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar specializing in Ukrainian Studies, in particular Ukraine’s twentieth century and contemporary literature, with a research interest in the intersections between poetry, philosophy and psychology. He studied for a Master’s degree in European Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge (2015), where he subsequently completed his doctoral work as a Gates Cambridge Scholar and taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies. In his doctoral thesis, Tokarsky explored the works of the Soviet Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus. As a PhD student he was a finalist of the UKRAINET PhD Thesis Presentation Contest in 2017 and won the 2nd place. He was a Prisma Ukraїna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and a URIS Fellow at the University of Basel. He has also organised and participated in a number of poetry, theatre, translation and cultural diplomacy projects. Tokarsky joined the University of Potsdam in June 2021 as a research associate within the “Europäische Zeiten/European Times” (EUTIM) project. He was also selected as one of Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies and will carry out his research project “A Fragment of Wholeness’: The Making of Self in the Works of Vasyl’ Stus” as the Mihaychuk Research Fellow (Spring 2022) at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).