'The Skin of Another': Empathetic Dissonance in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Poetry After Crisis"
Professional Background
Ms. Anna Veprinska is a PhD candidate in English at York University in Toronto (Canada). She received her MSt in English from the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). She possesses language skills in English, Russian, and French. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ms. Veprinska will work on her project, “'The Skin of Another': Empathetic Dissonance in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Poetry After Crisis”.
Ms. Veprinska published Sew with Butterflies (Steel Bananas Press, 2014), as well as “Meetings with Anna Akhmatova: Translation as Interrogation” in The Bristol Journal of English Studies (Winter 2012). She has also presented her work at a number of scholarly conferences, including: “Empathetic Witnessing in Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust and Cynthia Hogue’s Katrina Interview-Poems” at the Northeast Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference held at the University of Connecticut in March 2016; “Hollow Stones: Poetic and Photographic Reflections Seventy Years after the Holocaust” at the Western Jewish Studies Association Conference at the University of British Columbia in May 2015; “‘The Stones of the Road Do Not Weep’: Empathy’s Role in the Holocaust Poetry of Charlotte Delbo, Paul Celan, and Dan Pagis” at the Midwest Jewish Studies Association Conference at Kent University in September 2014; “Empathy's Potential to Heal: Doctor-Patient Relationships in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway” at the Northeast Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference at Susquehanna University in Harrisburg, PA in April 2014; and “Identity, Manipulation, and Tremolo: The Toronto Mandolin Orchestra’s Translation of Ukrainian Culture on the Canadian Stage” at the Multilingual Identities: Translators and Interpreters as Cross-Cultural Migrants Conference at York University in March 2012.
Fellowship Research
During her tenure as Cummings Foundation Fellow at the Mandel Center, Ms. Veprinska considered the role of empathy in poetry that responded to the events of the Holocaust, as it existed both within post-holocaust poetry and oral testimony of survivors. Ms. Veprinska’s research explored the notion that empathy within post-holocaust poems can be multidimensional and dissonant ̶ these poems variously enact, invite, refuse, evoke, deploy, show interest in, and/or ambivalence toward empathy ̶ because they are engaged in the struggle and question of the possibility and place of empathy in the face of the crisis to which they respond.
Ms. Anna Veprinska was in residence at the Mandel Center until January 31, 2017.