Alex Averbuch is a scholar, poet, and translator. In 2023-2024 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center, where his research focused on the creativity of WWII-era Ukrainian forced laborers and prisoners of war, in particular their literary, visual, and photographic attestations.
In general, his research explores gender and critical race theory, commodity culture, epistolarity, photography, theatricality and performance, translation, and creative writing. Averbuch has published extensively on Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish literatures from the 18th century to the present, in particular on topics related to femininity, queerness, homoeroticism, gendered otherization, material culture, performativity, and constructs of power, as well as intercultural and transepochal phenomena in Eastern Slavic and Jewish literatures. He is coeditor of a volume of articles on epistolarity, censorship, and totalitarianism in the Ukrainian context.
In 2021, Alex established, and has since run, a first-of-its-kind research group on queer studies in the Slavic context, which currently lists over a hundred international scholars and features monthly online seminars. Additionally, in collaboration with the Kule Center for Ukrainian-Canadian Folklore, Alex organized and continues to curate a digital archive for the “Writings From the War” project, which collects and disseminates testimonials of Ukrainians about their experience of the Russian invasion.
He is the author of three books of poetry and over 60 literary translations spanning Hebrew, Ukrainian, Russian, and English. His book Zhydivs'kyi korol' (The Jewish King) was a finalist for the 2023 Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest state award for works of culture. He has organized numerous academic and Ukrainian cultural events, for instance the Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry, from which he edited a special issue of Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations, dedicated to the participants' works.
