Darya Tsymbalyuk, assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, will present her award-winning book, Ecocide in Ukraine (Polity Press, 2025), recipient of the 2026 UNWLA Kovaliv Prize. The book grapples with urgent and unsettling questions: What does it mean to inhabit a world under attack, and what does it mean to live on contaminated land?

In this talk, Tsymbalyuk examines the environmental toll of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the lens of the more-than-human world, weaving together personal reflection, cultural and media analysis, and environmental data to show how familiar spaces become sites of rupture, memory, and survival—reshaping our understanding of what it means to live in a world marked by violence and contamination.