Medwidsky Lecture Post-event
16 April 2026
On April 10, 2026, Dr. Maryna Hrymych, the invited guest speaker for this year’s Annual Bohdan Medwidsky Memorial Lecture, presented “Between Narratives of Mourning and Humour: Memory and Resilience in Ukraine, 2022–25.”
From the first day of the escalated invasion in February 2022, Ukraine faced challenges that required immediate working through—largely on social media. Amid the torrent of textual, photo, and video content, there emerged both “one-day” messages and private reflections, as well as posts that became, to varying degrees, folklorized and integrated into the collective narrative.
Taken together, these narratives — both mournful and humorous — help people to process collective trauma while simultaneously fostering resilience and maintaining a sense of identity.
Maryna Hrymych is a writer, folklorist, ethnographer, and member of PEN Ukraine. Author of a biographical monograph on KuFC founder Bohdan Medwidsky in the form of essays on Ukrainian-Canadian folklore studies (2016), as well as editor of Robert-Bohdan Klymasz’s book Ukrainian Folk Culture in the Canadian Prairies (2013) and author of its afterword. Hrymych has written twenty novels and novellas, and she is the founder (2005) and director of the Duliby Publishing House. Her husband Ihor Ostash was the Ambassador of Ukraine in Canada from 2006 to 2011.
