Professor Nataliya Torkut is a Visiting Professor at King's and is a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Science. She is Professor in the Department of German Philology, Translation and World Literature at Zaporizhzhia National University. She founded the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre in 2009 of which she is currently the director and established Ukraine’s nationwide Shakespeare festival, ‘Shakespeare Days in Ukraine,’ in 2018. In April 2023 she visited Stratford-upon-Avon to give the toast ‘To the immortal memory of William Shakespeare’ at the official lunch held in honour of the playwright’s birthday. 

Research Interests

• Shakespeare Studies
• Theatre & Performance
• Genre in Early Modern England
• War and contemporary culture, especially in relation to Ukraine

Professor Torkut's research has examined, inter alia, the legacy of the Ukrainian modernist director Les Kurbas, genre in early modern England, and the subtexts of Kosintsev’s Hamlet. Together with her colleague Maya Harbuzyuk she is assembling an encyclopedia documenting the translation, performance and reception of Shakespeare in Ukraine. She is also working on the role of culture as a means to support civil society during the war. Her latest project is an online archive of works produced by artists of all kinds killed in the war including poems, paintings, sculptures and musical compositions.

Selected Publications

'Is Whispering Nothing': Anti-totalitarian Implications in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet, in 'A sea-change into something rich and strange: Shakespeare Studies in Contemporary Ukraine'. Lviv-Torun: Liha-Pres, 2020, pp. 126–158.'Religious issues in Tudor England and their resonance in Elizabethan literature', in 'Modern Approaches to Philological Studies'. Lviv-Torun: Liha-Pres, 2020, pp. 149–172.with I. Makaryk, 'Ukraine'. Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia.with N. Levchenko, L. Pecherskyh, and O. Varenikova, 'Communicative Model – Author, Hero, Text, Recipient in a Postmodern Novel', Postmodern Openings, 12 (2021), pp. 96-106.with V. Marinesko, D. Lazarenko, and N. Gutaruk, '“Shakespeare in love” / In love with Shakespeare: metatextual potential of John Madden’s fictional biopic', Amazonia Investiga, 10, pp. 103-112.