Ksenia Robbe

Ksenia Robbe is a Senior Lecturer in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen and a Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt (2025-2026). Her research sits at the intersection of postcolonial and postsocialist studies, with the focus on concepts and practices of memory, time, gender, and feminism in literature, film, and visual art. Her current work explores the remembrance of the 1980-1990s transitions in South African and Russian literatures and in political and cultural practices within Eastern European and Eurasian contexts. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Cape Town and Leiden African Studies Centre and held fellowships at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIASt) and Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS). At FMSP she is working on her second monograph provisionally titled Returning Transitions: Memories of Persistent Crises in South African and Russian Writing.

Recent publications:

Robbe, Ksenia, Andrei Zavadski, and Agnieszka Mrozik. “Dialogic Remembering as Method: Activating Relationality in Memories of Postsocialist ‘Transitions,’” Memory Studies (forthcoming 2025).

Robbe, Ksenia, and Veronika Pehe. “Postsocialist Transitions in Eastern Europe as Conflicted Heritage.” The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict, edited by Ihab Saloul and Britt Baillie. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. 1–13.

Robbe, Ksenia, and Dorine Schellens.“’Every Entry Should be the Last’: Archiving the War and Producing Implicated Publics in Yevgenia Belorusets’ A Wartime Diary (2022).” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 38.4 (2024): 418-435.

Remembering Transitions: Local Histories and Global Crossings in Culture and Media. New York & Berlin: De Gruyter, series ‘Media and Cultural Memory Studies’, 2023.

Formations of Feminist Strike, special issue of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice 44.2 (2023), co-edited by Senka Neuman-Stanivukovic, Ksenia Robbe and Kylie Thomas.

Current projects:

Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions, with Agnieszka Mrozik and Andrei Zavadski (awarded a CAT NetIAS grant)

“Remembering Independence in Times of War”, an international research network co-coordinated with Gulnaz Sibgatullia (awarded a Decolonial Futures grant, University of Amsterdam)