Nataliia Goshylyk is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where she teaches Ukrainian. Dr. Goshylyk received her M.A. in Philology from Lesya Ukrainka Volyn State University, and her PhD in linguistics from Kharkiv National University. She is the recipient of the Berkeley Language Center Summer Fellowship in 2022, as well as a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship from 2021-2022, and she was an Erasmus Mundus Ianus II recipient in 2015, where she did research in Graz, Austria. Some of her main areas of focus include ecolinguistics, language pedagogy, and media discourse analysis. She currently teaches introductory Ukrainian, and advanced readings in Ukrainian.
What are your main research interests within the Department of Slavic languages and literatures? What courses do you teach to undergraduates?
I am a lecturer in the Slavic languages and literature department here at Berkeley. It is my third year of teaching. I came here in 2021; I was the Fulbright Research Scholar. I got the Fulbright Scholarship in Ukraine, where I was an Associate Professor in the English Philology Department. My main research focus has always been linguistics and media discourse analysis.
I came here to do research because I focus on ecolinguistics. My research project was about the social media narratives that work with ecological identity, sustainable ways of thinking, and the ways that Americans are trying to verbalize these aspects. I came here and was affiliated with the Berkeley Language Center and was working with Professor Emerita Claire Kramsch.
After the war started in 2022, I was lost and confused. I wasn’t sure what to do. My two young daughters were here going to schools, and we weren’t sure whether we could go back. These were the decisions that had to be made quickly. I heard about this position in March, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen in Ukraine – on the first day of war, they bombed the city I was from and it was in Western Ukraine, far away from the frontline. I decided to apply for the position. After some interviews and demo-lessons, I was lucky to get the job and right now I am teaching.
The courses I have taught here are courses connected with Ukrainian language, literature and culture, and Ukraine itself. I have taught introductory and continuing Ukrainian courses, that are purely linguistic – language courses. I also have taught courses like ‘advanced readings in Ukrainian’ and I have a summer course about Ukraine: its history, identity, society, and environment. In this course, you can actually see the way that I was trying to combine all my spheres of expertise. The focus is Ukraine itself.
After I started teaching here in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department, I’ve had to shift the focus. In a nutshell, for 20 years I was working with the English language in Ukraine, just to come to the US and start working with the Ukrainian language and culture. I’ve had to switch that a bit, but I try to combine. The theoretical frameworks I have been working with can be applied to different materials and from different perspectives for Ukrainian studies. I was trying to look at the way the Ukrainian identity is emerging. One of the articles I have co-authored was connected with the Ukrainian diasporic identity.
While I look at identity from the social-constructivist perspective, I was trying to see how Ukrainian Americans from the Ukrainian diaspora perform their Ukrainian identity on the individual and institutional level. I was looking at Ukrainian-American nonprofits. That was a way of combining my theoretical expertise with Ukrainian studies. I have to use all of the knowledge I have to advance the field as much as I can, on both the research level and also the language-speaking level.