Mariia Fokeeva

Biography

Maria Fokeeva is a researaher who specializes in trauma studies, and memory studies. Her PhD thesis, Trauma in Aesthetics in the Second Half of the 20th century: the Experience of W. G. Sebald, was defended in 2021 in State Institute for Art Studies, Moscow, Russia. Her thesis explores aesthetic concepts that can fully reflect historical and cultural traumatic experience of 20th century. She observed how traumatic symptoms as inability to speak, sudden bouts of despair, obsessive memories or memory lapses transformed in artistic forms, and which approaches are the most appropriate for aesthetic analysis of these forms. Previously she worked in Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, Russia, as a head of the Graduate Study Department, and as a research assistant (2018-2022). For being more consistent in the trauma studies she received a qualification in psychology and took a two-year course of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis authorized by the Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna.