Natalya Bekhta is a an academy senior research fellow at Tampere University. Bekhta is currently working on the project “After Utopia: World Literature and the Future of Eastern Europe” (2024-2029). She is also the Principal Investigator of the team project on “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989” (2024-2028). The overarching ambition of these two projects is to deprovincialise the study of literatures of Eastern Europe by (a) mapping anew the existing geographies of comparison, (b) by developing a world-systems theory of literary semi-peripheries, and (c) by revising the current understanding of the novel as a globally-dominant genre. These three larger theoretical goals are framed by the thematic focus on the contemporary Utopian imagination in the region.

Bekhta’s current research interests and teaching areas include narratology, theories of comparative and world literature, utopia, and Ukrainian fiction. She is an elected member of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory and a founding member of the Young Network TransEurope.