Yakiv Bystrov

Yakiv Bystrov studied English Philology at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian University in Ivano-Frankivsk (1988-1993) and carried straight on to a PhD thesis Invariants and Variants in Lexical Semantics. His PhD degree in linguistics was awarded in 1996. Later he was appointed as University Lecturer at Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University. He became Associate Professor of English in 2002, and in 2007 he was elected as Head of the English Philology Department. In 2015 Dr Bystrov became Full Professor.
In 2011 he supervised an intercultural project between the Jagiellonian University, Krakow and Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, co-editor of the collective monograph Developing Intercultural Competence through English: Focus on Ukrainian and Polish Cultures.
In 2012 Yakiv Bystrov was selected as Visiting Scholar under the auspices of The Cambridge Colleges’ Hospitality Scheme in Cambridge, UK where he used his stay at Murray Edwards College to advance a research project in the field of cognitive poetics entitled “Modelling the Worldview of the Author in Narrative Fiction”.
Yakiv Bystrov has widely published on various aspects of the interpretation of fictional texts including, but not limited to cognitive aspects of the authorial style, and intercultural issues in studying other cultures through literary translations.
His present focus of research is on applying a cognitive linguistic perspective on life experience of the biographical subject (a narrator or a character) in the literary narrative.
Prof. Bystrov is on several editorial boards in Ukrainian academic journals. He is сhief editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Folium ( https://journals.pnu.if.ua/index.php/folium/about ).
In 2017 he obtained his doctoral degree from Odesa I. Mechnikov National University, his doctoral thesis Biographical Narrative: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective on twentieth- and twenty-first-century English-language Prose.
01.10.2019 – 31.12.2019 He was the holder of a Paul Celan Fellowship awarded by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria. His project addressed the translation of Kulyk Keefer’s Honey and Ashes in which the writer reconciled her memories with crucial events in the history of Ukraine against the backdrop of the formation of Ukrainian statehood after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.
01.10.2024 – 31.03.2025 Fellowship at the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena and Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS). Research project: “Ukraine and Ukrainians in the literary legacy of Holocaust survivors”.

2019 – 2023 He has been a participant of the project “Foreign Language Teacher Training Capacity Development as a Way to Ukraine’s Multilingual Education and European/ MultiEd” Erasmus + programme KA2 – Higher Education Capacity Building (610427-EPP) -1-2019-1-EE-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP).
From 2016 to present prof. Bystrov served on the Dissertation Committee for PhD degree programs at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
In addition, he has successfully supervised more than two dozen master’s students since 1999 and also PhD students since 2006.
Research Interests:
Cognitive linguistics
Cognitive poetics
Narratology
Intercultural communication
Translation studies