Iryna Zamuruieva
DPhil in Area Studies
Iryna Zamuruieva is a researcher and artist interested in human-environmental relations. At the University of Oxford, Iryna continues to develop her project "A Field from Afar" - an interdisciplinary investigation into the environmental history and political ecology of agriculture in Ukraine. Focusing on rapeseed, Iryna's research tells a long history of how trans-imperial, capitalist and multispecies relations shape life, labour and ecologies in Ukraine. Iryna blends archival, ethnographic and quantitative research with her own photography in an attempt to grasp why landscapes are the way they are today.
Across her work, both written and photographic, Iryna explores how we pay attention to historical, political and ecological entanglements, questions of resistance and complicity, and the material and symbolic relations between language and landscape.
Prior to joining Oriel College and Oxford School of Global and Area Studies Iryna worked on climate adaptation, land use and environmental policy in Scotland and Ukraine, was an artist in residence at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow and a research fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Iryna is also a co-editor of the Commons journal.
Iryna holds a BSc from the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences in Ukraine and an MSc from the University of Kiel.
Iryna's doctoral research is funded by the Clarendon Fund, Helmore Graduate Scholarship, and Scatcherd European Scholarship. It is supervised by historian Dr Zbig Wojnowski and anthropologist Dr Nicolette Makovicky.
Research Disciplines:
- Environmental History
- Political Ecology
- Cultural Geography
Research Keywords:
- Rapeseed, Agriculture, Landscape, Political Economy, Modernity, Capitalism, Multispecies, Language, Photography
Articles:
- "Geranium is falling and landing elsewhere: photographing and narrating landscapes and militarization across Scotland and Ukraine", peer-reviewed essay, Environmental Humanities, forthcoming
- "Gathering ecofeminist stories with Kateryna Hrushevska", [pre-print copy shared ahead of the forthcoming journal publication], peer-reviewed essay, special issue "Beyond Anthropocentrism in Ukrainian Studies: Proposals from the Environmental Humanities", East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Edmonton and Toronto, vol. 11, no. 1, 2024
- "A landscape, simplified", essay, Solomiya, no. 4 "Environmental Issue", 2025
- "Something happens, somewhere", originally published on Eurozine, also available on the Green European Journal, 2024
- "Adonis vernalis dreamings: (re)making kin with a place", essay, part of the "Beyond the colonial vortex of the 'West': Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022" dialogues curated by the south/south movement, 2023
Book Chapters:
- "Into kin-regions with Adonis Vernalis", book chapter for the edited volume "Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth", ed. Adrian Ivakhiv, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025. Excerpts available on internodes / міжвузля