Natalia Volvach

About Natalia Volvach

I am a sociolinguist working on language, memory, migration, and violence, with a focus on Ukraine and Eastern Europe. I hold a Ph.D. in Bilingualism from Stockholm University (2023), where I examined absencing and haunting in the semiotic landscapes of Russian-occupied Qırım–Crimea through ethnographic research. During my Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna), I developed this work into a book that will appear in the Critical Multilingualism series with Routledge in May 2026. My research explores how violence transforms words into voids; how it materializes in absences or traces of language, scarred landscapes, and bodies; and how it often appears in subtle, haunting forms that shape ways of being, speaking, and relating to the world.

Following my Ph.D., I conducted two postdoctoral projects. In Ukrainian Voices in Sweden, I studied war-induced displacement and lived experiences of language, memory, and trauma among Ukrainians in Sweden. My current project, Dreams of Violence, has just begun and is affiliated with and funded by the Centre for European Research at the University of Gothenburg (CERGU). Building on my previous work and deploying art-based research methods, it examines how violence reverberates beyond waking life, asking how war is sensed and remembered.

My research is interdisciplinary and draws on sociolinguistics, anthropology, human geography, and memory studies. My work has appeared in Language in Society, Linguistic Landscapes, and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. I am also a co-editor of the forthcoming special issue Mattering the Spectre: Language, Landscape, and the Haunted Researcher (Emotion, Space, and Society) and the edited volume Sociolinguistics of the Spectre: Language, Space, and Memory (Bloomsbury).