The Department’s history began in 1995 with the establishment of the Eastern Studies division at the Faculty of Philology. At that time, under the leadership of Professors Leonid Hrytsyk and Heorhii Khalymonenko, three Far Eastern languages – Chinese, Korean, and Japanese – were taught at Taras Shevchenko National University. With the creation of the Institute of Philology in 2004, the Department of Chinese, Korean and Japanese Philology was founded. In 2016, following the introduction of two new unique degree programs in Vietnamese and Indonesian (the only ones in Ukraine training specialists in these languages), the unit was reorganized into the Department of The Far East and Southeast Asia Languages and Literature under its current name.
Today, the department offers courses in 5 languages. It consists of 53 lecturers, including 3 Doctors of Philology and 23 PhDs in Philology, some of whom are native speakers of Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. These are the scholars who pioneer the main directions of development of national Eastern studies, researchers of languages and literatures of the Far East and Southeast Asia.
Since its foundation and until 2021, the department was run by a Doctor of Philology, Professor Ivan Bondarenko. The current Head of the Department is Doctor of Philology, Associate Professor Nataliia Isaieva.
The department serves as the graduating unit for eleven Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes that train specialists in Eastern Studies in the field of translation and teaching of Eastern languages and literature in higher education.
With the assistance of Mitsubishi Corporation, Japanese lecturers have developed a unique series of teaching materials on Japanese studies in Ukraine with 46 textbooks, manuals, and dictionaries. Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Vietnam, the Department’s lecturers Van Anh Ha Thi and Associate Professor Viktoriia Musiychuk created the first series of Vietnamese language textbooks in Ukraine. The department’s research interests are focused on cognitive, corpus and communicative linguistics, translation studies, history of Eastern literature, comparative studies, imagology, literary theory, genre studies, gender studies, methods of teaching languages and literature of the East, etc.
From 2004 to 2021, the lecturers of the department published more than 1260 academic and methodological works (articles, monographs, textbooks and manuals) in various fields, including: Modern Japanese Literary Language: A Theoretical Course: In 2 Volumes (Tetiana Komarnytska, Kostiantyn Komisarov), Japanese Language: Gender Aspect (Hideko Egawa), Japanese Literature. Course of Lectures: in 2 parts (Ivan Bondarenko, Yuliia Osadcha), Linguistic Studies of Japan (Ivan Bondarenko, Oleksandr Bondar), Japanese Characters (Hideko Egawa, Olena Kobelianska), Teaching Japanese in Higher Education: Integrative System of Formation and Development of Academic Literacy (Oksana Asadchykh); Chinese: Basic Course (Maria Voina, Olha Vorobei, Oleksandr Honcharenko, et al.), Formation of Chinese-language competence in written speech (Oksana Asadchykh, A. Savchenko), Chinese literature of VII-XIII centuries (Yaroslav Scheker), Modern Chinese literature (Olha Vorobei, K. Murashevych), Chinese language in the modern world (Maria Voina, Oleksandr Honcharenko, etc.), Chinese Women’s Prose: Revision of the Canon (Nataliia Isaieva), Theatrical Art of China: Historical Excursion (Olha Vorobei), Korea in the Descriptions of Western Authors (IX and early XX century) (Yurii Kovalchuk).
The Department’s faculty includes talented literary translators who have enriched the treasury of Ukrainian-language translations of poetry and prose from the Far East, in particular: Anthology of Japanese Poetry. Haiku of the XVII-XX centuries (Ivan Bondarenko), Anthology of Japanese Classical Poetry. Tanka, renga of the VIII-XV centuries (Ivan Bondarenko), Celestial Songs (Yaroslav Scheker), Red Sorghum: A Novel of China by Mo Yan (Nataliia Kirnosova), Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet by Alai (Nataliia Kirnosova), etc.
At different times, the department employed