Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute

• 1. Introduction

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  The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute was formally founded in 1973, but the story of how it came to exist stretches back nearly two decades earlier, to a quiet campaign that began not in any university boardroom but among student activists and members of the Ukrainian-American community.

  Those activists had a specific problem. Ukraine's culture and history were being actively suppressed inside the Soviet Union. At the same time, political and intellectual circles in the West had little familiarity with that culture at all. The question the activists asked was a practical one: how do you preserve and legitimize a national tradition that powerful forces are trying to erase?

  The answer they arrived at, shaped under the guidance of a scholar named Omeljan Pritsak at Harvard, was deceptively ambitious. Not one endowed chair, not two, but three at a major American university. Paired with a research institute to support and broaden the scholarship. What that vision eventually became, and what it has published, taught, and stood for in the decades since, is a story about the long work of cultural survival.

• 2. An Anniversary and a Beginning

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  The Ukrainian studies program at Harvard did not simply open its doors one unremarkable Tuesday. It was launched on the 22nd of January 1968, chosen deliberately as the 50th anniversary of Ukraine's first proclamation of independence.

  With the assistance of the Ukrainian Studies Fund, the program established three endowed professorships. These sat within two departments at Harvard: History, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. The arrangement gave Ukrainian scholarship a formal institutional home at one of the most prominent universities in the United States.

  Prior to any of this, the scholars and organizers behind the effort had been running weekly seminars in Ukrainian studies. Those seminars functioned as a kind of proof of concept. They demonstrated that there was genuine academic interest and a community of researchers capable of sustaining serious work. When HURI was formally founded five years later, in 1973, it had Omeljan Pritsak and a cohort of leading scholars in the field behind it.

• 3. What HURI Actually Does

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  Ukrainian studies, as HURI defines it, reaches well beyond politics and language. The institute covers history, culture, literature, sociology, archaeology, art, economics, and anthropology. That breadth reflects a deliberate choice to treat Ukraine as a subject worthy of the full range of scholarly disciplines.

  For students and researchers, HURI functions as a focal point. It supports undergraduate and graduate students, fellows, and professors, and provides assistance with their research. The institute also manages the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, which runs summer courses in Ukrainian language, history, literature, and culture as part of the Harvard Summer School.

  On the publishing side, HURI produces the Harvard Ukrainian Studies journal, which was founded in 1977. It also runs a series of book publications, among them the Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, the Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, and Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies.

• 4. Collections and Scholarship

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  HURI maintains one of the largest collections of Ukrainian books and other media available anywhere in the Western world. That collection draws on both HURI's own holdings and materials stored in the Harvard Library.

  The published scholarship the institute has produced over the decades spans a wide range of periods and questions. George Grabowicz's study of symbolic meaning in the work of Taras Shevchenko appeared in 1982. Frank Sysyn's examination of Adam Kysil, a figure caught between Poland and Ukraine during the years 1600-1653, came out in 1985. Zenon Kohut's work on imperial absorption of the Hetmanate during the 1760s-1830s followed in 1988.

  Earlier in the institute's life, a 1977 pamphlet addressed Nestor Makhno and the Ukrainian Revolution. A 1978 bibliography compiled by George Liber and Anna Mostovych documented nonconformity and dissent in the Ukrainian SSR between 1955 and 1975. Paul R. Magocsi edited a symposium on the Ukrainian experience in the United States, published in 1989.

• 5. February 2022

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  On the 25th of February 2022, as Russian forces pushed into Ukraine, HURI issued a formal statement. It declared opposition to the Russian military invasion and expressed support for Ukraine and Ukrainians.

  The timing placed the institute's founding logic in sharp relief. The Ukrainian-American activists who organized in the mid-1950s had been motivated by the suppression of Ukrainian culture inside Soviet Ukraine. Nearly seven decades later, the institute that grew from their effort was responding to an open military assault on the country itself.

  The Harvard Ukrainian Studies journal, which had been publishing since 1977, reached its 36th volume and third issue before the invasion. The accumulated record of scholarship the institute had built, through its journals, books, pamphlets, and document series, represented exactly the kind of independent documentation that the original activists had feared might disappear without deliberate effort to preserve it.