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Historical Encounters Special Event 2015: Speaker Bios

Jars Balan

Jars Balan is Coordinator of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles on Ukrainian Canadian history, literature and theatre, and an illustrated history of Ukrainians in Canada published by Oxford University Press. He is currently involved in initiating and conducting research on the Ukrainian community in Canada during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. He will be reading an unpublished paper by the late Robert J. Keyserlingk of the University of Ottawa.

Aurel Braun

Aurel Braun is currently a Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is also a Center Associate of the Davis Center at Harvard University. Additionally he is a senior member of the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and of the Centre for International Studies, and a Fellow and Senator of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Between July 2012 and June 2015 he was a Visiting Professor teaching in the Department of Government, Harvard University. Professor Braun has twice been appointed a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In March 2009, the Federal Cabinet via a Governor-in-Council appointment made Professor Braun the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Rights & Democracy) for a three-year term. Professor Braun has published extensively on communist affairs and strategic studies with a special focus on the problems of the transformation of the socialist systems in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. He is also a specialist in international law. He is the author and/or editor of several books. His latest book is NATO-Russia Relations in the 21st Century. His forthcoming book is on Russia, the West and Arctic Security.

Yitzhak Brudny

Yitzhak Brudny holds the Jay and Leonie Darwin Chair in Soviet and Eastern European Studies and is Professor of Political Science and History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of interest and expertise include: Nationalism, Democratization, Russian History, Russian Politics, Soviet & Post-Soviet Politics, Russian Intellectual History and the Politics of Identities. His Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Harvard U Press, 1998) and Why Ukraine Is Not Russia: Hegemonic National Identity and Democracy in Russia and Ukraine (co-authored with E. Finkel, Journal of Eastern European Politics and Societies, 2011) are considered classics on the stated subjects.

Janusz Bugajski

Janusz Bugajski is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington DC and host of television shows broadcast in the Balkans. Bugajski has authored 19 books on Europe, Russia, and trans-Atlantic relations and is a columnist for several media outlets. His recent books include Conflict Zones: North Caucasus and Western Balkans Compared (2014), Return of the Balkans: Challenges to European Integration and U.S. Disengagement (2013), Georgian Lessons: Conflicting Russian and Western Interests in the Wider Europe (2010), Dismantling the West: Russia’s Atlantic Agenda italicize (2009), America’s New European Allies (2009); and Expanding Eurasia: Russia’s European Ambitions italicize 2008). He is currently working on a book entitled Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks, italicize with Margarita Assenova.

Serge Cipko

Serge Cipko is Coordinator of the Ukrainian Diaspora Studies Initiative at the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre, CIUS. Dr. Cipko is the author, co-author, or co-editor of five books, including his Ukrainians in Argentina, 1897–1950: The Making of a Community), and One-Way Ticket: The Soviet Return-to-the-Homeland Campaign, 1955-1960 (2008). He is currently writing a book on the subject of Canada and the Ukrainian Famine. He has conducted extensive research on the coverage given in the mainstream Canadian press to Ukraine and the Ukrainian community in Canada during the Second World War.

Ariel Cohen

Ariel Cohen is a well-known international expert on Ukrainian, Russian, Eurasian, European and Middle Eastern foreign, security and economic affairs; U.S. and global energy security; terrorism; organized crime and other political risk factors. Dr. Cohen is presently Director of the Center for Energy, Natural Resources and Geopolitics at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security; concurrently, he is a Non Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States. For many years previous, he served as Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Security at the Heritage Foundation, working closely with Congressmen and Congressional staff members and cabinet-level foreign decision makers. He has over 20 years experience in research project management, government relations/political public relations, journalistic writing, and broadcasting.

Heather Coleman

Heather Coleman is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Imperial Russian History in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. She is currently writing a book titled, Holy Kyiv: Priests, Communities, and Nationality in Imperial Russia, 1800-1917. She is author of Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 (2005), co-editor (with Mark D. Steinberg) of Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (2007), and editor of Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Sourcebook on Lived Religion (2014). She serves as editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes.

Derek Fraser

Derek Fraser is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Global Studies, Adjunct Professor for Political Science, both at the University of Victoria, and adviser to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. He has supported democratization in Ukraine, given lectures on various topics, organized or contributed to academic and foreign policy conferences, notably on Eastern Europe, Ukraine, failed states, the European Union, and China. Derek Fraser had a long career with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. He served as Canada’s envoy in Ukraine from 1998 to 2001, in Greece from 1995 to 1998, and in Hungary from 1988 to 1993. Ambassador Fraser has also worked at Canadian missions in Vietnam, Germany, Russia and Belgium. At headquarters, he was variously Acting Director General, Cultural Affairs and Higher Education Bureau, Director at different times of the East and West European Divisions, and Deputy Director of the Latin American Division.

Oleksandr Gladun

Oleksandr Gladun is Deputy Director at the Institute of Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Dr. Gladun’s research interests include population statistics, historical demography, population census, and population sample survey. He defended his doctoral thesis in Statistics in 2009. His publications on historical demography and population losses include: Romaniuk, A., and O. Gladun. 2015, “Demographic Trends in Ukraine: Past, Present, and Future,” Population and Development Review 41(2): 315–337; Gladun, O.M. 2013a. “Otsinky hypotetychnykh vtrat naselennia Ukrainy za period 1897–2012” [Estimates of hypothetical population losses in Ukraine for the period 1897–2012], ­Demography and Social Economy 2(20): 147–154 (in Ukrainian).

Paul Goble

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the Euro College of the University of Tartu in Estonia. While there, he launched the “Window on Eurasia” series. Prior to joining the faculty there in 2004, he served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Lubomyr Hajda

Lubomyr Hajda is Associate Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A historian with a Ph.D. from Harvard University, he has taught at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. From 1978 to 1992 he held the position of Academic Coordinator of Harvard’s Master’s program in Soviet studies. Among his publications are the entry on Ukrainian history in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th ed.), The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (with Mark Beissinger), and Ukraine in the World: Studies in the International Relations and Security Structure of a Newly Independent State.

Bohdan Harasymiw

Bohdan Harasymiw is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Calgary, and Acting Coordinator, Centre for Political and Regional Studies at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. Born in Saskatchewan, he studied at the Royal Military College and Queen’s University (both in Kingston, Ontario) as well as at the University of Alberta, before completing his doctorate at the University of Toronto. He joined the University of Calgary in 1969, where he continued teaching until his retirement in 2005. Since retirement, he has participated as an election observer with the Canadian mission in Ukraine in 2006, 2007, and 2010. In 1989-91, he was seconded to the federal government in Ottawa as a Strategic Analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Pekka Holopainen

Pekka Holopainen is a retired colonel of the Finnish Army. During his 33-year military career he served in several chief of staff and commander level posts. His international experience includes the post of the Head of the Force Capability Unit in the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, Chief of the Civil-Military Division, KFOR, as well as the Deputy Head of Mission and Deputy Chief Military Observer, UNMOGIP. In October 2013, after being retired from the Defence Forces, Colonel Holopainen was selected as the Executive Director, Oak Leaf League for the War Veterans´Heritage (Finland).

Vladyslav Hrynevych

Vladyslav Hrynevych has been an academic associate of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since 1988; he is presently Senior Researcher of Ukrainian History tasked with studying the Stalinist Era, World World II and the politics of memory. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kviv National University in 1988, he was awarded a Kandydat Istorychnykh Nauk in 1994 and advanced to Doktor Politychnykh Nauk in 2007. Professional honors have included fellowship study through the Shklar program at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and through the Jacyk program at CIUS (Universities of Alberta and Toronto), a Fulbright-Kennan scholarship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center (Washington D.C.), a fellowship to work at The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam University, and inclusion in a professional exchange project, “U.S. Perspectives on Holocaust and Holodomor Studies,” developed under the framework of the International Visitor Leadership Program by US Government.

Yaroslav Hrytsak

Yaroslav Hrytsak is Professor of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University (L’viv, Ukraine) and the director of the Institute for Historical Research at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University. He has taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Central European University. He is the author of numerous publications on modern Ukrainian and East European history and has won various Ukrainian and foreign awards for academic achievement and public service.

Robert H. Keyserlingk

Robert H. Keyserlingk (1933-2009) was a professor of History at the University of Ottawa. He completed his B.A. at Loyola College in Montreal; an M.A., at the University of Toronto; and his Ph.D., at London University, in 1965. In the 1950s he served as a Foreign Service Officer in Canada’s Citizenship and Immigration Department stationed in Germany, an experience which informed the research that went into his unpublished paper, “The Role of Postwar Immigration Security Screening in Canadian War Crimes Inquires.” Among his publications are the following books: Media Manipulation: The Press and Bismarck in Imperial Germany (1977); Austria in WWII: An Anglo-American Dilemma (1988); and Breaking Ground: the 1956 Hungarian Refugee Movement to Canada (1993).

Hakan Kirimli

Hakan Kirimli is Associate Professor and Director of the Center of RU Studies at Ankara’s Bilkent University. He teaches Russian and Soviet history, with particular emphasis on the Tatars and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea region as well as a strong focus on the Turkic peoples of the Volga-Ural region and the Caucasus. He is the author of a large number of articles and books, including, most prominently, National Movements and National Identity Among the Crimean Tatars (1905-1916).

Bohdan Klid

Bohdan Klid is Assistant Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. He has written articles on Ukrainian historiography and on contemporary popular music and politics in Ukraine. Dr. Klid is co-compiler and co-editor (with Alexander J. Motyl) of The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto: CIUS Press, 2012).

Zenon E. Kohut

Zenon E. Kohut is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alberta and was the director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (1994-2012); during his tenure at the stated institutions, he specialized in the history of Ukraine, Ukrainian-Russian relations, and questions of early-modern political culture and identity. Dr. Kohut is the author of Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate (Cambridge, 1988, Ukrainian translation 1996), Korinnia identychnosty: Studiï z rann’omodernoï ta modernoï istoriï Ukraïny (remove space Kyiv, remove space 2004), Making Ukraine: Studies on Political Culture, Historical Narrative, and Identity (Edmonton, 2011) and remove space co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (2005, revised edition 2013).

Volodymyr Kravchenko

Volodymyr Kravchenko is Professor in the Department of History and Classics and Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton. His main fields of interest include the history of Ukrainian historical writing, historical legacy, and the Ukrainian-Russian borderland. Recent works include: “Ukraine: History Confronts Geography,” in: Ilkka Liikanen, James W. Scott, Tiina Sotkasiira, eds., The EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood: Migration, Borders and Regional Stability (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies), to be published in 2016; remove space “Ukrainian Historical Writing in North America during the Cold War,” East and Central European History Writing in Exile 1939-1989, Maria Zadencka, Andrejs Plakans & Andreas Lawaty, eds. Brill/Rodopi, 2015, pp. 93-119; “Ukraine faces its Soviet past: history vs. policy vs. memory,” Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past, Jie-Hyun Lim, Barbara Walker, Peter Lambert, eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp.87-119; Ukraïna, imperii͡a, Rosii͡a: vybrani statti z modernoï istoriï ta istoriohrafiï remove space [Ukraine, Empire, Russia: Selected Articles on Modern History and Historiography; in Ukrainian] 542 pp. Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011.

Svitlana Krys

Svitlana Krys is Assistant Professor and Drs. Peter and Doris Kule Chair of Ukrainian Community and International Development at MacEwan University (Edmonton, AB), where she also concurrently serves as the Director of Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre. She holds a PhD from the University of Alberta (2011). Her present research focuses on the development of the Gothic genre in Ukrainian literature, and she is currently working on her book manuscript, tentatively titled “At the Origins of the Ukrainian Gothic.” Dr. Krys is also part of the “Democratic Reform of the Government of Ukraine” project, funded by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (University of Alberta), where she participates in the cluster on nationalities, culture, and language policies. She serves on the editorial board of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies and on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Association of Slavists. Her scholarship has been recognized by the American Association for Ukrainian Studies.

Valerii Kuchynskyi

Valerii Kuchynskyi occupied important posts both at home and abroad during the course of his professional career in the Ukrainian Foreign Service, which spanned a period of three and a half decades. His last assignment was to serve as Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations 2000-2006. Since January 2007, Ambassador Kuchynskyi has been engaged as Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at SIPA, Columbia University. He has been teaching various courses dealing with the United Nations, Ukraine’s Foreign Policy and current political situation in the country. He has been active in organizing and participating in numerous panels, round tables, conferences and other fora on international relations and foreign policy.

Taras Kuzio

Taras Kuzio is a Toronto-based leading international expert on contemporary Ukrainian and post-communist politics, nationalism and European integration at the Centre for Political and Regional Studies, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations (CTR), School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. Taras Kuzio has been a political consultant to governments and legal and business consultant to the private sector on legal and economic questions. In 2010-2012, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Slavic Research Centre, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan and an inaugural Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

Marius Laurinavičius

Marius Laurinavičius is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis; he comes to the new posting from his position as Senior Policy Analyst in the Policy Analysis and Research Division of the Eastern European Study Centre. Prior to joining EESC, Mr. Laurinavičius worked for the largest Lithuanian media group “Lietuvos Rytas” for almost 22 year. During that time, he gained a well deserved reputation as Lithuanian media’s leading foreign affairs expert. He is an alumnus of IIRPS VU. The foremost areas of his interest include developments in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

Zuzanna Lorek

Zuzanna Lorek is a native of Głogów, Poland. She completed a B.A. in English Philology at the University of Zielona Góra, specializing in translations and language teaching methodology. After graduation she moved to Canada, where she is now working towards a degree in Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her main interests include social inequality, conflict and conflict resolution.

George O. Liber

George O. Liber is Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934. Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film remove space (British Film Institute, 2002); remove space and Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954 (University of Toronto Press, February 2016). He is also the co-compiler of Nonconformity and Dissent in the Ukrainian SSR, 1955-1975: An Annotated Bibliography (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1978).

Janusz Onyszkiewicz

Janusz Onyszkiewicz is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Centre for Democratic Transition; concurrently he serves as co-head of the Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Forum. After the fall of communism in 1989, Mr. Onyszkiewicz, already a renowned mathematician, a Member of the Polish Sejm and served all subsequent terms from May 1989 until 2001. A legendary Solidarity activist, he served as Minister of Defence of Poland twice: in the cabinets of Hanna Suchocka (1992-1993) and Jerzy Buzek (1997-2000), and from January 2007 until mid-2009 was vice-chairman of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee [PL-Group of Liberals and Democrats of Europe].

Roman Petryshyn

Roman Petryshyn is an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, where he is researching the reform of the university system in Ukraine. From 1987 to 2015 he was Director of the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre (URDC) at MacEwan University. He holds a PhD in the Sociology of Race and Ethnic Relations from the University of Bristol, England and a Diploma in Social Sciences from the University of Birmingham, as well as a Masters and Bachelor degree in Clinical psychology from Lakehead University. Dr. Petryshyn edited Changing Realities: Social Trends Among Ukrainian Canadians and has authored several articles about international development projects carried out by URDC remove space in Ukraine.

Herman Pirchner

Herman Pirchner, in 1982, became the founding President of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), a non-profit public policy organization headquartered in Washington, DC. Under his leadership, AFPC has hosted the Washington visits of hundreds of foreign officials, ranging from the Prime Minister of Malta to the Prime Minister of Russia; conducted hundreds of briefings for members of Congress and their staffs; and organized dozens of fact-finding missions abroad for current and former senior American officials. AFPC’s publication program includes the sponsorship of numerous articles, monographs and books. In recent years, AFPC authors have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal (including the European and Asian editions), the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and the New York Post, among other prominent newspapers and magazines. During the same period, AFPC scholarly articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as The National Interest, Current History, Middle East Quarterly, Problems of Post-Communism, and The Journal of International Security Affairs.

Jan M. Piskorski

Jan M. Piskorski is Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Szczecin, and a member of several research institute boards and editorial boards, including Przegląd Historyczny (Warsaw). He has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Halle, Mainz and Osnabrück in Germany, chair of the Advisory Board of the Humanity in Action Poland Foundation, member of the editorial board of German History (London), member of the Advisory Board of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and, for over a decade, director of the PTPN Publishing House in Poznań. He specializes principally in the history of colonisation and migration, the history of civilization, the history of East Central Europe and the history of historiography. He has published in Austria, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, India, Spain, Switzerland and the USA. He has received many awards, including awards from the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (2010) and Polish Ministry for Higher Education and Research for the book “Expellees. Forced Migration and Refugees in Europe of 20th Century” (in Polish 2010, in German as “Die Verjagten. Flucht und Vertreibung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Siedler Verlag 2013).

Omelian Rudnytskyi

Omelian Rudnytskyi is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His research interests include historical demography, population projection, and mortality. Dr. Rudnytskyi was involved in the research project on the GIS-based Atlas of the Holodomor undertaken by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Currently he is engaged in efforts to accurately estimate population losses in 1933 at the district level with Dr. Wolowyna and local Ukrainian demographers as well as work with Dr. Olksandr Gladun concerning Ukrainian losses during World War II and immediate aftermath.

Yuri Shapoval

Yuri Shapoval is presently the Chief Research Associate at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Institute of Political and Ethno-national Studies; he completed his undergraduate work at the Shevchenko National University in Kyiv in 1975, attained the rank of Doktor Istorychnykh Nauk in 1994 and the rank of Professor in 2000. Dr Shapoval is the author of over 500 published studies, amongst them several on the Holodomor and a number printed worldwide. He was co-editor, co-author of the foreword and author of a key article in the acclaimed 2001 work: Командири великого голоду/Commanders of the Holodomor. He and Polish colleagues co-edited and co-authored two volumes dealing with documents in the intelligence archives of Poland and the USSR for the 1930s that focused on the Great Famine of 1933 in a larger work put out in Poland and by the Institute for National Remembrance: “Голодомор в Україні, 1932-1933” (Holodomor. The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933) Kyiv-Warsaw 2008.

James Sherr

James Sherr is an Associate Fellow and former head, between 2008 and 2010, of the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, more commonly known as Chatham House. He was a member of the Social Studies Faculty of Oxford University from 1993 to 2012; a fellow of the Conflict Studies Research Centre of the UK Ministry of Defence from 1995 to 2008; and director of studies of the Royal United Services Institute (1983-85). He has published extensively on Soviet and Russian military, security and foreign policy, as well as energy security, the Black Sea region and Ukraine’s effort to deal with Russia, the West and its own domestic problems.

Myroslav Shkandrij

Myroslav Shkandrij graduated from the Universities of Cambridge (BA) and Toronto (PhD), and now works as Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of several books on Ukrainian literature and cultural politics, including Jews in Literature: Representation and Identity (Yale University Press, 2009). His Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Myth, Ideology and Literature, 1929-56 was recently published by Yale University Press He has also written on the avant-garde and has curated three exhibitions on the art of the early twentieth century, the latest being Propaganda and Slogans: The Political Poster in Soviet Ukraine, 1919-1921, which is currently on display at the Ukrainian Museum, New York. He has translated several Ukrainian authors into English, notably Mykola Khvylovy’s The Cultural Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets (1986) and Serhy Zhadan’s Depeche Mode (2013).

Vladimir Socor

Vladimir Socor is a Senior Fellow of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation and its flagship publication, Eurasia Daily Monitor (1995 to date), where he writes analytical articles on a daily basis. An internationally recognized expert on the former Soviet-ruled countries in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, he covers Russian and Western policies, focusing on energy, regional security issues, Russian foreign affairs, secessionist conflicts, and NATO policies and programs. Mr. Socor is a frequent speaker at U.S. and European policy conferences and think-tank institutions; as well as a regular guest lecturer at the NATO Defense College and at Harvard University’s National Security Program’s Black Sea Program. He is also a frequent contributor to edited volumes. Mr. Socor was previously an analyst with the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (1983-1994).

Vlad Spânu

Vlad Spânu is President of the Moldova Foundation. He was a senior Moldovan diplomat in the 1992-2001 period, holding positions of the Head of Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Division for Regional and International Economic Cooperation (1992-1994, 1997-1998), Counselor (1994-1997) Minister Counselor and Deputy Chief of Mission (1998-2001), Charge d’Affaires (1998) at the Moldovan embassy in Washington, DC. As head of the Moldava Foundation, Mr. Spanu has become a prolific writer, authoring several books and dozens of article touching an all aspects of Moldovan history.

Frank E. Sysyn

Frank E. Sysyn is Director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, and editor in chief of the Hrushevsky Translation Project, the English translation of the multi-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’. He is a member of the executive committee of the newly-established Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) at CIUS. A specialist in Ukrainian and Polish history, Dr. Sysyn is the author of Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600-1653 (1985), Mykhailo Hrushevsky: Historian and National Awakener (2001), and studies on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Ukrainian historiography, early modern Ukrainian political culture, and the Holodomor. He is also co-author, with Serhii Plokhii, of Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (2003).

Lori Thorlakson

Lori Thorlakson is Associate Professor and Jean Monnet Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta. She is also the founding director of the European Union Centre of Excellence at the University of Alberta. Dr. Thorlakson’s research focuses on comparative federalism, political parties and the European Union.

Mark Von Hagen

Mark Von Hagen teaches the history of Eastern Europe and Russia, with a focus on Ukrainian-Russian relations, at Arizona State University, after teaching 24 years at Columbia University, where he also chaired the history department and directed the Harriman Institute. At the Harriman Institute, Dr. Von Hagen developed Ukrainian studies in the humanities and social sciences. He was elected President of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2002 and presided over the Congress in Donetsk in 2005. He also served as President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (2009). Among his recent publications are introduction to the co-edited volume, “The Entangled Eastern Front in the First World War,” in Empire and Nationalism at War, co-edited with Eric Lohr, Vera Tolz, and Alexander Semenov (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 2014), volume in the series Russia’s Great War and Revolution; “The Entangled Eastern Front and the Making of the Ukrainian State: A Forgotten Peace, A Forgotten War and Nation-Building, 1917-1918” (forthcoming, Vienna, Austrian Academy of Science).

David M. Wineroither

David M. Wineroither is Austrian visiting professor at the University of Alberta’s political science department. He serves as member of the advisory board of the Wirth Institute of Austrian and Central European Studies. Specializing in comparative European politics, he is the author and co-editor of seven books and journal special issues; publications have appeared in English, German, Italian and Hungarian.

Myroslav Yurkevich

Myroslav Yurkevich is senior editor, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. He has participated in the CIUS project to translate Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’ (in 12 volumes), since its inception, serving as managing editor of five volumes. He was the lead author of Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (Lanham, MD, 2005; rev. ed. 2013) and has been an editor of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

Walter Zaryckyj

Walter Zaryckyj is Executive Director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR). The said Center has been designed to provide a set of “informational platforms” or venues for senior-level representatives of the political, economic, security, diplomatic and cultural/academic establishments of the United States and Ukraine to exchange views on a wide range of issues of mutual interest and to showcase what has been referred to as a “burgeoning relationship of notable geopolitical import” between the two nations. Dr. Zaryckyj completed his undergraduate and graduate work at Columbia University.