From the Director
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The initiator and first director of the Religion and Culture program was Dr. Serhii Plokhy, now Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of History at Harvard University. I stepped into the directorship to replace him.
I am giving the program a special focus on Ukrainian sacral art, architecture, and music. Two large projects are in the works:
1) A series of conferences intended to integrate art historians and musicologists from Ukraine into international scholarship. The first of these will be held 11-12 September 2009 and will be jointly sponsored with the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. We are bringing about ten Ukrainian scholars to Edmonton for a conference entitled “Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy.” The conference will include a Ukrainian-language session. We will publish the best papers as a book. [link to the preliminary program of the September conference]
2) Sanctuary: The Spiritual Heritage Documentation Project. This is a project to preserve a visual record of the Ukrainian churches and other sacral monuments of the three prairie provinces, also to digitize recordings of their liturgical music. On 26 January 2008 a planning conference was held at the University of Alberta. [link to the Sanctuary Project]
I look forward to community engagement in these projects.
John-Paul Himka
