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. Under his successor, Dr. John-Paul Himka, the program focused on Ukrainian sacral art, architecture, and music. Two major projects in this respect were an international conference titled, “Eastern Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy,” held at the University of Alberta in September 2009, and 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. Under my leadership, the program will continue to support the Sanctuary project, while also encouraging exploration of religion in contemporary Ukrainian life on the one hand and the relationship between religion and region in Ukraine past and present, on the other.
I look forward to community engagement in these projects.
Heather Coleman
