Dr. Frank Sysyn: Celebrating 70 Years

26 December 2016

On 27 December 2016 we will be celebrating Dr. Frank Sysyn's 70th birthday and, if we take his work on the journal "Recenzija" as a benchmark, then we will also be recognizing 45 years of academic achievement.

A native of Clifton, New Jersey, Dr. Sysyn began his scholarly career at Princeton University, completing a bachelor's degree (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1968. He received a master's degree in history from the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London in 1969. He then went to Harvard University, where Professor Omeljan Pritsak and the Ukrainian Studies Fund were working to establish an academic program in Ukrainian studies. Soon he became deeply involved in that effort, both as a doctoral student in the Department of History and as an activist and fund-raiser for the project to establish three professorships-in history, language, and literature-as well as a Ukrainian research institute. In the decade that followed, he held a number of research fellowships in the United Kingdom, Poland, and the USSR. He completed his Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation on Adam Kysil, a prominent seventeeth-century political figure. Over the following years, Dr. Sysyn taught as an assistant professor and then associate professor of history at Harvard, administered the Ukrainian program of the Harvard Summer School, became associate editor of the journal "Harvard Ukrainian Studies," continued his research projects in the U.S. and abroad, wrote numerous scholarly works, and served as associate director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).

In 1989, Dr. Sysyn came to Canada to join the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) as director of the new Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the University of Alberta. In that post he founded and continues to administer a number of research and publications programs. He serves as editor-in-chief of the centre's major undertaking, the Hrushevsky Translation Project, which is producing a complete English version of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's multivolume "History of Ukraine-Rus'." In addition, Dr. Sysyn heads the Peter Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Ukraine, which supports an extensive teaching, research, and publication program in Ukraine, and he was instrumental in obtaining funding and organizing the Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium.

As a historian of Ukraine, Dr. Sysyn has done pioneering work on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Adam Kysil, the Khmelnytsky era, and the political culture of early modern Ukraine. In fact, Dr. Sysyn has shaped and defined the whole field of early modern Ukrainian history as well as central and eastern European history. This shaping of the field occurred not only through Dr. Sysyn's personal scholarship but also through his teaching, mentoring, and the encouragement and support of other scholars. But Dr. Sysyn's impact on the whole field of Ukrainian studies goes beyond his own research and the fostering of individual scholars, for he helped shape the major institutions devoted to Ukrainian scholarship. Whether at HURI, at CIUS, the Petro Jacyk Program at the University of Toronto, and also the Ukrainian studies program at Columbia University, Dr Sysyn has made a major contribution as to how these institutions have been organized.

Currently, Dr. Sysyn is at the height of his academic career. As we-friends, colleagues, and staff members-congratulate him on his remarkable achievements thus far we also look forward to even greater feats in the future. We wish Frank robust health, good humor, happiness, and many, many more productive years. Многая літа!