New Director of Religion and Culture Program at CIUS

Edmonton - As of 1 February 2013, Dr. Heather Coleman is the new Director of the Research Program on Religion and Culture at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. Dr. Coleman is an historian of religion in Ukraine and Russia. She is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Imperial Russian History in the Department of History and Classics at the U of A. 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 (forthcoming). She serves as editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes.

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 U of A 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 Canadian Prairie Provinces, as well as to digitize recordings of their liturgical music.

“Under my leadership,” says Dr. Coleman, “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 meeting interested members of the community and to their engagement in these projects”.

The Religion and Culture Program was founded in 1994 as the Ukrainian Church Studies Program. It is devoted to the study of all aspects of the religious experience of Ukrainians in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora (especially in Canada), from the history and politics of religion to sacral art, architecture, and music. The Program is the site of the Bohdan Bociurkiw Library, a collection which contains many unique items and documents pertaining to the Ukrainian Church and serves as the basis for the Program’s reference library. Dr. Bociurkiw (1925-1998) was one of the “founding fathers” both of the CIUS and of the Religion and Culture Program. Every year, the Program hosts the Bohdan Bociurkiw Memorial Lecture.

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Dr. Heather Coleman