New Appointments at the 

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies

Dr. Roman I. Shiyan has recently been appointed assistant director for administration at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). He continues to work as coordinator of the Institute’s Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine.

Dr. Shiyan has been with CIUS for twelve years and possesses extensive research and administrative experience. As the new assistant director for administration, he joins the Institute’s senior management team and is responsible for providing administrative leadership and coordination of internal operations and public events, as well as facilitating the work of the Council of Directors of Research Programs (CDRP) at CIUS.

Dr. Shiyan earned his M.A. in History at Arkansas State University (1995) and his Ph.D. in Ukrainian Folklore at the University of Alberta (2006). His scholarly interests involve topics related to the history and culture of early modern Ukrainian society during the “Ruin” (1650s–70s), as well as social and other dynamics on the southern Ukrainian frontier in the eighteenth century.

Dr. Taras Kuzio has been appointed a research associate of the Centre for Political and Regional Studies at CIUS. 

Dr. Kuzio received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Sussex, an M.A. in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of London, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Birmingham, England. He is a top specialist in contemporary Ukrainian and post-communist politics.

Dr. Kuzio is a member of the editorial advisory board of Geopolitics, History, and International Relations and Demokratizatsiya. He is the author and editor of fourteen books, five think-tank monographs, and many book chapters and scholarly articles on post-communist and Ukrainian politics and European studies. He has guest-edited six special issues of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Society, Nationalities Papers, and the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics. 

Dr. Kuzio’s new book, Commissars into Oligarchs: A Contemporary History of Ukraine, which will be published by the University of Toronto Press in the autumn of 2014, was written when he was a visiting fellow at the Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, Japan, and at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. 

Dr. Kuzio’s affiliation with CIUS as a research associate for the next three years has been made possible by a grant from the Ukrainian Studies Fund. It is expected that Dr. Kuzio will take an active role in the Centre for Political and Regional Studies and will enhance the Institute’s research on contemporary Ukraine. His new research project focuses on the Donetsk clan in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine, its political culture, and sources of public support for the Party of Regions.

PHOTOS

1 - Taras Kuzio

2 - Roman Shiyan