Dmytro Shtohryn may have retired as a professor at Illinois in 1995, but his commitment to the university and the field of Ukrainian studies remained as vibrant and meaningful as the Ukrainian paintings hanging on the walls of his home.
Prof. Shtohryn (who recently passed away) and his wife, Eustachia, lived in Champaign since 1960, when he turned down a professional librarianship position at Harvard to join Laurence Miller, professor of library administration and the first head of the Slavic and East European Library, and the late Ralph Fisher, professor of history and the first director of the Russian and East European Center (later renamed the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (REEEC), in their quest to teach and expand the Slavic and East European collections at Illinois. The native of Ukraine is credited with establishing Ukrainian studies as a discipline at Illinois.
Their daughter, Dr. Liudoslava (Liuda) Shtohryn, has honored her father’s career by establishing the Dmytro Shtohryn Endowment in Ukrainian Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Illinois. The endowment for the department will be used for conferences, symposia, individual lectures and other learning opportunities on the topic of Ukrainian studies.
“There will be a number of symposiums and lectures not only covering the literature and language, but also Ukrainian culture, history and so forth,” Shtohryn said. “The endowment will also be giving money to the Program of Ukrainian Studies in the REEEC and its unique institution, the Summer Research Lab on Russia and East European Countries, and so maybe even next year we will have some papers on Ukrainian topics through the endowment.”
The opening of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at Illinois in 1959 caught Prof. Shtohryn’s eye. He joined the faculty at Illinois in 1960 as the Cold War was heating up.
During his 35 years at the university, Prof. Shtohryn, who served in the Slavic and East European Library (SEEL), was one of its key members who built the Ukrainian program from the ground up, obtaining a collection that includes hard copies, microfilm and other forms of published materials.
When he began his work at the university, there were about 7,000 books devoted to East European and Slavic studies at Illinois. Today the university boasts over half a million holdings, and is one of the largest collections of Slavic and East European resources in the country. Its Ukrainian collection might be recognized as the largest one west of the Library of Congress. In fact, it is rivaled only by Harvard, Columbia, the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Scholars come to Illinois from across the world each summer to conduct research at the REEEC’s Summer Research Laboratory.
In 1995, Dmytro and Eustachia Shtohryn established an endowment at the University of Illinois Foundation to further enrich the collection he’d been so pivotal in creating.
During his work at the SEEL, Prof. Shtohryn taught a course on Ukrainian language and, with Prof. Fisher, a course on the history of Ukraine. In the 1970s he established courses on Ukrainian literature in translation and later a course on Ukrainian culture, and thus taught a multitude of classes until 2000.
In the 1980s he organized, with REEEC sponsorship, the Ukrainian Research Program which organized and conducted (within the framework of the Summer Research Lab) 27 (including 25 annual) international conferences on Ukrainian subjects. From 1982 to 2009 those scholarly meetings were attended by approximately 2,500 participants, including 743 speakers and discussants from 24 countries in five continents.
Besides his library work and teaching Ukrainian courses in the 1970s, Prof. Shtohryn was elected to the University Senate. For several years, he was visiting professor of Ukrainian literature at the University of Ottawa, the Ukrainian Free University in Munich and the Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome.
He has authored and edited five books in English and Ukrainian, and was editor and member of editorial boards for five English and Ukrainian scholarly periodicals. He is author of nearly 60 articles on American and Slavic librarianship and Ukrainian culture, especially Ukrainian literature.
In the introduction to prominent Ukrainian scholar Jaroslav Rozumnyj’s “Twentieth Century Ukrainian Literature: Essays in Honor of Dmytro Shtohryn,” the author declares, “For over 40 years, the Ukrainian presence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been synonymous with Dmytro Shtohryn.”
And with the newest endowment from his daughter, Prof. Shtohryn’s impact will be even deeper for years to come.
To help create a vibrant culture of learning for students through the Dmytro Shtohryn Endowment in Ukrainian Studies readers may e-mail [email protected].
Samantha Jones Toal is affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois.