Dominique Arel named to Chair of Ukrainian Studies in Ottawa (08/24/03)

Dominique Arel named to Chair of Ukrainian Studies in Ottawa

OTTAWA - As of July of this year the first chairholder was appointed to the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Dominique Arel will hold this teaching position as associate professor in the department of political science, and a research appointment for five years, after which he may renew his chair position.

Dr. Arel adds this new appointment to a position which he has held since 2001 as co-chair of the Title VIII-funded ongoing workshop "Multicultural Legacies in Russia and Ukraine" at the Kennan Institute in Washington.

According to the University of Ottawa Bulletin, the Chair of Ukrainian Studies was formally established on February 3, 1993, and launched on November 17, 1995, with Ramon J. Hnatyshyn, former Governor General of Canada, as honorary patron.

Because the University of Ottawa is one of the few officially bilingual institutions, the chair has three official languages: English, French and Ukrainian. The chair's academic activities are directed by the Advisory Executive Committee (AEC), while the Executive Subcommittee of the AEC handles all of the chair's programs and activities.

Dr. Arel, who received his Ph.D. in political science in 1993 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializes in contemporary Ukrainian studies. While Dr. Arel is chairholder he will help further the goals of the chair and its holder, and continue to publish the informative bulletin for academics called the Ukraine List.

Dr. Arel will also retain an active research affiliation, which began in 1996, with the Watson Institute at Brown University in Providence, R.I., as adjunct associate professor in order to continue his multi-year census project on Ukraine and Russia.

Through his studies of modern Ukraine, the Bulletin noted, Dr. Arel "has played a central role in stimulating the growth of social science research on contemporary Ukraine, and in the study of national identity and nationalism in the former Soviet Union."

Since 1998 to this day Dr. Arel has been instrumental in turning the annual convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) into the premier scholarly gathering worldwide on nationalities issues, as well as the most significant annual event in Ukrainian studies. He helped organize ASN conferences in Paris and Bologna (2001, 2002), two conferences on contemporary Ukraine at Yale University (1999, 2000) and a symposium on the Ukrainian census at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2003).

Aside from being a professor at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Arel also taught at McGill, Wesleyan, Brown and Yale. He has been given research grants by the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the Mellon Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The Russian Research Center at Harvard University and Columbia University's Harriman Institute awarded Dr. Arel post-doctoral fellowships, while Dr. Arel received a pre-doctoral fellowship from Duke University (East-West Center). Dr. Arel has written several journal articles and book chapters, and is completing a manuscript on the language question in Ukraine.

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