Peter and Doris Kule create endowment to fund Ukrainian Diaspora studies

The well-known philanthropists, Drs. Peter and Doris Kule, have given a lead donation to create an endowment at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in support of the Ukrainian Diaspora Studies Initiative. This project will be under the auspices of the Ukrainian Canadian Program at CIUS and will be headed by Dr. Serge Cipko, an historian who has devoted much time to researching and studying Ukrainians living abroad. Dr. Cipko’s book on Ukrainians in Argentina will be issued by CIUS Press in 2007. Peter and Doris Kule hope that their $100,000 donation will encourage others to contribute to this important area.

The Drs. Peter and Doris Kule Endowment for the Study of the Ukrainian Diaspora will be used for research, publishing, and other scholarly and educational activities specifically dealing with the Ukrainian Diaspora. As noted by Jars Balan, “the Ukrainian Diaspora Studies Initiative will provide an international dimension to the work of the Ukrainian Canadian Program by enabling comparative analyses to be made of the evolution of Ukrainian communities outside of Canada. In recent years there has been a significant growth in Diaspora studies at universities around the world, stimulated largely through the impact of globalization and the shrinking of the planet through modern travel and communications. So expanding the horizons of the Ukrainian Canadian Program is both timely and appropriate.”

The Kules have previously given generous donations to the Ukrainian Research and Development Center at Grant MacEwan College; the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Saint Paul University in Ottawa; and to support Ukrainian folklore studies at the University of Alberta — where the Canadian Center for Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography was recently renamed the Peter and Doris Kule Center for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore.

The field of Ukrainian studies will greatly benefit from this latest gift. According to the Ukrainian World Congress (http://ukrainianworld- congress.org), there are approximately 20 million people of Ukrainian origin living outside the borders of Ukraine. Indeed, as Ukraine’s own population, which currently stands at 47 million, has been declining over the past decade or so, the Ukrainian Diaspora has correspondingly enlarged because of large-scale emigration. Countries that before 1991 received little Ukrainian immigration, such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece, are today major centers of Ukrainian settlement.

The work of the Ukrainian Diaspora Studies Initiative will reflect these new trends and realities as it balances research on long-established Ukrainian communities with studies of emerging areas of Ukrainian settlement. The Initiative intends to develop a network of scholars and to form partnerships with programs and centers in Canada and abroad, including the growing number of Ukrainian Diaspora studies institutes in Ukraine. In order to help realize these objectives, one of the planned projects of the Initiative is to organize an international scholarly conference on the Ukrainian Diaspora.