Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, Professor Emeritus

A few words about Professor Ilnytzkyj:

Professor Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj earned his MA and PhD degrees at Harvard University in Russian and Ukrainian literature, respectively.

At the University of Alberta's Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies (MLCS), he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Ukrainian literature, culture, and language. He also led a graduate seminar on Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory.

In addition to his teaching, Professor Ilnytzkyj served as Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and Area Coordinator of the Slavic Programs. He played a role as a grant adjudicator on a government committee in Ottawa. From 2001 to January 2011, he was the Editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers, and from 2013 to 2016, he edited East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

His research spanned several areas, including Modernism and the Avant-Garde, Ukrainian-Russian cultural relations, and computer-assisted text analysis.

He authored over 50 articles and the seminal book Ukrainian Futurism, 1914-1930: An Historical and Critical Study (1997), which was translated into Ukrainian in 2003. He also co-authored (with George Hawrysch) the comprehensive four-volume Concordance to the Poetic Works of Taras Shevchenko (2001) and the online Concordance to the Complete Works of Hryhorii Skovoroda (2009, with Natalia Pylypiuk and Serhii Kozakov).

Professor Ilnytzkyj's latest book is on the Ukrainian Russian-language writer Nikolai Gogol, released in 2024 by De Gruyter academic publishing.

Nikolai Gogol: Ukrainian Writer in the Empire. A Study in Identity resolves a long-debated question in Slavic Studies: Was Nikolai Gogol, the renowned 19th-century satirist, Russian or Ukrainian? Through a nuanced analysis of various arguments – historical and contemporary, from the plausible to the absurd – the book reveals that Gogol’s “Russianness” was artificially constructed by a Russian elite desperate to forge a nation from a multiethnic empire by denying Ukrainians recognition as a distinct nation.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111373263

Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies