Sysyn, Frank

Sysyn, Frank [Сисин, Франк], b 27 December 1946 in Passaic, New Jersey. Historian. He graduated from Princeton University (1968), the University of London (1969), and Harvard University (PH D, 1976), taught at Harvard University (1976–85), and was an associate director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (1985–8). In 1989 he was appointed the first director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, and has served as editor-in-chief of its Hrushevsky Translation Project, which is preparing and publishing an English-language translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s ten-volume Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy. He served as an acting director of the CIUS in 1991–93 and currently serves as the head of the Toronto Office of the CIUS. He is also actively engaged with the development of the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University in New York as well as the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. A specialist on 17th-century Ukraine, Sysyn has published Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600–1653 (1985), Mykhailo Hrushevsky: Historian and National Awakener (2001), and numerous articles about the Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Khmelnytsky Uprising, early-modern Ukrainian historiography, Ukrainian religious history, and the Holodomor. He was one of the editors of the three-volume edition of the collected works of Mykhailo Zubrytsky, Zibrani tvory i materiialy (Collected Works and Materials). A Festschrift in his honor, titled Tentorium Honororum, was published in 2010.

[This article was updated in 2014.]