Ševčenko, Ihor

Ševčenko, Ihor (Шевченко, Ігор), b 10 February 1922 in Radość, Poland, d 26 December 2009 in Cambridge, Mass, United States. Byzantine scholar and pedagogue; foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since 1991. A graduate of Charles University in Prague (1945) and the University of Leuven in Belgium (1949), from 1949 he taught in the United States at the University of California, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and (from 1965) Harvard University. In 1973 he became an associate director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He was a founding editor of Harvard Ukrainian Studies. His essays were published in the collections Society and Intellectual Life in Late Byzantium (1981), Ideology, Letters, and Culture in the Byzantine World (1982), and Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (1991). He was the author of the book Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (1996) and wrote numerous articles about relations between Byzantium and Kyivan Rus’. His translation of George Orwell's Animal Farm into Ukrainian (1947) was the first foreign-language translation of that work. A festschrift in Ševčenko's honor, titled Okeanos, was published as a special issue of Harvard Ukrainian Studies in 1983; another two-volume festschrift prepared on the occassion of his eightieth birthday appeared as two issues of the journal Palaeoslavica in 2002. A book of Ukrainian-language interviews conducted with Ševčenko by Lidia Stefanowska was published in Lviv in 2024.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zakorzeniony kosmopolita. Ihor Szewczenko w rozmowie z Łukaszem Jasiną (Lublin 2010)

[This article was updated in 2025.]