Morfill, William

Morfill, William, b 17 November 1834 in Maidstone, Kent, d 9 November 1909 in Oxford, England. British Slavist. A graduate of Oxford University, he taught there from 1870 and became the first professor of the Slavic studies chair in 1900. He visited Lviv and Kyiv and corresponded with Mykhailo Drahomanov from 1871 to 1895. He was the first British scholar to write about Taras Shevchenko, in articles in the Westminster Review (1880) and Macmillan’s Magazine (April 1886). He also reviewed the Ukrainian literary anthology Vik (3 vols, 1902) in the Athenaeum (January 1903), translated several of Shevchenko’s poems, and contributed information on Ukrainian literature and folklore to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]