Teslia, Ivan

Teslia, Ivan or Tesla [Тесля, Іван; Teslja], b 19 August 1902 in Nastasiv, Ternopil county, Galicia, d 12 April 1996 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Demographer and scholar; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1949. Teslia was educated at Lviv University (PH D, 1939), where he served as a research associate in the Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology (1932–9). During the Second World War he headed the school section of the Ukrainian Central Committee in Cracow. A lecturer at the Ukrainian Free University on climatology and meteorology, he emigrated to Canada in 1948, where he helped to organize the Shevchenko Scientific Society and became a specialist in the demography of the Ukrainian population in Canada. He is the author of Heohrafiia Ukraïny (Geography of Ukraine, 1938), Nasha bat'kivshchyna (Our Fatherland, 1942), Ukraïns'ke naselennia Kanady (The Ukrainian Population of Canada, 1968), and The Ukrainian Canadians in 1971 (1976), as well as a coauthor of Istorychnyi atlas Ukraïny (A Historical Atlas of Ukraine, 1980).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]