Lubomyr Luciuk

Lubomyr Yaroslav Luciuk is a Canadian academic and author of books and articles in the field of political geography and Ukrainian history. He is currently a full professor at the Royal Military College of Canada.

Background and education

Lubomyr Luciuk was born and raised in Kingston, Ontario. His education began at St. Joseph's School, Cathedral School and Regiopolis-Notre Dame. He earned two degrees from Queen's University, an Honours BSc (1976) and MA (1979) and completed his PhD (1984) at the University of Alberta. He had postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto and Queen's University, including the SSHRCC Canada Research Fellowship at the Department of Geography, Queen's University.

Political and academic work

Luciuk has worked for the Royal Ontario Museum, Cataraqui Creek Conservation Authority and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, as well as for the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.

Luciuk has also served as a Member of the federal Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada and was chair of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, from 2007 to 2010. He served as UCCLA's director of research until March 2013. The UCCLA has been at the forefront of the debate over the proposed contents and governance of the taxpayer-funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, consistently arguing that all of the galleries in this national museum should be thematic, inclusive, and comparative in content and that no community's suffering should be elevated above all others.

Luciuk was a leading figure along with Andrew Hladyshevsky and Paul Grod, in the Ukrainian Canadian community's request that the Government of Canada acknowledge what happened to Ukrainians and other Europeans during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914-1920, a campaign that took some 20 years to succeed and in 2008 resulted in the signing of a technical document establishing a $10 million endowment within the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko to be used for commemorative and educational programs dealing with the wartime experience of these communities.

He was appointed as a member of the Endowment Council of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund by UCCLA. In 2010 he served as chair (pro tempore) of the Department of Politics and Economics at the Royal Military College of Canada, the first Canadian of Ukrainian heritage to enjoy this distinction. Recently Dr Luciuk was appointed as a part-time Member of the Parole Board of Canada.

He is currently a full professor of Political Geography in the Department of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada, in Kingston.

Awards

Luciuk has received a number of awards, grants, and fellowships, and has taught for the Departments of Geography at Queen's University, the University of Toronto and the University of the Witswatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa as well as for the Department of History at the University of British Columbia and Department of International Relations and Political Science at Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey.

In 2010, Luciuk was one of 16 recipients of the Shevchenko Medal of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress in recognition of his educational, research and advocacy efforts on behalf of the Ukrainian Canadian community. Among his many other academic awards and distinctions Luciuk has received doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, including the Canada Research Fellowship, a Neporany Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Chair of Ukrainian Studies Foundation's John Sopinka Award for Excellence in Ukrainian Studies. He is a former member of Branch №360 of The Royal Canadian Legion, the Writers' Union of Canada and a fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2013-2014 he served as the voluntary project lead for CTO, an initiative that resulted in over 100 plaques being unveiled across Canada at 11 am local time on Friday, 22 August 2014, recalling Canada's first national internment operations- the first time in Canadian history this number of plaques have been installed at the same time and date, and coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the War Measures Act and the outbreak of the Great War. He was most recently honoured with an Ontario Volunteer Service Award for 50 years of community activism at a ceremony held in Kingston, Ontario on 25 June 2015, sponsored by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade. Luciuk is a long-standing member of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, in Toronto and has recently been accepted as a member of the Fort Frontenac Officers Mess, in Kingston.

Publications

Professor Luciuk specializes in the political geography of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, refugee studies, and the ethnic and immigration history of Canada. He is the author or editor/co-editor of over 15 books including "In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations", "Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and Migration of Memory", and "Konowal: A Canadian Hero" as well as almost 250 opinion editorials published in Canadian newspapers, as well as being a frequent commentator on the CBC, National Public Radio (USA) and BBC.

Luciuk also established Kashtan Press, which has published "Scourging of a Nation: CBS and the Defamation of Ukraine", Stefan Petelycky’s "Into Auschwitz for Ukraine" and "Welcome to Absurdistan: Ukraine, the Soviet Disunion and the West" and other publications. He also serves as series editor for "Occasional Papers on the Holodomor," the first volume being Raphael Lemkin's "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine," The Kashtan Press, 2013. Volume #2, "Tell Them We Are Starving: The 1933 Diaries of Gareth Jones" appeared in 2015.

Books authored/edited/compiled by Luciuk

• "Famines in European Economic History: The last great European famines reconsidered," 2015, Routledge, 2015 (with D Curran and A G Newby, co-eds)
• "Ukrainians in the Making: Their Kingston Story," The Limestone Press, 1980
• "A Delicate and Difficult Question: Documents in the History of Ukrainians in Canada, 1899-1962," The Limestone Press, 1986 with B. S. Kordan
• "Anglo-American Perspectives on the Ukrainian Question, 1938-1951," The Limestone Press, 1987, with B. S. Kordan
• "Canada's Ukrainians: Negotiating an Identity," University of Toronto Press, 1991 (with Stella Hryniuk).
• Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada and the Migration of Memory (University of Toronto Press, 2000)
• Creating a Landscape: A Geography of Ukrainians in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1989), with B. S. Kordan
• "In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920," Kashtan Press, 2001.
• A Time for Atonement: Canada's First National Internment Operations, 1914-1920 (Kingston, Ontario: Limestone Press, 1988)
• Their Just War: Images of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Kingston, Ont: Kashtan Press, 2007) with Wasyl Humeniuk
• The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-1933 (Kingston, Ontario: Limestone Press, 1988), with M Carynnyk & B S Kordan (co eds)
• "Righting an Injustice: The Debate over Redress for Canada's First National Internment Operations," Justinian Press, 1994
• Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 2008)
• The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, with Athanasius McVay (University of Toronto, Chair of Ukrainian Studies & Kashtan Press, 2011)
• Jews, Ukrainians, and the Euromaidan, (Chair of Ukrainian Studies in association with the Kashtan Press, 2014).

External links

• www.uccla.ca (Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association)