Romana M. Bahry
Professor Emerita, York University
Romana M. Bahry, Professor Emerita, is a Canadian academic and author specializing in Slavic languages and literatures and in comparative European literature and film at York University in Toronto. For forty-seven years from 1972 she taught courses at York on comparative European (Slavic and English) literature, on East European film, history and culture, on Ukrainian-Canadian literature and on the Ukrainian language. Before her appointment at York she taught Ukrainian at the University of Toronto.
She has written on Gogol, P. Kulish and Sir Walter Scott, on the expressionist theatre of Les Kurbas and the films of O. Dovzhenko, and she brought the documentary cinema of glasnost-era Ukraine to audiences across North America. Her most recent book restores her grandfather, the chemist Dr. W. S. Kindraczuk, to the history of probiotics.
Professor, writer, researcher, historian, genealogist
- Professor Fifty years of university teaching, forty-seven of them at York University, from 1972 to 2019. Twenty courses, from elementary Ukrainian to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the cinema of East Central Europe. Teaching
- Writer Three books: a study of Walter Scott’s path into the fiction of Gogol and Kulish, a volume on glasnost in Soviet Ukraine, and the biography of a forgotten scientist. Books
- Researcher Seven book chapters and nineteen articles, in English and Ukrainian, published in Canada, the United States, Ukraine, Poland and Australia. Publications
- Historian She documented the glasnost years in Ukraine as they unfolded and recovered a forgotten discovery in the history of science. Her current work is the history of Austrian Galicia. Research
- Genealogist Nineteen talks for genealogical societies in Toronto, Ottawa and Winnipeg since 2007, on tracing families through the archives of Ukraine, Poland and Austria. Talks
Dr. W. S. Kindraczuk
Forgotten Chemist of Łańcut and Pioneer of Probiotics
A biography. York University Press, 2018.
A lost discovery. A forgotten scientist. In 1912 Dr. W. S. Kindraczuk described a new bacterium in the fermented milk of the Carpathian Hutsuls. A century later his granddaughter wrote his biography.
Glasnost and film
1989 to 1992
As the Soviet Union came apart, she brought the new culture of Ukraine to York University and carried it across North America.
Between 1989 and 1992 she organized four international symposia at York University, lectured on the new Ukrainian cinema from Seattle to New Orleans, advised the Smithsonian and the CBC, and produced eighteen documentary videos.
Selected publications
- 2011–2014“Subversions in Dovzhenko’s Earth,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies
- 1994“Rock Culture and Rock Music in Ukraine,” in Rocking the State
- 1994“Les’ Kurbas’ Jimmie Higgins: An Expressionist Avant-garde Drama,” Canadian Slavonic Papers
- 1984–85“Sir Walter Scott and Pantelejmon Kuliš,” Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.
- 1972“The Expressionist Experiment in Berezil’: Kurbas and Kulish,” Canadian Slavonic Papers