About

Romana M. Bahry was born in Salzburg, Austria, to parents who were refugees of the Second World War. She came to Canada as an infant and grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, where her father’s uncle had settled in the 1920s.

She studied at the University of Toronto: an Honours B.A. in French and Russian in 1968, an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1969, and a Ph.D. in 1978 under George S. N. Luckyj. Her dissertation examined how Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Panteleimon Kulish’s The Black Council follow and depart from the historical novel of Sir Walter Scott.

She began teaching Ukrainian at the University of Toronto in 1968, while still a graduate student, and joined York University in 1972. She became Assistant Professor in 1979 and Associate Professor in 1987. Over forty-seven years at York she taught twenty courses: Ukrainian language, literature and culture; the Russian novel, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; and the film and culture of East Central Europe. She retired in 2019 and is Professor Emerita in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.

Her research begins with the historical novel: Scott, Gogol and Kulish. It extends to the expressionist theatre of Les Kurbas and Mykola Kulish, the prose and drama of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, existentialism in the Ukrainian writers of the 1960s, and the films of Dovzhenko, Paradzhanov and Tarkovsky. She has also written on rock music, satire and youth culture in late Soviet and newly independent Ukraine.

Between 1989 and 1992 she worked at the meeting point of scholarship and events. She co-organized the symposium Glasnost in Soviet Ukraine at York University and edited its proceedings as Echoes of Glasnost in Soviet Ukraine (1990). She organized three further international symposia, was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, advised the Smithsonian Institution, the CBC and the National Film Board on the new Ukrainian cinema, and produced eighteen educational documentary videos.

She served on the executive of the Canadian Association of Slavists in twelve of the years between 1987 and 2006, and has been a Fellow of Stong College at York since 1979. She has refereed for the Canada Council’s Killam Research Fellowships, for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University and for Canadian Slavonic Papers. In the 1990s she advised the Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale and Columbia on Ukrainian educational and documentary film.

Since the 1970s she has also traced the life of her grandfather, Dr. Włodzimierz Sylwester Kindraczuk, a chemist and pharmacist from Łańcut who in 1912 described the bacterium Bacillus carpathicus in huslanka, the fermented milk of the Hutsul shepherds of the Carpathians. Her biography of him appeared in 2018 in a bilingual English and Polish edition and was reprinted in 2021. Her current work concerns the history and genealogy of Austrian Galicia.

She works in English, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and French, and reads nine further languages, among them German, Latin and Old Church Slavonic.

• Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, 1978
• M.A., Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, 1969
• B.A. (Honours), French and Russian, University of Toronto, 1968

• Professor Emerita, York University, from 2019
• Associate Professor, York University, 1987–2019
• Assistant Professor, York University, 1979–1987
• Sessional Lecturer, York University, 1972–1979. Seconded to the Department of Foreign Literature for one third of her load, 1975–1978
• Lecturer and Course Director in Ukrainian, University of Toronto, 1971–1972
• Teaching Fellow in Ukrainian, University of Toronto, 1968–1971

• Comparative Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish) and English literature
• East Central European film and culture
• European studies
• Austrian Galicia
• Languages, literatures and linguistics
• Genealogy and family history in Galicia
• History of science: the early history of probiotics

Fellowships and grants

• SSHRC travel grant, ICCEES World Congress, Europe: Our Common Home?, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2005
• SSHRC travel grant, international conference Ukraine in the 1990s, Monash University, Melbourne, 1992
• SSHRC travel and small grant for research in Kyiv and Moscow, Perestroika and Cinema in the U.S.S.R., 1991
• Halle Dissertation Fellowship, New School for Social Research, 1991
• Research Associate and Visiting Scholar, Institute of Literature, Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, 1990
• SSHRC travel grant, IV World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, England, 1990
• SSHRC travel grant, International Conference on Russian and Soviet Cinema, British Film Institute, London, 1990
• York University Faculty of Arts Research Grant, P. Kulish and West European Literature, Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, 1990
• Alschul Scholarship, New School for Social Research, 1990
• Canada–USSR Academic Exchange Grant, University of St. Petersburg, 1989
• SSHRC travel and small grants, P. Kulish and West European Literature: The Role of M. Grabowski and the W. Scott Novels, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 1987
• York University Faculty of Arts Research Grant, for the same project, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 1987
• Sabbatical research grant, The Prerevolutionary Russian and Ukrainian Drama of V. Vynnychenko, Vynnychenko Archive, Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, 1987
• Scholarship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy for a one-month refresher course for teachers of Italian, Università per Stranieri, Perugia, 1987
• Associate, University of Illinois Summer Research Laboratory, Russian and East European Center, 1986–1989
• Travel grant for study in the U.S.S.R., Poland and Czechoslovakia, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, 1972
• University of Toronto Open Fellowships, 1970–1972
• Ford Fellowship, 1970
• Province of Ontario Scholarships, 1969–1971
• Taras Shevchenko Fellowship for Ukrainian, University of Toronto, 1969
• Princeton University Fellowship, 1969

Honours

• Invited author, Biblio Bash, Toronto Public Library Foundation, 2019
• 45-Year Honoree, York University ceremony in honour of long-serving faculty members, 2018
• 50th Anniversary Ceremony of University of Toronto Alumni, Class of 1968, 2018
• 40-Year Honoree, York University ceremony in honour of long-serving faculty members, 2013
• Saint Michael’s College Gold Medal in French, 1971

Early awards

• McMaster University Entrance Scholarship, 1964
• Kiwanis Music Festival Award for Piano, 1963
• Alumnae Club Award for excellence in English to a graduating senior, 1959–1963

Canadian Association of Slavists, Canadian Society for the Study of Names, East European Genealogical Society, Gesher Galicia, Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto, Ontario Genealogical Society, Polish Genealogical Society of America, Shtetl Routes: Western Ukraine and Lublin, Toronto Ukrainian Genealogy Group, Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada.

Curriculum vitae, the complete record