Zenon Eugene Kohut[a] (born January 18, 1944) is a Canadian historian specializing in early modern Ukrainian history. He retired as professor emeritus, University of Alberta. From 1992 to 2014 Kohut worked at the University of Alberta's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies where he served as the first head of the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine and acted as editor of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies (1990–92). He was acting director (1993) and director (1994–2012) of the Program.
Personal background
Zenon Kohut was born in Yaniv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Ivano-Frankove, Ukraine) in the Galicia region. After the Second World War, Kohut's parents emigrated with him as political refugees to the United States and settled in Philadelphia.[1]
During the years 1973–75 and 1977–78 Kohut was a research associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Harvard University's Russian Research Center. In between his Harvard stints he taught Russian and Ukrainian history at the University of Pennsylvania (1975–6). He then taught at Michigan State University (1979–80), Yale University (Visiting Professor 1988) and the University of Alberta where he held the rank of Professor of History.[3] Dr. Kohut also worked as editor of the American Bibliography of Soviet and East European Studies (1980–84) and as a senior research analyst at the Library of Congress (1984–89). Government work and he spent time at the U.S. Department of Defense as a Soviet political affairs analyst (1990–92).[4]
Published works
Kohut, Zenon. Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy. Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s–1830s, Harvard University Press, 1989. ISBN9780916458171
Kohut, Zenon. Making Ukraine Studies on Political Culture, Historical Narrative, and Identity, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2011. ISBN978-1894865227
Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (with Bohdan Y. Nebesio and Myroslav Yurkevich), Lanham and London, 2005. ISBN9780810853874
Korinnia identychnosti:Studii z rannoomodernoi ta modernoi istorii Ukrainy (Roots of Identity: Studies on Early Modern and Modern Ukraine), Kyiv: Krytyka Press, 2004).ISBN9789667679484
Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600-1945). Edited by Andreas Kappeler, Zenon E. Kohut, Frank E. Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003. ISBN978-1895571462
History as a Battleground: Russian-Ukrainian Relations and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Ukraine Saskatoon: Heritage Press, 2002. ISBN978-0888804242
"The Question of Russo-Ukrainian Unity and Ukrainian Distinctiveness" in Early Modern Ukrainian Thought and Culture, Kennan Institute Occasional Paper #280 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2001)
Rosiis'kyi tsentralizm i ukrains'ka avtonomiia. Likvidatsiia Het'manshchyna. (Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: The Abolition of the Hetmanate). Kyiv, Osnovy Press, 1996.ISBN9781895571103
Co-edited Early Modern Ukraine. Special issue of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, vol. 17, nos.1-2 (Summer–Winter, 1992)
“Tsarstvo, dynastiia, ta etnos: Dva rann’omoderni pohliady na rosiis’ku istoriiu” (Tsardom, Dynasty, and Etnos: Two Early-Modern Views of Russian History), Materialy V kongresu Mizhnarodnoi asotsiatsii ukrainistiv. Istoriia: Zbirnyk naukovykh statei. (Materials of the Fifth Congress of the International Association of Ukrainianists. History: Collection of Scholarly Articles), Part 2 (Chernivtsi, 2004): 51-55
“In Search of Early Modern Ukrainian Statehood: Post-Soviet Studies of the Cossack Hetmanate,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 24, no. 2 (Winter 1999) [actually published in the Spring 2002], pp. 101–112.
“Zustrich z Rosiyeiu: kul'turni tendentsii ta politychni pohliady v rann'ovovitnii Ukraiini,” (Encounters with Russia: Cultural Tendencies and Political Views in Early Modern Ukraine) Suchasnist' 9 (1996, Kyiv), pp. 67–76 (in Ukrainian).
“Ukrainian-Russian Relations in Historical Perspective,” Europe 3 (1996, Beijing), pp. 79–97 (in Chinese).