Mission and History

The Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US (Наукове Товариство ім. Шевчeнка в Америці) is a Ukrainian-American scholarly institution incorporated in 1948 in the state of New York. It traces its intellectual and scholarly lineage to the Shevchenko Scientific Society established in 1873 in Lviv, Ukraine (then part of Austria-Hungary) which, until its dissolution by the Soviets in 1939, served as the preeminent Ukrainian scholarly society in Ukraine. The headquarters of the Society in the US is located in New York City. Besides offices and lecture halls, it contains a specialized library, a depository of archives pertaining to Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora, and an art collection. The Society has chapters in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, PA, Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI, Cleveland, OH and Boston, MA. The Society cooperates with other national Shevchenko Scientific Societies in Australia, Canada, Poland, Slovakia, Western Europe (headquartered in Sarcelles, France) and, since 1989, with the renewed Lviv-based Shevchenko Scientific Society in Ukraine.

The Society organizes and sponsors scholarly conferences, colloquia, symposia, and weekly public lectures. It is an affiliate member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), and the consortium of the greater New York scholarly institutions involved in Ukrainian Studies. The Society participates in national and international scholarly conferences and congresses on Ukrainian and Slavic Studies. It provides research grants for scholars and stipends for qualified students.

The Society has published numerous scholarly works in various languages, including three multi-volume encyclopedias of Ukraine, and is now publishing the third volume Encyclopedia of the Ukrainian Diaspora. The Society has published over 120 scholarly volumes (some jointly with other scholarly presses), among them Ukraine and Ukrainians in the World (1994), Towards An Intellectual History of Ukraine: An Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995 (1995, in Ukrainian), and a 2-vol. Ukrainian-Czech Dictionary (1994-96). For the  200-hundredth anniversary of the birth of its patron, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) the Society spearheaded a multifaceted Jubilee Project which includes publications of Shevchenko’s works and new Shevchenko scholarship. A three volume facsimile edition of Shevchenko’s poem Hajdamaky (1841), with a history of the text and a study of the poem and its reception, will appeared in early 2013  as well as other commentaries and analysis on Shevchenko’s body of work Shevchenko v Krytyci.

While the main focus of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the United States is on scholarship and education, it also serves the general public: it provides information for students on institutions of higher learning, facilitates neighborhood educational programs, and hosts public lectures and poetry readings.

The Shevchenko Scientific Society, USA, is exempt from Federal Income Tax under the provision of section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Receipts for tax purposes are provided for all donations to the Society.

Presidents