Omeljan Pritsak - Career

Career

Pritsak began his academic career at the University of Lviv in interwar Poland where he studied Middle Eastern languages under local orientalists and became associated with the Shevchenko Scientific Society and attended its seminar on Ukrainian history led by Ivan Krypiakevych. After the Soviet annexation of Galicia, he moved to Kyiv where he briefly studied with the premier Ukrainian orientalist, Ahatanhel Krymsky. During the war, Pritsak escaped to the west. He studied at the universities in Berlin and Göttingen, receiving a doctorate from the latter, before teaching at the University of Hamburg. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States, where he taught at the University of Washington for a while, before moving to Harvard at the invitation of the prominent linguist, Roman Jakobson, who was interested in proving the authenticity of the twelfth century "Song of Igor" through the use of oriental sources. At Harvard, he founded the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (1973), became the first Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History (1975), and started the journal, Harvard Ukrainian Studies (1977ff). In 1989, he retired from his Harvard professorship. After the emergence of an independent Ukraine in 1991, Pritsak returned to Kyiv where he founded the Oriental Institute of the National Academy of Sciences and the journal Skhidnyi svit (The Oriental World). He spent his final years back in the United States, and died in Boston at the age of 87.