After doing the kind of research I first undertook three decades ago, which had not been seriously undertaken as a comprehensive look at Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants as a whole rather than only at one particular church jurisdiction/confession or in the context of a neighboring group with whom they sometimes identified, naturally I would start to get invitations to speak at genealogy conferences, Carpatho-Rusyn educational seminars, and churches. Eventually my work was being noticed by some prestigious entities and I was able to participate in scholarly conferences and some similarly notable venues. As I described in my previous post, in 2022 I was given the opportunity to create and deliver two papers/presentations, to two different audiences but both being prestigious in their own way.
The first I gave on August 30, as part of the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center Summer Seminars series that continued the successful series of 2020 and 2021. The lineup was a mix of established professional scholars and Europe-based doctoral candidates; I suppose I fell somewhere in between, though the “independent” in “independent scholar” always suggested to me the idea of “lone wolf”!
- Unlikely Brothers: Carpathian Mountain Brigands and American Superheroes
Dr. Patricia Krafcik, Professor Emerita of The Evergreen State College - The Art of the Coal Region Renaissance: The Painter Anthony Kubek
Dr. Nicholas Kupensky, Associate Professor at the United States Air Force Academy - Lemko Art as an Artifact of Memory
Michał Szymko, Doctoral Candidate at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University - The Lemko Language as a Cure
Anna Maślana, Doctoral Candidate at Jagiellonian University
These were all great and we eagerly await their availability on YouTube. (I’ll update this post with the links when they are available.)
My presentation, ‘We’re Russian, But Not High Russian’: Flavors of Identity Among American Carpatho-Rusyns, was based on my paper from the 2021 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) national convention in New Orleans. Freed from the strict 15-/20-minute constraints of reading a paper on a panel with 2 or even 3 other scholars, I was able to dig in a little more deeply and restore some of the passages I’d had to cut from the original paper.
