Ihor Ševčenko (1922-2009) was the Dumbarton Oaks Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History and Literature. Born in Poland, he studied at Prague’s Charles University and the Catholic University of Louvain and was a member of Henri Grégoire's seminar in Byzantine history in Brussels. Dr. Ševčenko taught and conducted research at many institutions, including the Collège de France, the universities of Cologne, Munich, Oxford, Michigan, and California (Berkeley), and Columbia University. Long associated with Dumbarton Oaks, where he served as the director of studies, he became the professor of Byzantine history and literature at Harvard University's Department of Classics in 1973 and served as the acting director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.
Dr. Ševčenko was the honorary president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the British Academy, the Society of Bollandists, the Accademia Pontaniana, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Knowledge, and other learned societies. A founding editor of Harvard Ukrainian Studies, he also served on the editorial boards of Corpus fontium historiae byzantinae and Corpus des astronomes byzantins.
Dr. Ševčenko contributed greatly to the study of the relationship between the cultures of Byzantium and the Slavic world. His essay collections include Society and Intellectual Life in Late Byzantium (1981), Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World (1982), and Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture (1991).
