Rate My Professor Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, where she also serves as the Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography and Director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Alberta in 2001. Her research focuses on oral history, ego-documents, vernacular cultures, diaspora, transnationalism, migration, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Canada, and Ukrainian Canadian culture. Prior to her current roles, she held positions including professor of cultural anthropology at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.

Key publications include the 2015 book Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century (University of Wisconsin Press) and the co-edited volume Reclaiming the Personal: Oral History in Post-Socialist Europe (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Additional books are The Other World or Ethnicity in Action: Canadian Ukrainianness at the End of the 20th Century (Smoloskyp, 2011) and co-edited works such as Orality and Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and In Search of Voice: Oral History as Theory, Method, and Source (Karazin National University, 2010). She has authored numerous articles and book chapters on topics including labor migration, personal correspondence, decollectivization in Ukraine, and Ukrainian Canadian experiences. Khanenko-Friesen has led projects such as Decollectivized: The Last Generation of Soviet Farmers on Agency, Meaning, and Social Change in Rural Ukraine and The 'Quiet' Work of the Immigrant Letter. She teaches courses including MLCS 696 Oral History as Theory and Praxis and has contributed to oral history exhibits and archives.