HREC Announces 2023-24 Temerty Postdoctoral Fellow In Holodomor Studies, Henry Prown

HREC is pleased to announce that Dr. Henry H. Prown has been named the 2023-24 Temerty Postdoctoral Fellow in Holodomor Studies. Dr. Prown was the recipient of the 2022-23 fellowship, which has been extended an additional year. Dr. Prown is a specialist in the relationship between Stalinism and the American media during the Great Depression and received his PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.

“Henry Prown has been impressively productive in his first year as the Temerty Post-Doctoral Fellow,” said Frank Sysyn, academic advisor to HREC. Dr. Prown submitted a book proposal based on his dissertation to McGill-Queens Press and has been contracted to develop it into a full-length monograph. His article “Holodomor Denial in American Communist Media,” will be included in a collection based on presentations given at the HREC-sponsored conference “The Holodomor in Global Perspective” (Cambridge University). Henry made a number of presentations, in person and virtual, including at the Pilecki Institute‟s “Genocidal Crimes of Imperialist Regimes” conference (Warsaw), the  annual meeting of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies (Sydney), and the Triennial Congress of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (Winnipeg), and in the coming months, will speak at the conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the conference “Rediscovering the Plurality of Socialism and Communism” (University of Montreal).  

In addition, Henry has been teaching a course titled “Communism around the World” offered through the History, Classics, and Religion department at the University of Alberta. The course explores the impact and influence of the Bolshevik movement in Eastern Europe, China, the US, and Russia. “My goal is to engage students in the study of events like the Holodomor not only through the lens of leaders in the Kremlin but also through the eyes of non-Russian witnesses and Ukrainians themselves,” he said.  

Henry is working with previously classified Soviet archives to document the existence of a collaborative, Moscow-based public relations campaign aimed at American audiences, including denial of the Holodomor.  In his second year as the Temerty Post-Doctoral Fellow in Holodomor Studies, Henry plans to prepare his book for publication and to continue to map the complex media ecosystem of 1930s America as it relates to coverage of the USSR and specifically to reporting on the Holodomor period.

HREC and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta) established the Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Holodomor Studies in 2021 to support in-depth research of the Holodomor. The Fellowship is named in honour of James Temerty and his family foundation, whose generosity continues to allow HREC to develop programs aimed at increasing knowledge and understanding of the Holodomor.