In the spring of 2001, a group of Ukrainian students at Cambridge University, aka the Cambridge University Ukrainian Society (CUUS), came up with the idea of organizing a "Ukrainian lecture": it seemed odd and unacceptable that ten years after its emergence as an independent nation, Ukraine as a country and Ukrainian studies as an academic discipline were absent in the University curriculum. An invitation was sent to David Marples, Professor of History, Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, Canada to deliver a lecture to the CUUS. David Marples' lecture "Ukrainian Politics and the Future of the Kuchma Regime" took place in July 2001 in front of a small and enthusiastic audience. Its success only further fueled the desire for a larger-scale Ukrainian initiative - the consensus was that an annual lecture series with an across-the-board appeal should be established at Cambridge University.

Recalls David Marples, "Talking to a group of Ukrainian students after my lecture, I asked about the state of Ukrainian studies at Cambridge. They told me it was non-existent and the University curriculum focused primarily on Russia. After further talks with Alex Orlov, who is from Kyiv, we hit on the idea of an annual lecture on Ukraine which I could fund from the Stasiuk Program that I direct at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS)"

The idea of the Ukrainian annual lecture series found support of Dr. Simon Franklin, Chairman of the Committee for Russian and East European Studies, and a recognized expert on Kievan Rus' history and culture. Subsequently the lecture organizing committee, was formed. Chaired by Simon Franklin it consisted of Dr. David Lane, Dr. Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, and the indefatigable Alexander Orlov, a Ph.D. student of Chemistry, a native of Kyiv, who represented the Cambridge University Ukrainian Society The final plan boiled down to two main stipulations: first, the Annual Lecture in Ukrainian Studies Series would have a grace period of five years and its continuation would be contingent on its success, second - the speaker should be a renowned academic to give the initiative a "good start".

Says Alex Orlov, "It is quite appropriate that the first speaker of the series is Professor Szporluk, Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The two Universities are very interconnected in their history. John Harvard, the first benefactor of Harvard University, was a student at Cambridge University. And although Cambridge (UK) and Cambridge (MA) are miles apart, it is wonderful to have a Ukrainian link between them. Hopefully, some day, the Cambridge University will have its own Institute of Ukrainian Studies of such stature and influence as the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Excerpts from the Yuri Shevchuk article in CUUS Newsletter, 2003. Complete article is here.