Alexander J. Motyl
1953– · American historian and political scientist specializing in Ukraine and the Soviet Union, also a poet, novelist and painter
Alexander J. Motyl (born New York City, 1953) is an American historian and political scientist who specializes in Ukraine, Russia and the Soviet Union. He is professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey. His parents had left Western Ukraine as refugees after World War II, when the region was under Soviet occupation. He studied at Columbia University, earning a BA in history in 1975 and a PhD in political science in 1984.
His academic career has taken him to Columbia, Lehigh University, the Ukrainian Free University, the Kyiv-Mohyla University and Harvard. He has written widely on the Soviet Union, Ukraine, revolutions, nations and empires. In Imperial Ends (2001) he proposes a theoretical framework for analyzing imperial structures, distinguishing continuous, discontinuous and hybrid types. His work on Ukraine includes The Turn to the Right, a study of Ukrainian nationalism between the wars, and Dilemmas of Independence.
Beyond scholarship, he is a poet, a novelist and a visual artist. His paintings have been shown in one-man exhibitions in New York, Toronto and Philadelphia, and are held in the permanent collections of the Ukrainian Museum in New York and the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Winnipeg. His legacy spans academic research as well as literary and visual creation.