Jaroslav Stetkevych, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations who specialized in the Arabic poetic tradition, passed away June 12, 2021. He was 92.
Prof. Stetkevych was born in Burkaniv, Ukraine on 25 April, 1929. He began his secondary school studies at the Statsgymnasium in Göttingen and completed secondary school at the Ukrainian Gymnasium at Berchtesgaden, Germany in 1947 and the German Gymnasium in Munich, 1949. He began his university studies at the University of Madrid where he received the Licenciatura in Semitic Philology with Premio Extraordinario honors in 1959. During that time (1957-58) he studied in the PhD program at Cairo University. In 1959 he received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to pursue PhD studies in the department of Semitic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. There he studied Arabic Literature under Sir Hamilton Gibb and received his PhD in 1962. He taught Modern and Classical Arabic literature and Classical Arabic syntax in the NELC department at the University of Chicago from 1962-96.