Alexander B. Dolitsky

Alexander Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev, in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and attended the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center.

In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years and an archaeologist for five years at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States after living one year in Austria and Italy. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981 while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He then settled in Alaska - first, in Sitka in 1985, and then in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was the U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education and Yukon-Koyukuk School District from 1988 to 2006; and Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.org) from 1990 to present. He has conducted approximately 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and the United States (including Alaska).

Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, and Clipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manage for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Memorial erected in Fairbanks, Alaska in 2006. Dolitsky is the founder and Program Manager of the "White Nights Festival of Russian Culture" that is held annually in the Southeast Alaska.

He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography in Current Anthropology, Artic, American Antiquity, Ultimate Reality and Meaning, Sibirica, and in many other professional journals. His more recent books include: Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During World War II; Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East, and Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends from Chukotka and Alaska.