It is with immense sadness that the Department of History learned of the passing away of Professor Edita Bosák, historian of Slovakia, Central Europe, and the Habsburg Empire.

Bosák earned her doctorate at the University of London before Memorial University had the privilege of winning her over as a faculty member. A versatile scholar, in addition to her degrees in history and education, she became an accredited professional translator for Slovak and Czech. Her historical studies encompassed the history of nationalism and of underrepresented peoples – the Slovaks in the Habsburg Empire or Czechoslovakia, and the Roma in Slovakia. She researched the activism of Slovak student organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their struggles against Magyarization policies. She unveiled how, in Communist Czechoslovakia, centralizing tendencies led to the chronic underrepresentation of Slovak language and culture. She investigated the role of Živena, the association of Slovak women, in the Slovak national movement in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. More recently, her experience as government translator working with Roma asylum seekers fleeing the Czech and Slovak Republics convinced her of the necessity of researching and writing on the history of the little-known Roma in Slovakia.

Not only through her publications, but also through her teaching, as a rare North American expert, Edita Bosák contributed to restoring the Slovaks and Roma to a fairer place in European history. In addition to her popular courses on the Holocaust and on the history of Germany, thanks to her expertise, Memorial University students, and the graduate and honours students she supervised, were among the rare North Americans able to study the history of modern Central Europe and even the centuries-long history of the Roma.

Edita Bosák was also a wonderful colleague appreciated by everyone. Through good and bad times, she always had a positive word to say. Her collaborative approach, her humour, and her anecdotes about research in Communist-era Czechoslovak archives will be terribly missed. Her honours and graduate students remember Dr. Bosák as a patient and caring mentor who guided their studies and listened sympathetically to their problems, both academic and personal.