Beginning in the 2025-2026 academic year students currently studying Slovak courses in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures are invited to apply for the Michael Kopanic, PhD Fund Scholarship. Eligible recipients must be in good academic standing, currently enrolled in a Slovak course, and have committed to taking Slovak course(s) within the next academic year.
Michael J. Kopanic, Jr. is an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) and a former editor of Jednota, the publication of the First Catholic Slovak Union. He has earned degrees from Youngstown State University (A.B.), the University of Notre Dame (M.A.), and the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D.). At UMGC, Professor Kopanic has served as Course Chair and Course Coordinator for European history courses and received an outstanding teaching award in 2012. He also administers three Facebook sites: Learning the Slovak Language and Culture, Slovak History, and the Slovak Studies Association.
Professor Kopanic has contributed numerous articles to the Jednota newspaper, Naše rodina, and many academic publications, and edited the books Slovaks in America and Illustrated Slovak History. A former Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International board member, he serves on the Academic Committee of the Museum of Slovak Emigration to North America, is an academic consultant for Global Slovakia and is on the editorial board of the journal Kultúrne dejiny
(Cultural History, Ružomberok, Slovakia). He is currently working on a book about Slovak traditional customs.
Prof. Kopanic has always had a keen interest in history and this translated into a wish to learn more about his ancestors while attending college. He wanted to communicate in Slovak with his baba (grandmother) and Slovak-born mother, who emigrated before World War II. This inspired his wish to learn the Slovak language and culture. When studying for a doctorate in history, he found that only the University of Pittsburgh continually offered courses in Slovak, so he transferred to Pitt from the University of Toronto. His quest to learn culminated in his first trip to his mother’s ancestral home, and four years later, a year-long stay for doctoral research in communist Czechoslovakia. Since then he has made over 20 trips to Slovakia, including attending the Slovak summer school, Studia Academica Slovaca.
Professor Kopanic has devoted his entire life to learning more about Slovaks and their culture. From their birth, he has spoken with his daughters only in Slovak, and hoped they would carry on the culture and language with their children. Furthermore, he decided that he wished to help others with the same yearning to advance their education. In consulting with the Slovak Studies Program and the Slavic Department, he was told that what the Program needed most was funding for those wishing to learn Slovak. Thus he decided to fund an endowed scholarship for students studying advanced Slovak. It is his hope that the Slovak Studies Program will continue to flourish, and as an historian, he said that he wants it to be alive and thriving for hundreds of years into the future.