Avhustyn Shtefan was a Ukrainian and Ukrainian American educator, politician, and social activist. He was speaker of the Carpatho-Ukrainian Soim (legislature) during that region’s autonomy/independence in 1938-1939.

He was born in the village of Poroshkovo (currently in Perechyn raion, Zakarpats’ka oblast’, Ukraine) in a family of Greek Catholic clergy (his father Omelian Shtefan and maternal grandfather Ievhenii Fentsyk were both priests and well-known social activists). He studied at the University of Budapest (1914-1918) and became professor of mathematics and physics at the Uzhhorod teachers college. After creation of the Czhechoslovak Republic, he taught at the Uzhhorod Gymnasium (1920-1922) and then became director of the Commercial Academies in Uzhhorod and Mukachevo (1922-1938).

During this period, he was also heavily involved in politics. This culminated with the autonomy of Carpatho-Ukraine, when he was named Minister of Education and Religion, was elected to the Soim, and became its speaker. After the annexation of Carpatho-Ukraine by Hungary in March 1939, he became a political refugee, living in Bratislava, where he was director of the Ukrainian Academy of Commerce, and then in Prague, where he was director of the Ukrainian Gymansium in Modřany.

At the end of World War II he along with his fellow Modřany faculty became displaced persons in Augsburg, Germany, and resettled in the United States in 1949. He taught at the Mother of God Academy (a Catholic girls high school) in Stamford, Connecticut until his retirement in 1969, and continued to be active in Ukrainian and Transcarpathian social and political organizations.