Congratulations to Our Graduating Students!
We invite you to join us in congratulating our graduate students who have worked so hard over the last few years, finally reaching a crucial milestone in their studies:
Randall Rowe, Andrey Ridling, Siobhán Seigne, Michelle Verbitskaya, Lejla Veskovic and Enes Tastan!
Randall Rowe defended his dissertation, Mediated Social Hierarchies and Gender & Sexuality in the Russian Federation this last Fall, and his Ph.D. will be conferred this Spring.
Randall received his M.A. in Russian and Slavic Studies from New York University in 2014 and his B.A. in Russian, Michigan State University, 2009.
Andrey Ridling will be the first Russian For the Professions M.A. student to graduate from our program! Andrey passed his exams this Spring, writing on the Thaw, Socialist Realism, and completing translations of Russian texts.
Andrey received his B.A., University of South Carolina in Russian language, literature, and culture; Comparative Literature before joining us here at Ohio State, and is joining us as Ph.D. student this year.
Siobhán Seigne's MA paper analyzed the character pannochka from Gogol’s short story “Viy.” Siobhán used a feminist lens to characterize how she was adapted from the short story to the 1967 Soviet adaptation by the same name and the 1990 Serbian adaptation A Holy Place (Sveto Mesto).
Siobhán received her B.A. in Russian at the University of Rochester in 2019 and will continue as a Ph.D. student at the Slavic Department.
Michelle Verbitskaya's thesis examined competing feminizing suffixes in contemporary Russian. Having created a corpus of online posts mentioning women doctors, Michelle compared 10 suffixes used to mark the gender of the referent based on frequency, connotation, and ideology.
In 2019 Michelle received her B.S. in Secondary Education English Language Arts at the University of Central Florida, where she also earned her M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language in 2022. Michelle will continue with us as Ph.D. student.
Lelja Veskovic wrote in her MA paper about the positionality of dissident writers Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Mihajlov in relation toward authoritarian discourses in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. This Spring (seen in her photo), Lejla presented on her work at the 23rd biennial conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore hosted by the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.
At the University of Sarajevo Lejla received her B.A. in English Language and Literature in 2009, her B.A. in Russian Language and Literature in 2011, and her M.A. in Russian Language and Literature and Teaching Orientation in 2013. Lejla joins us as a Ph.D. student this year.
Enes Tastan wrote his M.A. thesis on song and poems in the folklore of the Great Patriotic War. In the past, Enes has focused his thesis and research on Russian Language and Linguistics.
Enes received his B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Ankara University 2015 and his M.A. from Saint Petersburg State University in 2017 also in Russian Language and Literature. We are excite for Enes to continue with us as a Ph.D. student next fall.
Please give these students a warm congratulations on their outstanding achievements! We look forward to the great work they have ahead of them. We wish Randy the best of luck in his future endeavors and we are excited to have Andrey, Siobhan, Michelle, Lejla, and Enes continue with us as Ph.D. students.
