Recent semesters at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures have proceeded under a banner of DESPITE. Despite the pandemic, despite the need to pivot to virtual, or to quarantine, or to test, despite COVID-19 and all the changes the pandemic has wrought in our lives, we have met, gathered, taught, learned, presented, and even had fun.
Autumn’s Kapustnik is a case in point. Record numbers of students gathered to eat Russian and East European food and to showcase their language learning through songs, poems, and skits. The Russian 1101 students found new ways to illustrate shopping for clothing and food or passing through passport control at a Russian airport, while the more advanced students donned black outfits for a rendition of one of Viktor Tsoi’s hit songs or recited a poem by Joseph Brodsky. Our new Polish instructor, Pani Diana (Sacilowski), got the audience involved in her classes’ performance, and the BCS crew mimicked newscasters as they interviewed each other and passersby on the Oval. And the Romanians danced! A good time was had by all in the newly renovated Hagerty Hall lecture room – and all this while wearing masks.
As interim chair, I have been touched by faculty, student and staff flexibility as this pandemic drags on. Our main office suite draws students to the lounge, and I often see them engaged in parallel zoom appointments with their faculty, studying and reading, or preparing group presentations while enjoying the library-like atmosphere and the comfy couch. I keep hoping to start our regular coffee and lunch hours in that space, where faculty and students have an opportunity to chat and share informally, but whenever the infection numbers spike, we postpone our meeting start date. Hope springs eternal, though, and with the return of kitchen access and our coffeemaker and tea kettle, we are just waiting for the right moment.
In the sections of this newsletter to follow you will read about our other new staff and our various events, including the Naylor Lecture on Cappadocian Greek given by Dr. Mark Janse of Ghent University last spring and the Oulanoff lecture in Russian literature featuring Dr. Gabriella Safran from Stanford. We also brought Dr. Caryl Emerson for a talk that commemorated the 200th year of Dostoevsky’s birth and welcomed SEELC alumna Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang back to campus to give a talk on U.S. civil rights and European Roma rights movements. We love hosting guests on our campus, and two other highlights of the past semester were visits from our Alumni Advisory Board and from a delegation of Serbian political scientists from Belgrade – part of the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies’ Serbian Educational Alliance project. Hagerty also saw guests from Poland, including our inaugural Fulbright Slavic Scholar from Warsaw, Dr. Jarosław Szczepański, a post-doctoral scholar in the Center for Historical Research, Dr. Julia Keblinska, and colleagues Irina Dubrow and Kazimierz Słomczyński from the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Please monitor our website for a forthcoming page highlighting our Advisory Board. We were thrilled to welcome two new members this autumn, B.A. graduates Kenneth Helmsley (2012) and Natalie Mauser-Carter (2009). From the bottom of my heart I wish you smooth sailing into the spring of 2022 and hope to see you at the Midwest Slavic Conference, at the Kalbouss lecture in April, or any other time you happen to be in Columbus.
-Angela Brintlinger,
SEELC Interim Chair 2021-22
