It has been a busy academic year. Students are scheduling their honors defenses, faculty continue to develop new curriculum and teach our classes, and we are also researching, presenting and publishing our work. This Newsletter marks a new format and distribution process, with help from the College of Arts and Sciences, and we plan to bring tidings of Slavic and East European developments to you twice a year going forward. Do let us know if you like the new format and share your own news with us!
In my first year of what I like to call my “non-interim” chairship, I’ve been thrilled with our students, staff and faculty. This group of people are talented, hardworking, flexible—all essential qualities as we try to put the global pandemic behind us. Ukraine has been much on our minds as well, with this horrific war in our region weighing heavily over everything we do.
In these notes I thought I would highlight our annual events, in great part because they celebrate our research and teaching program—and while they benefit current students and faculty, alumni and friends of the department are always welcome to attend:
- Thanks to the generosity of Constance Oulanoff, the annual Hongar Oulanoff Memorial Lecture in Russian Literature this past autumn featured Professor Michael Wachtel from Princeton. We have adopted a dinner talk format, much appreciated by the students who can feed their minds and bodies simultaneously. These talks usually are scheduled for October.
- In spring semester we remember Dr. George Kalbouss, our beloved colleague who brought Russian culture into the lives of thousands of students while teaching at Ohio State. Before he died in 2020 George endowed the Kalbouss Lecture for Innovative Approaches to Slavic Cultural Studies, and for our third iteration we brought back alumna Dr. Tatiana Smorodinskaya who teaches at Middlebury College. Dr. Smorodinskaya was one of Dr. Kalbouss’s PhD advisees, and it was with pleasure that we heard her thoughtful and practical ideas about how we ought to teach the Russian literary texts known to Russians in order to understand them and their culture better. The timing of this lecture varies from February through April.
- Toward the end of spring semester we honored Dr. Ken Naylor with the Annual Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lectures in South Slavic Linguistics at the Department of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State. This year we welcomed Dr. Motoki Nomachi (University of Sapporo) for the 25th Naylor Lecture on the last day of spring semester, April 24.
- Finally, we hosted the 20th iteration in a row of the Midwest Slavic Conference on campus, and this year it featured a number of guests from abroad, two Fulbrighters from Poland (2021 and 2023’s Slavic Scholars), a Slovenian researcher and a Serbian visiting scholar, in addition to students and scholars from the region and across the world. Those conferences always happen in spring (March or April, depending on holidays and spring break) and we were happy to see students, friends of the department and alumni join us.
This autumn we had our first “virtual salon” featuring Dr. Ludmila Isurin and her book, Reenacting the Enemy: Collective Memory Construction in Russian and US Media (Oxford University Press, 2022). We plan another event for this fall and hope to have them regularly going forward. Let us know if you want an invitation!
Our new faculty member Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang along with Dr. Yana Hashamova and Oana Popescu-Sandu has also published a new book, Cultures of Mobility and Alterity: Crossing the Balkans and Beyond (Liverpool University Press, 2022). Our new lecturer Lilia Caserta has spent the year settling in, and all of us here at DSEELC are looking forward to a restful and productive summer, new graduate students and faculty arriving in autumn, and a new academic year. In the meantime, please read the rest of the newsletter, and stay in touch!
Yours,
Angela Brintlinger
