2024 was a great year all around at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages, and our faculty are a key reason great years are possible.
Stay tuned to our "News" section and our social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
- Ludmila Isurin took a sabbatical leave to work on her book project, “Memory of Defeat in the Shaping of Collective Future Thought”;
- Angela Brintlinger in February published her new book, Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Others;
- Jenny Suchland (whom we share with WGSS) was part of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Society of Fellows and also took a spring semester sabbatical to complete her book Debts of Analogy: Accounting for Modern Day Slavery;
- Alex Burry’s book, Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature, came out last year, and he was promoted in May to full professor;
Yana Hashamova has spent three semesters as interim director of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design while also chairing Graduate Studies in SEELC;
Brian Joseph, who was the longstanding Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics, retired from the university in May; as emeritus faculty he will still be around—to shepherd his new Laboratory for the Study of Greek Language;
- Sunnie Rucker-Chang received a grant of over $100,000 to continue the work of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Think Tank and support the career and expertise development of underserved and underrepresented students across the U.S.; she was also appointed as Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Cultures;
Philip Gleissner’s edited volume Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis (Rutgers University Press, 2023) won a prestigious 2024 James Beard Media Award (!)
- In October we held our second faculty “virtual salon” with the help of Arts and Sciences Communications—over a hundred people came to hear Dan Collins speak about some of the supernatural terrors that haunt Slavic folklore, including sorcerers, witches, werewolves, Evil Eyes and vampires;
- Alisa Lin has been active in curricular development and will pioneer a new four-credit course cross-listed with Theater in spring semester;
- Diana Sacilowski and Matthew Boyd were promoted to assistant teaching professors from senior lecturers;
- Our other assistant teaching professors (Helen Myers, Andrei Cretu, and Adela Lechitan-Siefer) continue to serve as valuable mentors and teachers, as do lecturers Viktoriia Kim and Lilia Caserta.
