At the university, summer is a time for reflection. Our campus emptied out in May and our summer courses were offered online for maximum flexibility. But soon orientation groups of incoming first year students began to flood the Oval—we are excited that the new academic year has begun.
It’s good, though, to reflect on changes, successes and challenges. As I look back over 2023-24, I see a lot of change! So if in my last letter I focused on department events, this time I want to highlight personnel—faculty, staff, and of course our wonderful students.
First and foremost, we welcomed new assistant professor Dima Arzyutov, who arrived a month late due to a visa issue but quickly became a valued new colleague who brings us knowledge of indigenous and Siberian settler studies. We are sharing new senior lecturer Laura Siragusa with Linguistics and French/Italian (she’s a native speaker of Italian and FRIT jumped at the chance to have her work with their language students), and she too is a welcome addition.
We said goodbye in September to Derek Peterson, our long-time Academic Program Coordinator, and in December to Gary Hayward in financial operations. Both left for greener pastures at the College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences—at least we kept them in the OSU family! But they were hard to replace, and only in January and March did Joe Ernst and Daniel Pavlovski join us on the fourth floor of Hagerty Hall. With his many Ohio State degrees (BA/MA/MPA), Joe is one of our own, and his deep familiarity with our programs as well as his knowledge of Russian, Polish and even some Slovak language has helped the transition. And as you might guess from his surname, Daniel and his family hail originally from North Macedonia. It’s going to be great to have an all-Slavic and East European-loving crew!
For faculty news, see here [JOE ADD LINK]
My own new book, Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature (Bloomsbury “Russian Shorts” series), came out in February and I’ve been speaking about it across the world: from Louisville KY and Boulder CO to Rome, Italy and Warsaw, Poland.
For graduate student progress, click here click here [JOE ADD LINK]
Our undergraduates excelled at the annual Russian Language Olympiada in February and at the semesterly Kapustnik talent show. We honored many of our fabulous undergrads students at the Slavic Spring Tea—we are delighted to have generous endowment funds to reward students’ hard work and help them to study abroad in summer. Scholarships supplement the FLAS awards that some students received and enable them to continue to pursue their efforts to become fluent. For more details see this story about our students on the website.
With this newsletter, we seek to maintain connections with our alumni across Ohio and the globe. One way to connect with us is to join our alumni advisory council. To learn about our current members, see the alumni council website. If you're interested in joining the council, do get in touch with me at brintlinger.3@osu.edu. Once or twice a year we get to see the alumni council members: this year they will join us in late September for the annual Hongor Oulanoff Lecture in Russian Literature, featuring Prof. Edyta Bojanowska (Yale University) speaking on the topic of “Imperial Comparisons in Tolstoy’s War and Peace” on Friday September 27.
We invite you to join us at the Oulanoff Lecture as well if you are in the area--or just stop by our offices in Hagerty Hall when you happen to be on campus.
With best wishes,
Angela Brintlinger
