This year, 2025, will be remembered as having exceptionally autumnal weather in the first week of classes! Cool or sunny, with only a few raindrops, we were blessed to not endure the usual 90+ degree days this first week of academic year 2025-26.
The most fun this week was seeing new students peering at their cellphones in front of various buildings as they sought their classrooms. I found myself standing in the entryway of Enarson Classroom Building repeating: the stairwells and elevators are at either end of the building; all classrooms are upstairs; follow that student—she’s going to Enarson 245 and you want 246… Et cetera.
Excitement is palpable, despite leftover hurricane fencing and unfinished renovations around Bricker Hall. We are delighted to welcome students and faculty back for a new year!
The faculty kicked things off early with a picnic at the Scioto Park in Dublin (where we also fed a few ducks…) and a retreat at the Dublin public library to do some strategic thinking. We also welcomed visiting professor Ivan Kurilla, who is teaching for us and History this year, offering his insights onto U.S.-Russian relations and the uses and misuses of history.
2024-25 held a lot of excitement for the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. In particular:
- Two of our assistant professors were promoted with tenure. Please congratulate Dr. Alisa Ballard Lin and Dr. Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner, new associate professors who also published new books this year! Check out Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2025) by Dr. Lin and Subscribing to Sovietdom: The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal (University of Toronto Press, 2025), recipient of a Book Subvention from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. And Dr. Tuxbury-Gleissner’s edited volume Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis (Rutgers University Press, 2023) received a 2024 James Beard Media Award. Dr. Lin has started a term as our Director of Graduate Studies, and Dr. Tuxbury-Gleissner continues on as Director of Undergraduate Studies.
- The ranks of our teaching professors are growing! Dr. Helen Myers was reappointed as assistant teaching professor and has also been teaching at Columbus International High School. (She invited staff and faculty to visit: read more here.) What’s more, just as the bell rang for the first day of class this autumn, Dr. Laura Siragusa was appointed assistant teaching professor with her home in Linguistics and 50% of her teaching in SEELC. Congratulations to both.
- More new books will be coming in 2026: Dr. Ludmila Isurin spent her spring sabbatical writing her new book, forthcoming with Oxford next year, Memory of Defeat: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future. Dr. Jenny Suchland spent her sabbatical last year working on Accountable to Freedom: Interpreting (Anti) Trafficking Today. That, plus new books from Dr. Yana Hashamova (Ecosocial Selfhood: Embodied Knowledge about Russia’s Social Minorities) and me (The Silver Age in our Home: A Russian Literary Memoir, by Sophia Bogatyreva, translated by me and Catherine O’Neil, forthcoming with CEU Press), Dr. Dima Arzyutov (Paper Bridges Between Franz Boas and Russian Anthropology, co-edited by Dima, Dr. Laura Siragusa, and others, forthcoming at U of Nebraska Press, and soon his own The Northern Book of Origins: Siberian Indigenous Narratives and Metropolitan Ethnogenesis Theories, also at Nebraska.)
We have a few PhD students looking to defend this year, and we graduated two more Russian for the Professions MA students, Eleanor Grazier and Adam Johnson. In 2024-25 we also graduated twelve Russian majors and 19 Russian minors, with 6 additional Slavic minors. Not a bad crop! Many more of our PhD students are taking their candidacy exams this year, and with only one incoming graduate student, the RFP student Mitchell Baughman who has just spent his summer at Indiana University’s intensive Russian program, we will be looking to rebuild soon.
This past year we lost a beloved member of our alumni council, Jim Connell, who died in December of 2024. Our other council members will visit campus for Balkan Week in October—reach out if you’re interested in joining the council! Our traditional late September Hongor Oulanoff Lecture in Russian Literature will happen on 9/26, with Prof. Eric Naiman from U of California, Berkeley treating us to a comparison between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy with his lecture "The Heart of the Whole: Two Experiments in Eccentric Criticism." We have already scheduled the autumn semester Kapustnik talent show for November 5, and we expect our usual crowd of 100-150 talented students and their friends to mark their successes in studying our many languages: Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian.
More events are in the planning stages, though uncertainty around funding through the Department of Education Title VI grant to the National Resource Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies is complicating our ability to bring in guest speakers. Nonetheless, please stay tuned to our webpage and the CSEEES webpage and reach out if you are near campus. We will be rolling out a fundraising campaign to create a Romanian Language Endowment in honor of the fiftieth year of Romanian at Ohio State. Keep your eyes peeled!
With best wishes,
Angela Brintlinger
