Current Activities and Structure (2008)

Teaching

Our enrollments – we have by far the strongest enrollments in first-year Russian in the country – teaching evaluations, and the variety of courses we offer all testify that we are, indeed, a very strong academic program and a leader in the field.

In 2005 we restructured our curriculum to introduce lower-division courses in literature and film. The results have been very impressive, due both to the popularity of the topics of the courses (“Russians in Hollywood,” “From Russia with Love,” “Introduction to Russian Culture and Civilization”) and to excellence in teaching. In 2005-2008, lower-division literature and film courses often attracted enrollments of 50-70 students. Our well-enrolled “hits” also include courses on Eastern-European film and Slavic cultural and sociolinguistics.

We expand our interdisciplinary endeavors and foster undergraduate research offering courses like “Language of Advertising” for freshmen; recently we initiated a cross-cultural program in conjunction with School of Nursing “Russian Talk: Communication, Culture, & Health in Sochi, Russia.”

Our teaching, across the board, receives strong, often stellar, evaluations. In any given year we have several faculty nominated for the Distinguished Teaching Award: in fact 8 of us have been nominated for this distinction in the past 5 years alone, which is quite remarkable for a relatively small department like ours, with only 7 professors and 4 lecturers.

The mission of our undergraduate and graduate programs is to provide effective instruction in a variety of Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures, for the benefit of all members of the University community, whatever their subject of specialization. We have consistently served between thirty and eighty undergraduate majors, and bestowed, in 2000-2007, up to 5 MA degrees, and one Ph.D. degree each year. We also work closely with the Honors Program on campus and teach at least three Honors sections each year.

We are also active in leading Exploration Seminars to the areas of our specialization. The Summer and Fall of 2008 will feature two: one in Sochi, and the other in the Republic of Georgia.

Scholarship and service

The faculty in all ranks are engaged in active and productive scholarship, most publishing regularly and all giving papers at national and international conferences. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2007 we ranked as number nine among our peer institutions in terms of our Scholarly Productivity – see the Chronicle of Higher Education website. This places us ahead of Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, University of Michigan and Ohio State.

We will detail individual scholarly achievements below, but our collective research and professional expertise covers Russian and Eastern European Literature (Alaniz, Crnkovic, Diment, Henry, West), Critical Theory (Crnković), Russian and Eastern European Film (Alaniz, Crnković, Diment), Slavic Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (Augerot, Belić, Dziwirek), Visual Arts (Alaniz, West), Cultural Studies (Alaniz, Dziwirek). Several of us (Alaniz, Crnković, Diment, West) are also specialists in Comparative Literature. In 2006-07 three of our faculty (Alaniz, Dziwirek, Henry) were awarded the Royalty Research Fund Fellowship for three different projects. Other significant Research Fellowships given to faculty in the past five years included an NEH Summer Research Grant (Henry), an IREX Grant for Research in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Crnković), an NEH Reference Materials Program Grant (West, Biggins), a Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society (Diment), Chaim Schwartz Foundation for Jewish Culture Grant (Henry), a Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship Grant (Diment), a UW Simpson Center for the Humanities Research Fellowships (Crnković, Alaniz).

Our faculty is dedicated to university and professional service that goes beyond the department and immediate community, and extends to College of Arts and Sciences, University, and Faculty Senate councils and committees, as well as major national professional organizations and committees. In the past five years these have included elected positions on the College Council (Diment, Humanities; 2005-09) and MLA’s Association of Departments of Foreign Languages Executive Committee (Diment, Russian; 2002-05); membership on the College of A & S Budget Advisory Committee (Diment, 2002-04), chairing 2005 AAASS Program Committee (West, 2004-05) and being a member of standing program committee of AATSEEL (West, 2004-05), membership on National AAUP Committee on Government Relations (Diment, 2000-06) and National AAUP Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security (Diment, 2002-05), as well as membership on important Faculty Senate councils (Dziwirek, Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs 2002-2004 and Faculty Council on University Relations 2001-2003; Diment, Faculty Council on University Libraries, 2006-09), and College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellows Program (Crnković, 2007-08). We are also the proud home of two recent recipients of The Distinguished Staff Award: our Administrator, Shosh Westen (2001), and Affiliate Professor (and Slavic and Eastern European Librarian) Michael Biggins (2005).

Individual Scholarship

• Assistant Professor José Alaniz is currently working on two books – Comics and Comic Art in Russia and Death, Disability and The Superhero – which reflect his main areas of research: Disability Studies, Visual Arts (Film and Comics), and Post-Soviet Russian Literature and Culture. Death, Disability and The Superhero examines the shifting meanings of disability in Russian visual culture since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Comics and Comic Art in Russia will be forthcoming from the University of Mississippi Press, which is the leading publisher on Comics Scholarship, in 2009. José earned the 2005 Inge Award for Comics Scholarship, given by the American Popular Culture Association. Annually he attends the largest comics festival in Russia, KomMissia, and biannually Kino Bez Bar’erov, a Russian film festival devoted to disability rights. Several forthcoming articles deal with the filmmaker Alexander Sokurov.
• Professor James Augerot‘s research in the past ten years has focused around Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Pedagogy. His recent publications include a textbook for modern Romanian (Romanian/Limba Romana), which came out in 2000, and a Russian Morphological Database, which contains the morphology of a 100,000 word corpus of modern Russian, searchable by root, derivational morpheme, word type, word class and meaning. He completed it in 2002. Professor Augerot has continued to serve as Secretary-Treasurer of the South East European Studies Association, President and Secretary-Treasurer of the Society for Romanian Studies, each of which has sponsored national (SEESA) and international (SRS) conferences in the last year.
• Lecturer Bojan Belić received his Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics in 2005. To date, he has published four articles relating to Serbian and South Slavic Syntax, as well as teaching Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Bojan has also been very active in attending conferences, workshops, and giving papers.
• Affiliate Professor Michael Biggins, whom we consider an integral part of our department, has authored four full-length articles on publishing in the former Yugoslavia and Czech Republic. He also co-edited a volume entitled Publishing in the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and published six translations (prose and poetry) from Slovenian, including Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut, Tomaz Salamun’s Blackboards, and Drago Jancar’s Northern Lights. Michael’s primary job is in the Library: he is the UW Slavic and Eastern European Librarian. In 2005 he received the UW Distinguished Staff Award for his professional excellence.
• Associate Professor Gordana Crnković is a scholar in the field of Eastern European literature, culture, and film. Right now she is working on two books, “Something Strange and Valuable”: Literature, Utopia, and Anti-Nationalism in the Former Yugoslavia and Yugoslav Successor States and The Dark Mirror: Essays on East European Literature and Film. She has published a monograph on the relationship between Eastern European literatures and those in the United States and England (Imagined Dialogues: Eastern European Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature) and co-edited a volume on the impact of American culture on European popular culture (Kazaaam! Splat! Ploof!: The American Impact on European Popular Culture, since 1945). She has also published more than twenty articles, many in refereed journals.
• Professor Galya Diment‘s areas of research include Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Goncharov, and Russian and European Modernism. She has just finished co-editing MLA Approaches to Teaching “Lolita,” which is coming out in the summer of 2008. She is currently completing A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life of Samuel Koteliansky, a cultural biography of a Russian Jew from the Pale of Settlement who became a close friend of many leading English writers at the time, including D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and H. G. Wells. She is also the author of two monographs, among them one on Nabokov’s Pnin and the book’s real-life prototype, a Russian History professor at Cornell and the University of Washington, Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel), and edited two other volumes, including one on Siberia and one on Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, and published numerous articles in leading Slavic, English, and Comparative Literature journals.
• Associate Professor Katarzyna Dziwirek is a specialist in Synchronic Linguistics. She is readying two books for publication, Complex Emotions and Grammatical Mismatches, a monograph which will appear in “Mouton de Gruyter Applications of Cognitive Linguistics series,” and an edited volume on Cognitive Corpus Linguistics, which will be published in 2009. Her monograph focuses on emotional expressions in cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspective and provides insights into how people talk about emotions in different cultures. The volume on Cognitive Corpus Linguistics gathers several papers presented at the 2007 International Cognitive Linguistics Conference which test cognitive hypothesis against the reality of corpus data. In the past ten years she edited a volume on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, based on the proceedings of a national conference she organized at the University of Washington. She has also published ten articles in prestigious Slavic and general linguistics journals.
• Assistant Professor Barbara Henry‘s main area of research is Yiddish (Russian-Jewish) Literature. In 2006 she was one of the two organizers of a highly successful international conference entitled “Yiddish Theatre Revisited: New Perspectives on Drama and Performance.” It featured leading scholars of Yiddish literature and theatre, who presented their research on the history, repertoire and legacies of the Yiddish theatre. She has co-edited a volume, Yiddish Theatre Revisited, based on the proceedings of this conference. Her monograph, Re-Writing Russia: Jacob Gordin, Yiddish Theatre, and the Idea of Russian Literature, devoted to a popular Russian-Jewish playwright, will be published by the University of Washington Press. She has also published seven articles in prestigious journals and book chapters.
• Associate Professor James West is working on two books, The Russian Idea: Criticism, Mysticism, and Nationalism in Russia since 1880 and In Living Memory: The Persistence of Traditional Images in Russian Visual Culture. He has also completed one other manuscript, The Icon and the Word: Literature and Painting in Russian Culture. Since 1996, he has published three articles and book chapters as well as four entries for the Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, including one on Zhukovsky. In 2005, Professor West was instrumental in securing a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant of $325,000 to fund a project on which he and Michael Biggins have been working for several years now: the creation of a digital archive and website for the William C. Brumfield collection of photographs of Russian architecture. He is also responsible for the information design of the Project’s interface.
• Lecturer Valentina Zaitseva is the author of The Speaker’s Perspective in Grammar and Lexicon. The Case of Russian. In the past ten years she has published six articles and book chapters, including a 2006 article on “Gender and National Identity through Russian Language.”