Slavic Languages and Literatures

The Romanian community launched its fundraising efforts in support of Romanian studies with a delightful Romanian Chamber Music Night on May 12, 2013. Works by Enescu, Bartok, and Porumbescu were performed by violinist Cristian Gruber, cellist Cealice Kennison, violist Adam Weiss and pianist Angela Draghicescu. Historical context was provided by Ileana Marin and musical context by Claudia Jensen. Proceeds from the concert were used to establish the department’s latest fund, the Romanian Studies Fund.

On Saturday, May 4 the Slavic Department hosted Foss High School students at the annual ACTR Olympiada of Spoken Russian. After the competition, students, teacher (and alumnus) Daniel Erickson, and judges (alumnus Dimitri Kotlyar, lecturer Valentina Zaitseva and administrator Shosh Westen) posed for photos in the Grieg Garden.

Michelle Lie is the latest recipient of the Vadim Pahn Scholarship. She will be using it to study intensive fourth-year Russian this summer.

Slavic Department graduate student Matt Boyd was recently awarded a Fulbright through ACTR for the summer intensive ACTR Russian Teacher Training Program at Moscow State University.

An article about the Academic Challenge and Engagement Study conceived of by the Office of Educational Assessment quotes undergraduate adviser Megan Styles on her experience interviewing graduating seniors about their experiences in the major.

Grad student Lena Doubivko’s latest film review of Avdot’ia Smirnova’s “Kokoko” appears in Kinokultura.

UW PSEC has awarded its 2013 Polish Studies Scholarship to Karolina Lamb. Karolina is a graduate student in REECAS and will use the scholarship to travel to Poland this summer in order to conduct research for her MA thesis. Her work focuses on the relationship between Poles and Jews in contemporary Poland. She is planning to compare the Polish reaction to Jan Gross’s 2000 book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, with the reaction to Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath and study responses to the book and film by Polish intellectuals, scholars, and the general public.

Andrej Markovčič, a UW double major in Philosophy and History (BA 2013) and student of Slovene, is the winner of the 2012 Joseph Velikonja Undergraduate Prize, awarded by the Society for Slovene Studies for the year’s best essay or research paper in any discipline written by a U.S. or Canadian undergraduate on a topic involving Slovene studies. Andrej’s paper, “The Nietzschean Ideal in Vladimir Bartol’s Al-Araf,” was based on a close reading of this often overlooked 1935 collection of short stories in which Bartol’s narrator explores various real life misapplications of what the book’s characters wrongly assume to be Nietzschean thought. Andrej will be spending a post-graduation year in Slovenia.

Two of Galya Diment’s books are out as paperbacks as of spring 2013: A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury (McGill-Queens UP) and Pniniad (UW Press). In addition, effective April 1, 2013, she has been appointed to the Thomas L. & Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Faculty Fellowship for a three-year term.

Grad student Veronica Muskheli’s research on Russian Jewish folklore was recently featured in the Stroum Jewish Studies Program’s fall 2012 newsletter. A link is also provided to her blog post, “St. Petersburg: New Pride, Old Prejudice?”