Lawrencian Chronicle Fall 2018

THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES

THE LAWRENCIAN CHRONICLE Vol. XXIX no. 1 Fall 2018

IN THIS ISSUE Chair’s Corner...................................................................... 2 Czech Language at KU......................................................... 3 Jonathan Perkins’ Interview................................................. 4 Fake News or Not.................................................................. 5 SEEES Club..........................................................................7 Goran Fercec’s Interview......................................................8 Study Abroad Stories.............................................................9 Student News.......................................................................14 Former Faculty News.........................................................18 Alumni News.................................................................... ...23 SLL in Pictures....................................................................26

CHAIR’S CORNER

by Stephen Dickey Last year was a busy year for everyone in the Slavic Department, and despite the challenging times there is a fair amount of good news. Our enrollments are up, and since we started testing the language abilities of our graduating BAs with Oral Proficiency Interviews two years ago, the results have been very encouraging. Dr. Wallo reports that SLL students reach the Intermediate High and sometimes the Advanced level by graduation, especially if they have studied abroad. Congratulations to all of our language instructors who make this happen.

As for faculty, congratulations are in order to Ani Kokobobo, who was awarded tenure last year and now holds the rank of Associate Professor.

At the 3rd Convocation of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures in September, my friend and colleague Mark R. Lauersdorf of the University of Kentucky and I presented a Festschrift entitled V zeleni drželi zeleni breg: Studies in Honor of Marc L. Greenberg to Professor Marc Greenberg in recognition of his long record of scholarship, as well as his advocacy of foreign language study in the US. Mark and I had kept the project a secret, and Prof. Greenberg, as we had 2

hoped, was taken by complete surprise.

Six graduate students passed the department’s MA comprehensive exam last spring: Molly Godwin-Jones and Devin McFadden, who passed with honors, and Oksana Husieva, Frane Karabatić, Nicholas Shea, and Olga Savchenko. The five members of the 2016 cohort also went on to complete the department’s MA degree.

This winter we will welcome a new graduate student, Cecilia Leugers. We congratulate them all and welcome Ms. Leugers.

Our most recent Graduate Student Course Contest winner, Ekaterina Chelpanova, will teach an undergraduate literature course entitled Otherworldly Lovers, Dead Grooms, and Living Portraits: The Gothic Tradition in Russian Literature, Painting, and Film In Spring 2018, McKinzey Manes, who graduated with a South Slavic BA the previous year, had two translations of short stories by the early 20th-century Sephardic Serbian writer Hajim S. Davičo (“Scenes from Life on the Belgrade Strand” and “One Evening on the Strand…”) appear in Balkanistica 31. These two translations were part of the product of her BA Capstone Experience (SLAV 495 Senior Capstone Seminar). The Capstone Experience has been very successful since its implementation. It allows undergraduates to carry out significant research projects based on their own interests with individual attention from a faculty member. Other projects completed to date include “Metaphor, Metonymy, Misiu, and Muffin: A Comparison of Polish and English Terms of Endearment” (Jason Cash), “A Comparative Study of the Russian Swan Maiden through the Genres” (Tay Cameron), “Representations of Roma people in Russian Popular Culture” (Rada Lowery), and “Враги Народа: Enemies of the Soviet People” (Ian Smith). We look forward to more rewarding projects in the future.

This year, thanks to the gracious generosity of Belinda Schuman and the Conrad family, we awarded the first annual Joseph L. Conrad Memorial Scholarship to Shin Haseop, and the first annual Joseph L. Conrad Undergraduate Study Abroad Scholarship to Eliza Hemmer.

The Joseph L. Conrad Memorial Fund also continues to be a crucial resource for our graduate students, giving them support for professionalization activities, such as traveling to conferences to present papers and chair panels or obtaining professional certifications. In 2017– 2018, Krysztof Borowski, Molly Godwin-Jones, Oksana Husieva, Devin McFadden, Ekaterina Chelpanova, and Megan Luttrell received support from the fund.

This fall we are delighted to work together with CREES and CEC ARTSLink to host Zoya Falkova, a poet and a visual artist from Kazakhstan, who is staying at KU from October 11 to November 14 of this year.

CZECH LANGUAGE AT KU

by Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova The Slavic Department has hired a new Czech lecturer, Dr. Mila SaskovaPierce, who will teach Elementary and Intermediate Czech language courses online, starting this fall. A KU alumna, Dr. Saskova-Pierce had a long and successful career as a Professor of Slavic Languages and Cultures at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Her research and teaching interests lie in language teaching pedagogy, using technology in language instruction, cultural history, and Slavic linguistics. For many years, she has been active in Czech organizations around Lincoln, including the Czech Language Foundation, which aims to advance the teaching and appreciation of the Czech language, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU), and Lincoln Czechs and Czech-Nebraska. She believes that Czech-American culture is integral to wider Czech culture and hopes to “build a bridge” between the two.

In recognition of her contributions to raising the visibil-

ity of Czech language and culture in America, she was appointed the Czech honorary consul for Nebraska in 2017.Dr. Saskova-Pierce has kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself.

I was born in Prague, now Czechia, and lived there until 1968. My emigration coincided with the end of Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact occupation in August 1968.

I left for the West because I feared political repercussions for my involvement in the student organization that took part in the so called Socialism with a Human Face reform movement. I studied in Belgium and later at the University of Kansas, where I received a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics.

2. What are some of the highlights of your career?

I was lucky to become a teacher because the interaction with students allowed me to learn from them as much as they learned from me. The intellectual community within the university enriched my life to such an extent that I do not want to give it up. On the other hand, the outreach and work with Czech heritage communities offered me the chance to participate in their creation of living culture, and this is something I truly enjoy. For the Czech communities in the Great Plains, the fact that their language is being taught at the university level constitutes a guarantee for the continuation of their cultural aspirations for their children, as well as for the protection of their cultural ties with the old country.

3. How did you develop an interest in online teaching?

Which aspects of teaching Czech online do you enjoy the most? Do you think online language instruction can be as effective as brick and mortar teaching?

Czech is a small language and in order to recruit more students one needs to reach beyond the geography of the campus. The online format requires motivation and selfdiscipline from students, yet at the same time, it attracts diverse students, and their interaction is enriching for everybody. Online students do learn as much as those in the physical classroom. After all, we are meeting online twice a week to speak. So this part is preserved.

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We are delighted to hear from any and all of you—our former language students, majors, and graduate students.

Please write and let us know what you are doing and where your studies at KU have led you. Your stories about how studying Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures has enriched your lives and modified the trajectory of your career plans help inspire today’s students to think out the world in a broader, more global framework.

We are grateful for your gifts to our department, which allow us to better support our students and carry out our mission.

4. Tell us about the research/creative projects you are currently working on.

Besides being a lecturer, I am also an Honorary Consul of the Czech Republic, and I am doing some administrative work in this function. I am also researching the intellectual collaboration between the US and the Czech Lands, which includes the feminist movement at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

I am also collaborating with my husband Layne Pierce on translating a Czech chronicle from the 18th century written by František Vavák, a farmer who lived through the Reformation, the Toleration Patents, and a number of wars in Austro-Hungary.

5. How do you like to spend your free time?

My favorite free time is spent with my family, including my grown-up children. I also enjoy classical music and reading books. Often I read while listening to music.

I am pleased to work for the institution that was intellectually a defining place for me, my alma mater, the University of Kansas.

AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. JONATHAN PERKINS, SLL ALUMNUS AND DIRECTOR OF THE KU ERMAL GARINGER ACADEMIC RESOURCE CENTER (EGARC)

by Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova 1. You graduated from the KU Slavic Department with a PhD in Russian Literature and wound up in a so-called alternative academic (alt-ac) staff position.

How did that come about?

Like most alt-ac staff, I found my job through a bit of luck. Although my skills in web design have never been more than passable, I learned how to make webpages relatively early and was offered a job designing websites for Less Commonly Taught Languages during the year I was planning to finish up my dissertation.

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Mila Saskova talking to Russian soldiers in 1968 in Prague

As I was teaching third year Russian and my first content course in addition to the website job, I did not get a lot of writing done that year. I also realized that I really liked working with faculty on creating language materials and that it was fun to figure out all the software needed to get the materials online. When a full-time position opened up in EGARC the next year, Bill Comer (who was a faculty member in Slavic as well as EGARC’s Director) offered it to me. I had to learn a lot about computers really quickly, but thanks to some wonderful mentoring from Bill, I found myself taking over the unit when he stepped down as Director a few years later. Now that I think about it, there is a pretty direct line between my initial work with LCTL instructors almost twenty years ago and EGARC’s current work with the School for Languages under the new Language Resource Center grant. But it is not like any of that long-term development was planned.

2. Does your job allow you to make use of what you learned in the department?

Although I have not taught a course in the Slavic Department for many years, I feel inextricably linked to the department at this point.

FAKE NEWS OR NOT? A FINAL RESEARCH PROJECT IN THE COURSE RUSSIAN FOR THE PROFESSIONS

by Irina Six In my teaching practice, I have always tried to supplement traditional textbook-centered instruction with projects involving authentic texts and real-life experiences in order to keep the interest of today’s “click-generation” in the learning process. In Spring 2018, a group of Russian journalists from Ekaterinburg visited KU as part of a State Department Peer-to-Peer grant focused on fake news and independent fact-checking. As soon as I found out about their visit, I contacted them and we collaborated on creating a prompt for the final research project in my Russian for the Professions course. The Russian journalists provided some photos and news materials published in Russian social media as well as some theoretical readings on how to verify the authenticity of social media posts.

Russian journalists Elena Shlegel’, Dima Shlykov and Oleg Medvedev

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I have spent the last three years working on Между нами, the first year Russian curriculum that KU uses, and hired four SLL graduate students to help get everything online.

I have also worked with Professors Dickey and Wallo to set up the intensive Russian program at Fort Carson as part of my work with the Language Training Center grant, and the new LRC grant includes major OER projects for both Ukrainian and Russian. I am not sure that I can remember everything that I learned about the fall of the jers or the plot of the novel Cement, but there is no possible way that I could do my job without the ability to think broadly, read critically and write clearly … and those are all skills that I learned as a graduate student in the Slavic Department.

3. What is the best part of your job?

It is never boring. We have a nice mix of long-term projects that require sustained focus, short-term projects that provide opportunities to try new things, and drop-in requests that help to keep us on our toes. And while I am excited about our expanded work on foreign languages, I hope that it will continue to be complemented by work on projects like Мigration Stories and Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement, if only to give me the opportunity to learn new things. I am also fortunate to have a staff that is just as curious as I am, and excels in meeting the many challenges that are put before them.

4. Do you have any advice for graduate students who are thinking about an alt-ac job?

I think everyone who goes to graduate school in the Humanities does so to become a professor, and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from pursuing that goal, especially if it is the only thing that will make them happy. I would, however, suggest that graduate students take advantage of tangential opportunities that may present themselves.

Work on a journal to learn about the peer-review process and economic pressures on publishing in the 21st century.

Do some translation work to use your language skills in new ways. Learn about the technologies that are shaping online instruction and Digital Humanities. Work in an office on campus like Study Abroad to get a real sense of how a university works behind the scenes. All of these experiences will enhance your value as a young academic, and could also help you discover jobs that you had never considered as a career path.

All of the materials were written in Russian.

The prompt for the final project read as follows: In the last week of the semester we will have guests— Russian journalists from Ekaterinburg. They have sent us a few photos published recently in Russian social media and would like to know how critically you read social media publications. Your task will be to determine whether these photos and the news they are announcing are authentic. In groups of three, you will have to prepare PowerPoint presentations and explain: 1) what do you see in the photographs and what is written about the event they illustrate? 2) describe your process of analyzing the photograph and the news; 3) is this news fake or real and why?

The students’ reaction to the project was very enthusiastic. Their presentations surpassed my expectations and impressed the Russian guests. Although it was stressful for the students to give presentations in front of Russian native speakers and accomplished journalists, they nevertheless appreciated the opportunity to discuss with them the global problem of fake news. The Russian guests, in turn, admired the KU students’ strong motivation to learn such a difficult language like Russian, the interesting questions they asked, and the high level of fluency they have acquired in just three years.

Here are some quotes from the student evaluations and the Russian journalists’ comments: “I really liked the project we did. I feel like the topic of fake news is such a big problem we face in today’s world

Derek Vanwyck

Anna Whitaker

that it was very interesting to do research on this topic and find ways of discovering fake news. I really enjoyed having the Russian journalists here. It gave us practice using our Russian skills not only in front of our classmates, but also in front of real native Russian speakers.

I think it is amazing that our teacher Irina as well as the Slavic department as a whole, gives us opportunities like these. Russian is a very challenging language to learn, but I feel very grateful to have such a great teacher and department to help myself and my classmates with anything we need help with. Everyone in the department really goes the extra mile for all of us, and that is what Ihink makes this such a great program at KU.” “I was very grateful for the opportunity to speak in front of native speakers of Russian. Though a bit stressful, it was a unique and rewarding experience to have a real investigative project presented to journalists. Thank you to everyone who facilitated this meeting.”

“I am so happy the professors and journalists from Russia came to our class. It was very interesting to ask them questions and hear their perspectives. It was a very relevant project and I really enjoyed it.”

“If I were an American student, I would never have studied the Russian language. I would have probably come to the first class, looked at the alphabet and said: ‘No, thank you. This is not for me.’ And you are learning this strange language. Moreover, you are doing amazingly well. This is cool. Really. Carry on.”

“I was amazed by the concrete motivation of every student to study Russian: the students knew very well how they wanted to use their Russian skills in the future. If we take into account the fact that they come to the Russian program with zero knowledge of the language, their level is pretty good. They were not always able to choose the correct/appropriate word, but I could tell by looking at them that they understood everything we said and we spoke at a normal pace.”

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by Molly Godwin-Jones This year, the Russian Club has transformed into the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES) Club! This is a student-run organization for anyone interested in this part of the world. SEEES Club was created to expand students’ opportunities to learn about Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian culture beyond the classroom. We will host various on- and off-campus events to accomplish our club mission and create a fun and relaxing community! So far in fall 2018, we have hosted a “Meet and Multik” event on campus, where we watched Russian cartoons and got to know each other, and Blini Night off campus (pictures below), where we made and ate delicious blini! We may occasionally bring in professors or native speakers of Slavic and other languages to do informal sessions about historical/cultural/ current events in a laid-back and informal setting. Please feel free to give us feedback and ideas for our events or meetings. Anyone interested in SEEES Club will be informed of upcoming events (both those sponsored by our Club and other events relating to Russian and Eurasian culture) through the SEEES Club Facebook Page, Instagram, or Twitter—follow us! If you are interested or have questions/comments, don’t hesitate to contact us at kuseees@gmail.com!

SEEES Club Vice-President Spencer Miles turned out to be a master blini-maker!

SEEES Club members enjoying some tasty blini!

Around 30 people attended Blini Night!

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SEES CLUB

AN INTERVIEW WITH GORAN FERČEC

by Stephen Dickey In the Fall of 2017, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures hosted the CEC ArtsLink resident, Croatian writer and playwright Goran Ferčec. He is the author of the novel There Will Be No Miracles Here, published

by Fraktura in 2011. In 2015, he published a collection of essays titled Handbook for Yesterday: Thirteen Essays.

His first play, Letter to Heiner Müller, was staged in 2011 by the Zagreb Youth Theater. His most recent work, the drama trilogy Workers, is forthcoming by Fractura. The plays are representative of his recent preoccupation with the notion of the working class and what happened to it at the beginning of the 21st century, especially in the countries that experienced the transition from communism to liberal democracy. For his work for the theater, Ferčec has received numerous national and international awards.

Professor Dickey talked with Goran Ferčec about his creative projects and his time in the US. What were your goals for the CEC ArtsLink residency?

If you write or are devoted to a similar line of creative work that requires being sequestered from the hustle and bustle of daily life, writing is always a struggle with the outside world and time. So, goals do not always get realized the way they were planned. And an abyss of despair can open up, if we let that happen. I brought all the manuscripts I had been working on to the CEC ArtsLink Residency: an adaptation of the novella Water by the Croatian writer Vladimir Nazor for the Croatian National Theater in Rijeka, a manuscript of my plays that I was preparing for publication by my publisher Fraktura this year, and lastly, I brought the manuscript of a novel with which I applied for the CEC ArtsLink Residency. So, I planned on devoting my time in Lawrence chiefly to working on the novel, but as I said, what we plan and what we do are two different things. The despair that I mentioned earlier threatened to take over my days in Lawrence, so I had to pull myself together and do something about it. My gracious colleague Marta Pirnat-Greenberg generously lent me a bicycle and I rode countless kilometers on the city streets of Lawrence, as well as the expansive subdivisions, realizing that riding a bicycle had to be the activity most similar to writing.

Riding in an east-west direction was full of impossibly steep slopes, which meant constantly getting off the bicycle, a disruption that broke up the ride similarly to the 8

Goran Ferčec

distractions that made difficult my concentrating on the writing. In the end, I didn’t write either of the chapters of the novel that I had planned. I finished the adaptation of Nazor’s novella and revised my dramas for publication. In addition, I had several wonderful meetings and discussions with students and professors at KU and the Kansas Art Institute. I was also very happy that Professor Dickey made an excellent translation of one of the essays from my collection A Handbook for Yesterday, so I could present it to a Kansas audience.

You’ve been to New York before, but not the Midwest. Was there anything that surprised you about Lawrence and Kansas?

I experienced New York several years ago in 2012, when a theater piece from my text “A Letter to Heiner M.” was performed by the Zagreb Youth Theater in the La Mama Theater. New York is actually almost a typical European city. The diversity one finds in New York breaks every stereotype one has about America. The Midwest, on the other hand, embodies a typical stereotype of America.

But both New York and Lawrence have something in common, and that is the feeling that you already know them: the image of the USA is so present in the everyday

STUDY ABROAD STORIES Tony Ware and Ruth Remmers in Gorno-Altaisk, Altai Republic, Russian Federation.

My wife, Ruth Remmers, and I just returned yesterday from an excursion—the third field trip we have made since arriving in the Altai Republic in mid-September.

Ruth received a Fulbright Student Research Grant to study small-numbered indigenous peoples and a small religious sect concerning their perceptions of tourism’s effect on their culture and the natural environment. The Altai Republic has a small number of residents compared to large numbers of tourists arriving annually, and about 35 percent of the local population is indigenous. Because Ruth received the grant, I took an intensive Russian class at the University of Kansas in June and July and accompanied her to Russia.

Now that you have returned, did your stay here affect your writing, and if so how?

The biggest change that my time in Lawrence brought about was that I started writing a diary again, noting down everything that I would otherwise forget. In writing down one’s daily experiences, insignificant things remain just as insignificant, and the day-to-day is just that. What intrigues me as a writer about writing such things down is not that I make insignificant things significant, but that I attempt to save them from oblivion. Saving insignificant day-to-day things from oblivion is, in the end, completely futile, as is the very act of writing, but there are passing moments when it comforts me.

We have gone to the Ust-Koksa District to visit Old Believers, Choia and Turachak Districts to visit Tubalars, and just this weekend to the Ulagan District to visit Telengits. These were fascinating adventures. The weather cooperated nicely, and the view of the Altai Mountains and scenery was spectacular. Different mountain areas reminded me of places in the north-western United States – the featureless tall mountains of Nevada, the high pinetree laden mountains in central Idaho, and the rugged, steep, majestic snowy peaks of the Tetons in Wyoming.

Large, fast-moving rivers wind through the mountains as you would find in any western state of the United States.

On these trips, we stopped at villages where we conducted surveys. We not only enjoyed dining in local cafes, but also in private homes. I sampled many types of food, such as a local fish baked in a sour dough pie, and pickled tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. I was totally fascinated with the local honeys, because there are so many different kinds.

Farm animals seem to roam everywhere – cows, horses, sheep, a few pigs, as well as dogs and cats. In the country, we noticed ravens, hawks, and song birds. In the city of Gorno-Altaisk, where we live, there are lots of pigeons.

There have been a lot of lady bugs here, too, because the city seems to be on their migration route. As the weather has turned colder, the lady bugs have gradually disappeared.

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life of the average inhabitant of the Earth, of non-Americans, that everything one sees upon arrival in Kansas has actually already been seen. America only confirms the images that we carry inside and that we have gotten through various media. You recognize America before you get to know it. The six weeks I spent in Lawrence were a meditative period during which I had the feeling that, being distant from the world, I was more in control of its chaos. All the little things seemed littler to me.

Everything far away seemed more distant. The fact that all those I know were asleep while I was awake and viceversa brought a kind of peace to my daily existence. It was wonderful to be out of sync with the place I came from, for a little while.

We also went on a brief trip to Moscow. Moscow is a busy place with lots of international businesses, fast subways, and people walking fast on the sidewalks. People are very helpful. We stopped for minute in the Paveletskaya metro station (subway) wondering which way to go to catch our train to another station. A fellow quickly walking by asked us in English which station we were going to. We answered Tverskaya. He pointed and said, “Get on that train, get off at Tverskaya, one, two, three stops, and then exit to the city.� Then he was gone. His advice was exactly correct.

In Gorno-Altaisk, we use mass transit, namely the city buses, because we do not have a car. A bus heading to the university appears every few minutes at nearby bus stops. If we need to find a place or certain items, people are willing to help us. Grocery stores are numerous, and they have almost everything we want. I even found

peanut butter at one of them, which made me very happy.

Fruits and vegetables, especially root vegetables, are fresh. There is an ample selection of various meats. Quail eggs are popular and available in grocery stores, and we have enjoyed eating them. There are outdoor markets to buy local vegetables, although those stands have been disappearing with the turn in the weather. One item I have found at the outdoor markets, which I really like, is a drink with horseradish, tomato juice, and garlic, called yadryonyi khrenoder. It will light your taste buds right up!

People here are easy to get along with. They are not just helpful, they often inquire where we are from, and enjoy talking with us. So far, life in the Altai Republic has been a grand experience. The weather is about the same as in Kansas, although it may get colder than Kansas does as winter progresses.

Tony and Ruth at Turachak, Lake Teletskoe, 13 Oct 2018

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Ust-Koksa, Ruth and Tony Katun River, near Ust-Koksa village, 5 Oct. 2018

Ulagan, mountains and Chuya river, near the road, 20 Oct 2018

Ongudai, Chuya-Katun Valley, 2 rivers join, Place of Power, 20 Okt 2018

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Eliza Hemmer on a Study abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia in summer 2018 I had the opportunity to participate in the Summer Language Intensive Program through the School of Russian and Asian Studies (SRAS). I got to live in St. Petersburg, Russia for two months. I lived in the international dormitory on campus of the St. Petersburg State University of Economics in the very heart of the city. After a blur of week spent in orientations and tours, we began our regularly scheduled classes. I placed into the upper intermediate class, along with five other American students.

Classes were up to five hours a day, Monday-Thursday.

I grabbed a latte from my favorite place just down the street every day before class, and every day after class I explored the city. I have always enjoyed the theatre, and Russia is famous for ballet. While there, I saw Cinderella, Anna Karenina, and Swan Lake at three historical theatres. I also went to a stage production of Master and Margarita. The arts scene is an easy and pleasant way to get to know the local culture. There are museums of history, art, even “ethnography.� My favorite Russian artist was Mikhail Vrubel. It took me three separate and long trips to see the Hermitage, but the Japanese art on the top floor turned out to be completely worth it.

Georgian food is amazing. With a new life-long friend of mine, I took Cuban salsa classes at a studio for five weeks, taught by Russians for Russians. The Catherine Gardens was one of my favorite things from my time in Russia. I took my first train ride to go to Moscow for the weekend. While I was there, the Russian Federation beat Spain in the World Cup. Aside from all the fun, there was a lot to learn. For me, the most profound thing I was confronted with while in Russia was the continual aftermath of World War II. As a 22-year-old female from America, World War II feels like history. We are so far removed from it here.

In Russia, they are still healing. On the way to Moscow,

the tour guide pointed out a cemetery with fresh graves.

He then informed us that the bodies of WWII soldiers are still being found in the outskirts of St. Petersburg.

Every attempt is made to identify them, notify the family, and give them a proper burial. Many of Peter’s most beloved monuments and churches have bullet holes or other damage. Statues and artwork have gone missing, buried or otherwise hidden away to protect them from harm. There are survivors of the siege still living, not just veterans of the war. It was so sobering, it gave me a whole new understanding of what war does to a country and its people. My time in Russia really drove WWII home for me, but it also gave me perspective on all future wars that I hope never happen.

I have never gotten to enjoy myself and my time the way I did in Peter. Living abroad is truly like breathing new air. Sights, sounds, tastes and sensations unlike any I have experienced before, but invigorating and restorative.

Peter was a delight, and I am determined to return many times in the future.

Eliza Hemmer at a stage production of Master and Margarita

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Catherine Gardens

Swan Lake and the Alexandrinksy

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STUDENT NEWS This spring, Molly Godwin-Jones passed her M.A. comprehensive exams with honors. Over the summer, she participated in KU’s Stats Camp for the second year in a row, and also taught intensive first-year Russian at KU with Devin McFadden. While teaching, she participated in a STARTALK intensive online program on transitioning to teaching languages online (eportfolio: https://megojoneseportfolio.wordpress. com/). In August, Molly was a core leadership staff member at Concordia Language Village’s Lesnoe Ozero, where she also received a Citation of Excellence Award. Soon after the fall semester started, Molly presented a paper on aspect and verbs of motion at the Slavic Linguistics Society Annual Conference. In October, Molly gave a presentation at MWALLT on using Digital Humanities tools in the foreign language classroom. Molly recently traveled to Bloomington for an ACTFL-sponsored workshop on curriculum and lesson planning for intensive courses; she is excited to

Molly presenting at SLS in September (University of Oregon)

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Molly receiving award at CLV’s Lesnoe Ozero in August

use the knowledge from this seminar in her teaching next summer. As the fall semester ends, Molly will join the large contingent from KU heading to Boston for ASEEES, where she will present a paper on expressions of gender performance in the work of Zinaida Gippius as part of a panel organized by Oksana Husieva.

In addition, Molly is chairing an SLA panel and planning a Slavic Sing Along, where anyone at ASEEES can join in for some informal musical fun with folk songs from various Slavic countries. In January, Molly will give a webinar for IALLT on using Quizlet in the foreign language classroom, followed by a Brownbag on Gippius in March. In addition to teaching, coursework, and conference participation, this year Molly has been working to revitalize the community for undergraduate students by transforming the Russian Club into the SEEES (Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies) Club. So far, SEEES Club has elected undergraduate officers and hosted two social events for students. More events are being planned for the end of the fall semester and next spring, so stay tuned!

Olga Savchenko passed the PhD qualification exam in spring 2018. In the summer, she worked as a Beginner Russian instructor for STARTALK, an immersion residential language program for high school students at the University of Pittsburgh, for the second time. Prior to that, she took part in the Spring 2018 STARTALK conference in Philadelphia, PA, where she learned a lot about teaching in an immersion language classroom. This semester, she is teaching 2nd year Russian at KU and working on a research project about the role of culture-specific gestures in Russian language instruction with Prof. Oleksandra Wallo and Prof.

Renee Perelmutter.

STARTALK Russian language students performing a Russian folk dance choreographed by Olga Savchenko

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The academic year 2017/2018 was a busy one for Krzysztof Borowski. He continued his work on his dissertation, completing a chapter on linguistic forms of mutual othering in Polish-Silesian online discussions and outlining another chapter on gender and the use of gendered language there.

He also received a summer scholarship from the Office of Graduate Studies for a research project on verbal violence and hejt, which will lead to another chapter in his dissertation.

Throughout the year, he has also been working on other research projects, including an article on Silesian for the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics edited by our very own Prof. Marc L. Greenberg. Further, a survey of contemporary research in Slavic dialectology, co-authored with Joseph Schallert and Curt F. Woolhiser, was published in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

He has also completed an article manuscript with Professor Renee Perelmutter on recent trends in research on discourse and pragmatics in Slavic languages.

In addition, he also presented his research at international conferences in Europe. In June 2018, he traveled to Łódź (Poland), where he participated in a panel on radical discourses, hate speech, and verbal violence. There, he presented an invited paper titled “Szlezjery i Paljaki: Discursive Strategies of Othering in a Polish-Silesian Online Discussion Forum.” In July, he traveled to Aalborg (Denmark) for the 2018 Conference on Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD), where he gave a talk titled “Identity, Social Control, and the Erasure of Difference in Polish-Silesian Online Discourse.”

His participation in this conference was possible thanks to an internal travel bursary awarded to him by the conference organizers, and thanks to the generous support from the Joseph L. Conrad Memorial Fund, for which he is very grateful.

Last spring, Devin McFadden published a book review of Adulterous Nations by Tatiana Kuzmic in SEEJ. In addition, she passed the MA comprehensive exams with honors. This summer, Devin adapted her experience teaching literature and culture to the foreign language classroom by co-teaching intensive first-year Russian with Molly Godwin-Jones. Their students were very successful, with all ProjectGO students scoring above the expected minimum score on their OPIs. This fall, Devin is continuing to teach first-year Russian, and will return to her Hall Center Fellowship next year. In December, Devin will present a paper on Sofia Kovolevskaya at ASEEES, and in February 2019 she will participate in a Tolstoy panel at AATSEEL. Her adorable dog, Judith Butler (Judy B), celebrated her first birthday in October.

Judy B enjoying the weather this summer

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Frane Karabatić spent his summer at the University of Pittsburg, PA, teaching Intensive Elementary and Intermediate Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian (BCS) at the Summer Language Institute, which focuses on critical and less commonly taught languages. He has been with SLI at the University of Pittsburgh since 2013. This semester, Frane is teaching Advanced BCS and an online course on South Slavic Literature and Civilization.

In December, he will travel to Boston, where he will present his research on Chekhov at the annual ASEEES conference.

Megan Luttrell taught intensive first level Russian as the lead instructor at the Indiana University summer language workshop this summer and led the Russian singing club there. She gave a guest lecture on Slavic languages in the REES 110 class for the third year in a row. She is working on becoming a certified OPI tester. Megan was a participant in a round table discussion at AATSEEL in February titled “Using Mezhdu nami for Intensive Summer Programs.” She was the recipient of the Conrad Award and Norman Saul Travel Award. She completed a graduate certificate in second language studies, and will be defending her dissertation on December 14th.

Over the summer, Anna Karpusheva worked in the International Collections at Watson Library, where she organized an exhibit devoted to the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia and the history of soccer in Russia and the Soviet Union. She has continued to work on her dissertation on Svetlana Alexievich and has completed two and a half chapters. Anna organized a panel titled “Reading Svetlana Alexievich: Ethics, Aesthetics, Gender, and Trauma” for the 2018 ASEEES Convention.

In March 2019, Anna will give a Brownbag talk at CREES titled “Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses: Reliving the Magic Tale of Childhood.”

Anna is looking forward to completing her studies at KU and moving on to the next stage of her career.

This fall, Chulhyun Hwang is continuing to teach first-year Russian and developing the EnglishRussian language exchange program to assist and motivate students to learn Russian outside of the classroom. Chulhyun has joined the Concert Choir of the University of Kansas as a first tenor. He has participated in a Collage Concert at the Lied Center, two KU Choir’s concerts in October, the recording of “Liberation” by the KU wind ensemble, and will take part in three Vesper concerts at the end of November and December.

In Spring 2018 Katya Chelpanova, together with Yulia Glushneva, a PhD student in film and media studies at Concordia University (and a former KU PhD student), organized a panel titled “Sound and Voice as Performative Agents in Cinema, Media and Literature” for the 2018 ASEEES Convention.

Katya’s paper will be devoted to soundtrack as a performative agent in the Soviet films The Cranes are Flying by Mikhail Kalatozov and Long Farewell by Kira Muratova. This paper is part of Katya’s dissertation exploring Russian literature and film from the Thaw era and the 1970-1980s.

In addition, Katya has submitted two articles for publication, which are currently under review. She is grateful to her advisors, Professors Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova, Vitaly Chernetsky and Renee Perelmutter, for providing valuable feedback on her article and dissertation manuscripts. She is also indebted to Krzysztof Borowski for his advice regarding her PhD portfolio, which is nearing its completion. During the summer, Katya successfully launched her private tour guide agency. She enjoys showing tourists Russia’s old capital, but often takes them off the beaten track for visits to Pavlovsk, Gatchina or Pskov.

Oksana Husieva presenting at CREES

Katya with her American-Chinese tour group in Pavlovsk 17

Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2018

Last February, Oksana Husieva presented a paper at the 2018 AATSEEL Conference on the literary representations of Dohodiagi, the dehumanized victims of the Gulag, in Solzhenitysyn’s and Shalamov’s works. Over the summer, she worked in the International Collections at Watson Library, where she collaborated with Anna Karpusheva on an oral histories translation project, which involved transcribing audio CDs about immigrant experiences in the US and then translating them.

This fall, Oksana is teaching advanced Ukrainian and Slavic Folklore. In October, she gave a CREES Brownbag talk titled “Nadezhda Teffi’s Play ‘The Woman Question’ as a Response to the Women’s Movement in Russia.” She will present a version of this talk at ASEEES in December. Together with Molly Godwin-Jones, Oksana organized a panel for ASEEES titled “Gender Performance in Finde-Siècle Russian Women’s Writing” featuring papers on poetry, theater, and prose.

FACULTY NEWS Marta Pirnat-Greenberg developed an online language course, Beginning Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian I, which is a condensed version of the first-semester of the regular sequence course. It is designed to satisfy the needs of students who are interested in acquiring very basic skills in B/C/S languages and cultures, but cannot (or do not want to) commit to taking the language sequence. This might include KU and outside students with a general interest in the area, a personal or family

In June 2018, Prof. Marc L. Greenberg traveled to Montenegro to establish a memorandum of agreement with the Faculty for Montenegrin Language and Literature in Cetinje. In August, he traveled to the Congress of Slavists in Belgrade, Serbia, where he serves on the Committee on Language Contact, and worked with his editorial team on the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics. In August, he was presented with a (surprise) Festschrift, edited by Stephen M. Dickey and Mark Richard Lauersdorf (PhD with Honors ’95), with nearly 400 pages of articles by colleagues from the US and around the globe. While on sabbatical in fall 2018 to complete several projects, he traveled to Japan to give lectures at Waseda University in Tokyo and Hokkaido University in Sapporo.

Croatian writer Goran Ferčec visiting BCS class

connection to the area, or plans to travel there for business or pleasure. The online format of the course should open the possibility of learning BCS to off-campus, working, and non-traditional students, from whom we fairly regularly receive requests for this type of a course. If the course garners enough interest, she plans to develop a continuation of it in the near future. In the fall, she hosted the Croatian writer Goran Ferčec in her second-year BCS class. He talked to the students about his work and answered their questions, and then engaged them in a short writing workshop.

Marc L. Greenberg with linguists Novica Vujović and Adnan Čirgić visiting the Njegoš Mausoleum in Lovćen, Montenegro.

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LawrencĂ­an Chronicle, Fall 2018

Prof. Greenberg meeting with the SLLC Advisory Board, August 2018. In the upper left is Slavic alumnus Dr. Dan E. Davidson.

Prof. Motoki Nomachi hosted Marc L. Greenberg at his visit to the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University

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2017-2018 was a busy academic year for Prof. Vitaly Chernetsky. He published an article on the New Yorkbased Russian émigré writer and artist Slava Mogutin in the volume Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity (Routledge) and an afterword to the collection Eastern Europe Unmapped: Beyond Borders and Peripheries (Berghahn). Two of his articles are in press, one in a collection titled Global Russian Cultures (University of Wisconsin Press), the other in a Festschrift for Prof. Marko Pavlyshyn, Australia’s leading scholar of Slavic literatures. He has also published translations of several contemporary Ukrainian authors in the anthology The White Chalk of Days (Academic Studies Press) and in Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations (based at the University of Toronto). A comprehensive bilingual collection of poetry by Yuri Andrukhovych, one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary authors, titled Songs for a Dead Rooster, which he co-translated with Ostap Kin, was published in September 2018.

In addition to the ASEEES and MLA conventions, Prof.

Chernetsky delivered a paper at Harvard University’s conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ukrainian Studies at Harvard in May 2018. In the summer of 2018, he traveled to Australia and New Zealand, where he participated in a major international Ukrainian Studies conference at Monash University in Melbourne and delivered guest lectures at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch) and at the University of Otago (Dunedin). He is now serving as an external reader for a Ph.D. dissertation at Canterbury. The new partnership with the University of Canterbury, a major center for European Studies in New Zealand, is especially promising for future collaborative research projects.

On campus, he has poured a lot of effort into a wide variety of activities and projects in our department, at CREES, where he continues to serve as the director, and across campus. For 2017-2018, he served as a coinvestigator for a State Department Peer-to-Peer grant (together with the School of Journalism’s Lisa McLendon), through which KU established a partnership with the Humanities University in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s oldest private university, launched in 1990. The focus of the grant project is on developing resources for journalism students and practitioners on independent fact-checking and addressing the challenge of fake news. A collaborative class on the topic was taught by our two universities in Spring 2018, and the materials will go into open access shortly. Many KU students were involved in the project, including students in advanced-level Russian language classes. In February 2018, Chernetsky, McLendon, and another Journalism faculty member, Peter Bobkowski, 20

traveled to Ekaterinburg to meet with colleagues and students there. We are hopeful that this visit will lead to a successful long-term partnership. Prof. Chernetsky also used this opportunity to interview leading local writers and filmmakers and purchase hard-to-find books for KU’s libraries. On behalf of the Slavic Dept., he has now successfully applied three times to host a writer-in-residence through CEC ArtsLink, a prestigious New York-based nonprofit. In the fall of 2017, we hosted Goran Ferčec, a playwright and essayist from Croatia; in the fall of 2018, we are hosting Zoya Falkova, a Russian-language poet and visual artist from Kazakhstan.

In AY 2017-2018, Oleksandra Wallo completed and submitted her book manuscript, Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary – From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan, to the University of Toronto Press. Her article, “‘The Stone Master’: On the Invisibility of Women’s Writing from the Soviet Ukrainian Periphery,” was published in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies in March 2018. She began a research project on new drama in contemporary Ukraine and gave two presentations on this topic: “Women and War in Natalia Vorozhbyt’s Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha” at the 2017 ASEEES Convention in Chicago and a CREES Brownbag lecture, “New Drama in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine,” in April of 2018. She also presented a paper on the representations of the Euromaidan in documentary film and non-fiction at the Convention of the Association on the Study of Nationalities (ASN) in May of 2018. She is currently working on an open-access online Ukrainian textbook, Добра форма. Basic Ukrainian Grammar Communicatively, which is one of the textbook projects funded by KU’s newly established Open Language Resource Center.

Stephen M. Dickey presented three conference papers; he attempted a novel analysis of Russian biaspectual verbs in “A Dynamic Systems Approach to Biaspectual Verbs in Russian,” at the 15th Annual Conference of the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association in St. Petersburg, Russia, in October of 2017. He also presented two papers on historical Slavic aspectology: “Directed Motion Verbs in the Development of the East-West Aspect Division,” at the 6th International Conference of the Commission on Aspectology in Lille, France in April of 2018, and “Разрушение общеславянской системы прошедших времён как «катастрофа» в развитии славянского глагольного вида,” at the 16th International Congress of Slavists in Belgrade, Serbia in August 2018.

He published an updated discussion of the East-West Slavic Aspect Division in “Thoughts on the ‘Typology of Slavic Aspect’” in Russian Linguistics, as well as

Prof. Stephen Dickey and Dr. Mark R. Lauersdorf present a Festschrift entitled V zeleni drželi zeleni breg: Studies in Honor of Marc L. Greenberg to the totally taken by surprise Prof. Marc Greenberg

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Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2018

“Prefixation in the Rise of Slavic Aspect” in a volume entitled The Role of Prefixes in the Formation of Aspect and Related Categories. Problems of Grammaticalization. He has a paper on the aspect of Slavic imperatives forthcoming in Cahiers Chronos, and a paper entitled “On the History of Prefixed Imperfective Motion Verbs in Slavic” will appear any day in V zeleni drželi zeleni breg: Studies in Honor of Marc L. Greenberg, which he co-edited with KU Slavic PhD Mark R. Lauersdorf. He was invited to translate poems for an anniversary multilingual translation of Miljenko Jergović’s Opservatorija Varšava presented to the author in May of 2018, for which he translated “The Warsaw Observatory, or Not Waiting for the Barbarians,” “The Move,” “Inheritance,” and “He was Hoping.” In July 2018, he joined the editorial board of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

In AY 2018-9, Professor Renee Perelmutter is continuing to serve as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for both the Jewish Studies and the Slavic Languages and Literatures departments. They find the advising work rewarding and satisfying on multiple levels; it is always a pleasure to encourage students’ interest in all things Slavic. Prof. Perelmutter is excited about new opportunities for undergraduates in our department: thanks to the new Conrad Undergraduate Study Abroad Fellowship, our first awardee, Eliza Hemmer, was able to study abroad in St. Petersburg this summer (see a Lawrencian feature for more detail!). This year, Prof. Perelmutter has been active in a number of college-wide initiatives designed to make less commonly taught languages more accessible to marginalized students. Researchwise, Prof. Perelmutter has published a number of articles on Jewish Russian and Israeli Russian discourse, including an article in the prestigious Journal of Pragmatics; a few more articles on this topic are under review. This Fall, Prof. Perelmutter is enjoying teaching a graduate course titled Interdisciplinary Approaches to Narrative.

Professor Kokobobo was awarded tenure at KU last spring and is now an Associate Professor in the department. Her monograph, Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and the Gentry Decline, came out with The Ohio State University Press (Feb. 2018). Her translation of Ismail Kadare’s book, Essays in World Literature, also came out with Restless Books (Feb. 2018), and has been positively reviewed in Variety and The Wall Street Journal.

Prof. Kokobobo’s edited volume with Edith Clowes and Gisela Erbsloh, Russian Regional Identity, The Power of the Provinces, was published with Routledge (Jan. 2018); Prof. Kokobobo had an article in the volume. She has also included articles in the festschrift for Prof. Greenberg (Slavica, September 2018) co-edited by Stephen Dickey, as well as in the American contribution to the 2018 Congress of Slavists (Slavica, August 2018). She has an article in press on DH, digital mapping and War and Peace in a special issue of the journal Russian Literature (2019), and two other journal articles currently undergoing peer review.

Prof. Kokobobo gave talks at Columbia, NYU, and Dartmouth last spring, and at BYU this fall. Since the beginning of 2018, she has been editor of the Tolstoy Studies Journal, and beginning in 2019, she will be program chair for the annual AATSEEL conference.

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Prof. Kokobobo’s op-eds this past year appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and LARB. She also edited a forum on the Slavic and Eastern European Blog, Russian Studies in the Era of Trump: http://u.osu.edu/seej/2018/09/26/ russian-studies-in-the-era-of-trump/.

Prof. Kokobobo is currently co-director (with Luciano Tosta and Marike Janzen) of the Hall Center Faculty Colloquium on Comparative Literature. She will be spending her sabbatical leave in Spring 2019 writing her book on Tolstoy, the body, and gender/ sexuality.

Prof. Kokobobo visited her undergraduate alma mater, Dartmouth College, after 12 years and took this selfie with the statue of Warner Bentley on campus, whose nose — incidentally also featured on the show, “Gray’s Anatomy” — reportedly brings good luck.

Professor Vassileva-Karagyozova completed two chapters of her new book manuscript The Body and the City: The Reimagining of the Post-Industrial City of Wałbrzych in Contemporary Polish Prose, Drama and Film. Her articles “The Making and Unmaking of Heroes in Regional Identity Politics: The Case of The Polish City of Wałbrzych” and “Things Post-German and Their Identity Shaping Power in Stefan Chwin’s and Joanna Bator’s Novels” are currently under review.

She created a teaching portfolio for the Center for Teaching Excellence on How Intermediate Polish I (PLSH 204) fulfills Core Goal 4.2. Prof. Vassileva-Karagyozova served on several University

Esra Predolac presented her paper titled “Enhancing Cultural Comparisons and Presentational Communication through Writing” at the 21st Annual Meeting of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL) in DC in April 2018. She also co-presented a paper on the benefits of LCTL coordination and the use of technology in the language classroom at the MidWest Association for Language Learning Technology

NEWS FROM FORMER FACULTY Since leaving the Slavic Department (and KU’s CREES) in June, 2012, Professor Edith Clowes has kept close ties with many friends and colleagues in the KU community. It eased the transition to a new university (University of Virginia) to be able to continue work on projects started at KU. In 2016, she and Latin-Americanist Shelly Jarrett Bromberg published Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity (Northern Illinois University Press), a book that emerged from the wonderful multi-area conference in fall 2011 on “Identity and Community after the Cold Prof. Clowes in Batumi, Georgia

(MWALLT) conference in October 2018. Through a grant from KU’s Open Language Resource Center (OLRC), Esra and her colleague S. Ebru Ergul (Stanford) are developing a third-year Turkish language textbook. She continues her work as an executive board member of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic (AATT).

In February 2018, Irina Six was invited to give a talk at the LEARN Workshop (Foreign Languages Program Office, National Security Agency) titled “Why Can’t We Teach Verbs of Motion?” She also presented a paper at the 2018 AATSEEL Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Dr. Six published a review of the new intermediate-advanced textbook Panorama in Russian Language Journal Vol. 67, and gave a guest lecture at the KU School of Business titled “Comparative and Cross-Cultural Management: Russia.”

War.” The book has attracted international attention for its new conceptualization of area studies at a time when US foreign policy and preparation of foreign area experts have been less than consistent. In March 2015, Edith, Ani Kokobobo, and the radio journalist Gisela Erbslöh organized an international conference on “Centrifugal Forces?

Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives,” held at UVA. Following the conference, Edith edited a special number of the journal REGION, devoted to current social and cultural issues in Russia’s regions (5:2, 2016). Ani, Gisela, and Edith published a major multi-authored book from the conference, Russia’s Regional Identities: The Power of the Provinces (Routledge, 2018). This is the first book devoted to historical and cultural aspects of post-Soviet regional life across Russia.

Edith has continued to pursue her interest in imagined geography, including a recent keynote speech on “Finding Common Ground in the Black Sea: The Imagined Geography of the Black Sea among Regional Writers,” at a conference on “Eastern Europe as a Multicultural Space” held at Shota Rustaveli State University in Batumi, Georgia.

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Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2018

committees: the Committee on Sabbatical Leaves, the Hall Center Graduate Summer Research Award Committee, and CREES Graduate Admissions Committee, and she enjoyed editing the departmental newsletter, the Lawrencian Chronicle.

She has been invited to serve as a reviewer for CHOICE (the Journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries) and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Polish academic journal Zeszyty Cyrylo-Metodianskie.

ALUMNI NEWS Yuki Onogi is working as a futures broker at Societe Generale in Chicago. Although almost a decade has passed since his graduation from KU, Yuki has never forgotten his passion for Slavic and Balkan languages. He still remembers and uses Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), Polish and Russian. While he speaks Japanese and English mainly at work, he always finds opportunities to utilize Slavic languages both at and outside of work. For instance, his regional expertise and knowledge of Slavic languages has been helpful for selected topics in financial markets, such as the Ukrainian Crisis in 2014 and the OPE-Russia negotiation over oil production. Since Yuki studied the geopolitics of Russia and Eastern Europe and can read sources in Russian, he can provide clients with information available only in Russian. He also uses not only Russian, but also BCS and Polish to communicate with friends, colleague and clients from these countries. Yuki is grateful to the Slavic Department at KU for its service and dedication to teaching less commonly taught languages. He especially wants to thank Professor Greenberg, Professor Dickey, Ms. Greenberg, Professor Karagyozova, and Dr. Six for introducing him to the Slavic world. Yuki is currently studying Mandarin Chinese for personal reasons.

Yuki Onogi

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John Bidwell recently entered his 25th year of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. From 20122015, he worked at Allied Joint Force Command, Naples, Italy, which is an operational-level NATO headquarters. During that time, he spent a year as a plans officer, where he was responsible for participating in the future planning efforts for NATO’s Kosovo Force mission, and two years working as a desk officer in the Military Partnership Directorate, which involved managing the military aspects of NATO’s partnerships with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

From Naples, he went to study at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, MA. At Fletcher, he completed the two-year Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD), which is an international relations degree. His two areas of focus were human security and gender analysis in international relations. His studies focused especially on humanitarian action and gender, with a special emphasis on education as a component of humanitarian intervention and gendered access to education.

The Marine Corps funded his education at Fletcher; therefore, he is obligated to do additional service for them. After Fletcher, he moved to southern California, where he currently works as the officer in charge of the New Equipment Training Team (NETT) for the Program Manager Advanced Amphibious Assault. The Marine Corps is replacing its aging Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV) with a newer Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV). He is not involved with the acquisition work related to this program, but he will be responsible for training the operating forces to use these new vehicles once they are fielded. Fielding is still several years away, so his Marines currently operate the vehicles during various testing phases, work on curriculum development, and train to become qualified instructors. He expects to be in this job for another 1-2 years.

His long-term goals include retiring from the Marine Corps and transitioning to work in the humanitarian sector. He hopes to work for an organization that is involved in education or gender programming for populations affected by conflict or disaster.

Therefore, he is involved in volunteer work in his community that supports these interests. He works as a tutor for refugee children in San Diego at the

Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2018

Matthew Feeney at the 2018 CARTA conference

International Rescue Committee (IRC) and as an on-call sexual assault victim advocate through the Women’s Resource Center (WRC) in Oceanside, CA. As an advocate, he works with law enforcement and sexual assault nurse examiners as they address the acute needs of sexual assault victims in north San Diego county.

Lyle McMillan relocated back to the Kansas City area in Summer 2016 to accept a new role as the “Product Marketing Manager | Mid Tractors” for John Deere at its North American Sales and Marketing office, located in Olathe. Since his last departmental update, he married his wife Lauren, and had two boys, Liam and Teddy. He also went back to school, finishing his M.S. in Ag Econ from Purdue in 2015 and an MBA from Indiana in 2016.

He does work abroad from time to time, primarily visiting tractor and loader factories in Germany and Mexico, as well as working with field teams and dealers in both the US and Canada. He is continuously surprised at how often he still uses his Russian language skills, even when located in Kansas.

Whether at the factories he visits, the farm shows he attends, or even the hotels he stays at when he travels, there always seems to be a visiting group of Eastern European farmers or customers whom he speaks with or entertains. Even the proprietor of his neighborhood gas station is from Uzbekistan, and he is able to share a word with him from time to time.

Although speaking is rusty, Lyle does his best to keep it up by reading Russian language novels. His short-term goal is to find a tutor or an instructional program for his children to learn the language.

In May and June 2018, Matthew Feeney went to Moscow, Russia for the 20th annual CARTA conference, where he presented the paper, “Language and Culture in the Diplomacy of Queen Marie of Romania, Russia 1896, the United States, 1926.” He was there for nine days, which he spent in and around Moscow, visiting Peredelkino, Yaroslavl’, Rostov Velikii, and Pereslavl’-Zalesskii. The conference was great, and the cultural program was excellent.

His paper was well received. He saw new places, and met a lot of new people.

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SLL IN PICTURES 2018 HONORS RECEPTION

[L>R] Diana Chilton (Excellence in Elementary Ukrainian), Prof. Oleksandra Wallo and Franklin Conrad (Excellence in Advanced Ukrainian)

Excellence in Elementary Turkish [L>R] Farouk Alabed, Dr. Esra Predolac, and James Estes

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Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2018 Excellence in Elementary Russian [L>R] Anna Karpusheva (instructor), Steven Duke, Amanda Birger, Jordan Hayes, Frane Karabatić (instructor), Ross Fitzpatrick, Chul Hyun Hwang (instructor), and Deborah Haas.

[L>R] Roman Panickar (Excellence in Elementary Polish), Krzysztof Borowski (instructor) and Alana Holland (Excellence in Advanced Polish)

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[L>R] Taylor Heslop (Excellence in Elementary BCS), Ryan McKinney (Excellence in Intermediate BCS), Grace Horvat (Excellence in Intermediate BCS), and Marta Pirnat-Greenberg (instructor)

[L>R] Prof. Renee Perelmutter, Kari McClude (2018 Outstanding Slavic Major) and Dr. Irina Six

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LawrencĂ­an Chronicle, Fall 2018

SLL Chair, Prof. Stephen Dickey, welcoming guests, students and faculty at the Honors Reception

Graduate students Molly Godwin-Jones and Megan Luttrell performing Russian songs

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Excellence in Advanced Russian [L>R] John Stanko, Kari McClure, Haseop “Peter” Shin, and Dr. Irina Six

Excellence in Intermediate Russian [L>R] Molly Godwin-Jones (instructor), Zsófia Oszlanczi, Eliza Hemmer, Shimon Rosenblum, Lauren Cassidy, and Olga Savchenko (instructor)

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LawrencĂ­an Chronicle, Fall 2018

[L>R] Dr. Irina Six, Rada Lowery (2018 ACTR Award recipient) and Prof. Renee Perelmutter

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Editor’s Corner

The Slavic department began producing this newsletter, simply called Newsletter, in 1975; for the next 14 years, it was edited by professor Stephen Parker, who put out his last issue in Fall 1989. In 1991, then assistant professor Marc L. Greenberg took over the editorship, restarting the newsletter under a new name, Lawrencian Chronicle (the name references the Laurentian Chronicle, one of the two sources for the Russian Primary Chronicle). Professor Greenberg edited the newsletter for ten years, improving and expanding its scope, and eventually producing an e-version to supplement the dead-tree version. When Prof. Greenberg stepped down as an editor in 2011, Prof. Perelmutter, Prof. Kokobobo, and Rebecca Stakun edited LC issues. In 2016 Prof. VassilevaKaragyozova took over the editorship. She edited the 2018 issue with Molly Godwin-Jones’ help.

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LawrencĂ­an Chronicle, Fall 2018

Join the KU Friends of Slavic I am contributing in the amount of: _____$25 _____$50 _____$100 _____$250 _____$500 _____$1000 _____Other ________ to:

_____Slavic Unrestricted Fund

_____The Conrad Memorial Fund (undergraduate and graduate grants)

_____The Czech Opportunity Fund

If paying by check, please make payment to: Dept of Slavic Languages and Literatures c/o KUEA Please send to:

Professor Stephen M. Dickey, Chair Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures University of Kansas 1445 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 2133 Lawrence, KS 66045-7594

Please tell us your news: Profession:

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