THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES THE LAWRENCIAN CHRONICLE Vol. XXX no. 1 Fall 2019 IN THIS ISSUE Chair’s Corner .....................................................................3 Message from the Director of Graduate Studies ..................5 Message from the Director of Undergraduate Studies ........6 “Postcards Lviv” .................................................................8 Faculty News ........................................................................9 Alumni News ......................................................................13 2 Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2019 Fall Chronicle, Lawrencían various levels, as well as become familiar with different CHAIR’S CORNER aspects of Central Asian culture and politics. For the depart- by Ani Kokobobo ment’s larger mission, this expansion leads us to be more inclusive and consider the region in broader and less Euro- centric terms. Dear friends – Colleagues travel throughout the country and abroad to present The academic year is their impressive research. Stephen Dickey presented a keynote running at full steam lecture at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association confer- here in Lawrence and ence at Harvard. Marc Greenberg participated in the Language I’m thrilled to share Contact Commission, Congress of Slavists in Germany, while some of what we are do- Vitaly Chernetsky attended the ALTA translation conference in ing at KU Slavic with Rochester, NY. Finally, with the help of the Conrad fund, gen- you. erously sustained over the years by the family of Prof. Joseph Conrad, we were able to fund three graduate students (Oksana We had our “Balancing Husieva, Devin McFadden, and Ekaterina Chelpanova) to Work and Life in Aca- present papers at the national ASEEES conference in San demia” graduate student Francisco. We are deeply grateful for this support. workshop in early September with Andy Denning (History) and Alesha Doan (WGSS/SPAA), which was attended by Finally, our Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies students in History, Spanish, and Slavic. This October we Club (SEEES) (former Russian Club), which assumed its new followed up with a workshop (by Kokobobo, Wallo, Dickey) name last year under the leadership of our graduate student, about how to write conference abstracts in literature, linguis- Molly Godwin-Jones, is continuing this year under the lead- tics, and second language acquisition. In November, we will ership of another graduate student, Olga Savchenko. Many look forward to a workshop about conference networking with of our undergraduate SEEES Club officers have assumed an Chernetsky, Greenberg, and Kokobobo. If you attended KU active role in the club. I want to make special mention of: Slavic, either as a graduate or undergraduate student, what Nicole Konopelko, communications coordinator, who runs kinds of professional development events did you enjoy? What the facebook, instagram, and twitter pages; Mason Hussong, events did you wish we had? If you have strong feelings, get treasurer, who helped prepare a special club event about Soviet in touch and let us know. cartoons; and Jacob Springer, outreach coordinator, who is dedicated and responsive on all club matters. I am also deeply As fall classes are more than halfway through, we are already grateful to Olga for her time and dedication to the club and anticipating our spring semester lineup. With Soviet and Post- to the Russian conversation table. SEEES Club makes the Soviet Russian Cinema (Chernetsky), South Slavic Cinema broader campus community aware of the important work we (Dickey), and courses on Turkey (Predolac) and Iran (Ahmad) do, so we are thrilled to have these dedicated and energetic through cinema and film, KU Slavic will be in a cinematic students around. frame of mind this Spring 2020. For those who love theater, Olesia Wallo is reviving our Russian theater course for the first Best wishes, time in a few years. We also have an exciting lineup of two linguistics seminars, as well as lower level courses in folklore (Perelmutter), graphic novels (Vassileva-Karagyozova) and culture (Kokobobo). Prof. Six continues our business Russian offerings, and this spring Prof. Pirnat-Greenberg will be teach- Ani Kokobobo ing an intro to Slovene (language and culture) for KU Business Associate Professor and Chair School students attending a study abroad program to Slovenia. [email protected] (m) 646-416-1879 We are also working on getting our new Kazakhstan program up and running for this coming summer of 2020. Students will go to Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan to study Russian at 3 Spring 2020 DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC SLAV 320 LANGUAGES & LITERATURES GRAPHIC NOVELS AS MEMORY: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST AND COMMUNISM In this course we will examine the interaction between literature and memory, in particular how authors have responded to major historical events and have contributed to the shaping of the collective memory of those events. Using several graphic novels as prompts, you will be writing for a variety of academic and non-academic audiences. Throughout the semester, you will produce writing in the following genres: journal entry, article summary, synthetic and analytical essay, and reflection essay/creative writing. Online Course March 23– May 15, 2020 Satisfies Goal 2.1 and Elective Requirement for Slavic-Jewish and Slavic-Polish Minor and Polish BA Get in Touch! Prof. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova [email protected] slavic.ku.edu 4 Lawrencían Chronicle, Fall 2019 Fall Chronicle, Lawrencían In Spring 2019, MA student Chul Hyun successfully passed MESSAGE FROM his MA/PhD Qualifying exams and advanced into our PhD program, while doctoral student Ekaterina Chelpanova suc- THE DIRECTOR OF cessfully defended her professional portfolio. Ekaterina was GRADUATE STUDIES awarded the 2019 Summer Research Scholarship from KU by Oleksandra Wallo Graduate Studies in support of her dissertation project. Her research took her to the Laboratory of Native Cinema of It has been a very busy VGIK in Moscow, an institution famous for its film archives. year for students in our Frane Karabatić spent his summer at the University of Slavic Languages and Pittsburgh, teaching intensive elementary and intermediate Literatures graduate pro- Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian at the Summer Language Institute. gram, with many accom- Frane received a Language Teaching and Learning Research plishments to celebrate. Grant from the University of Pittsburgh to develop and pi- lot the first few modules At the end of 2018, of what will be his open- the program conferred access online resource for another PhD degree: teaching elementary Bos- Megan Luttrell defend- nian/Croatian/Serbian. In ed with honors her dis- July 2019, Frane accepted sertation, “Color, Line, a Lecturer position at the and Narrative: Visual Art Techniques in Lev Tolstoy’s University of Texas at Aus- Fiction.” In the spring, advanced doctoral student Anna tin where he now teaches Karpusheva was awarded a prestigious national grant—a Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship—for and Russian. her dissertation, “In Search of a Form for Soviet Trauma: Svetlana Alexievich’s Prose between History and Literature.” The University of Pitts- Oksana Husieva giving a talk burgh benefited from high- The fellowship provides a year of support to advanced gradu- about East Slavic witches and ate students in the humanities and social sciences to help them quality summer language sorcerers at the Haunting Hu- complete dissertation projects. Another advanced doctoral instruction by two more manities event, organized by the student, Krzysztof Borowski, presented research related to of our graduate students: Hall Center for the Humanities his dissertation at three international conferences in Europe Oksana Husieva taught in 2018-2019 and gave an invited presentation, titled “Rural beginner’s intensive Russian at the Summer Language Voices in Urban Setting: Silesian as a Troublesome Dialect Institute and Olga Savchenko worked there as the instruc- of Polish,” at the “Language in Its Settings” workshop at tor of Russian for STARTALK. Meanwhile, back at KU, Columbia University. Molly Godwin-Jones and Devin McFadden team-taught our department’s intensive summer Russian-language course and Chul Hyun worked as the Project GO Russian- language tutor. Graduate students were and continue to be actively involved in curriculum development for our Rus- sian courses: in 2019, teams of Slavic faculty and gradu- ate students Molly Godwin-Jones, Cecilia King, and Olga Savchenko received two Course Transformation grants from the Center for Teaching Excellence to redesign our advanced Russian sequence. Anna Karpusheva giving a Brownbag talk on Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses at CREES 5 Slavic graduate students have also been very active represent- MESSAGE FROM ing KU at a variety of international, national, and regional conferences. Several of them (Anna, Molly, Oksana) orga- THE DIRECTOR OF nized panels and roundtables for the ASEEES convention; others presented their research at ASEEES (Anna, Molly, UNDERGRADUATE Oksana, Devin, Frane, Ekaterina), the meeting of the Slavic STUDIES Linguistics Society (Molly), the Midwest Slavic Conference at by Stephen M. Dickey Ohio State University (Frane), the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Conference at the University of Kentucky (Frane), Undergraduates in the the conference of the Midwest Association for Language Department of Slavic Learning Technology (Molly), the STARTALK conference