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THE LAWRENCIAN CHRONICLE Vol. XXX no. 1 Fall 2019 THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES

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Page 1: THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC … › sites › slavic.ku.edu › files... · Seminar, and the other for his Honors Thesis, on changes in Putin’s rhetoric in his

THE LAWRENCIAN CHRONICLE Vol. XXX no. 1Fall 2019

THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSASDEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES & LITERATURES

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Chair’s Corner .....................................................................3Message from the Director of Graduate Studies ..................5Message from the Director of Undergraduate Studies ........6“Postcards Lviv” .................................................................8Faculty News ........................................................................9Alumni News ......................................................................13

IN THIS ISSUE

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Dear friends –

The academic year is running at full steam here in Lawrence and I’m thrilled to share some of what we are do-ing at KU Slavic with you.

We had our “Balancing Work and Life in Aca-demia” graduate student

workshop in early September with Andy Denning (History) and Alesha Doan (WGSS/SPAA), which was attended by students in History, Spanish, and Slavic. This October we followed up with a workshop (by Kokobobo, Wallo, Dickey) about how to write conference abstracts in literature, linguis-tics, and second language acquisition. In November, we will look forward to a workshop about conference networking with Chernetsky, Greenberg, and Kokobobo. If you attended KU Slavic, either as a graduate or undergraduate student, what kinds of professional development events did you enjoy? What events did you wish we had? If you have strong feelings, get in touch and let us know.

As fall classes are more than halfway through, we are already anticipating our spring semester lineup. With Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Cinema (Chernetsky), South Slavic Cinema (Dickey), and courses on Turkey (Predolac) and Iran (Ahmad) through cinema and film, KU Slavic will be in a cinematic frame of mind this Spring 2020. For those who love theater, Olesia Wallo is reviving our Russian theater course for the first 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-ing an intro to Slovene (language and culture) for KU Business School students attending a study abroad program to Slovenia.

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

CHAIR’S CORNERby Ani Kokobobo

various levels, as well as become familiar with different aspects of Central Asian culture and politics. For the depart-ment’s larger mission, this expansion leads us to be more inclusive and consider the region in broader and less Euro-centric terms.

Colleagues travel throughout the country and abroad to present their impressive research. Stephen Dickey presented a keynote lecture at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association confer-ence at Harvard. Marc Greenberg participated in the Language Contact Commission, Congress of Slavists in Germany, while Vitaly Chernetsky attended the ALTA translation conference in Rochester, NY. Finally, with the help of the Conrad fund, gen-erously sustained over the years by the family of Prof. Joseph Conrad, we were able to fund three graduate students (Oksana Husieva, Devin McFadden, and Ekaterina Chelpanova) to present papers at the national ASEEES conference in San Francisco. We are deeply grateful for this support.

Finally, our Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies Club (SEEES) (former Russian Club), which assumed its new name last year under the leadership of our graduate student, Molly Godwin-Jones, is continuing this year under the lead-ership of another graduate student, Olga Savchenko. Many of our undergraduate SEEES Club officers have assumed an active role in the club. I want to make special mention of: Nicole Konopelko, communications coordinator, who runs the facebook, instagram, and twitter pages; Mason Hussong, treasurer, who helped prepare a special club event about Soviet cartoons; and Jacob Springer, outreach coordinator, who is dedicated and responsive on all club matters. I am also deeply grateful to Olga for her time and dedication to the club and to the Russian conversation table. SEEES Club makes the broader campus community aware of the important work we do, so we are thrilled to have these dedicated and energetic students around.

Best wishes,

Ani KokoboboAssociate Professor and Chair [email protected] (m) 646-416-1879

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SLAV 320 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.

[email protected] slavic.ku.edu

Get in Touch!Prof. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova

Online CourseMarch 23– May 15, 2020Satisfies Goal 2.1 and Elective Requirement for Slavic-Jewish and Slavic-Polish Minor and Polish BA

Spring 2020DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC

LANGUAGES & LITERATURES

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It has been a very busy year for students in our Slavic Languages and Literatures graduate pro-gram, with many accom-plishments to celebrate.

At the end of 2018, the program conferred another PhD degree: Megan Luttrell defend-ed with honors her dis-sertation, “Color, Line,

and Narrative: Visual Art Techniques in Lev Tolstoy’s Fiction.” In the spring, advanced doctoral student Anna Karpusheva was awarded a prestigious national grant—a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship—for her dissertation, “In Search of a Form for Soviet Trauma: Svetlana Alexievich’s Prose between History and Literature.” The fellowship provides a year of support to advanced gradu-ate students in the humanities and social sciences to help them complete dissertation projects. Another advanced doctoral student, Krzysztof Borowski, presented research related to his dissertation at three international conferences in Europe in 2018-2019 and gave an invited presentation, titled “Rural Voices in Urban Setting: Silesian as a Troublesome Dialect of Polish,” at the “Language in Its Settings” workshop at Columbia University.

MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF GRADUATE STUDIESby Oleksandra Wallo

In Spring 2019, MA student Chul Hyun successfully passed his MA/PhD Qualifying exams and advanced into our PhD program, while doctoral student Ekaterina Chelpanova suc-cessfully defended her professional portfolio. Ekaterina was awarded the 2019 Summer Research Scholarship from KU Graduate Studies in support of her dissertation project. Her research took her to the Laboratory of Native Cinema of VGIK in Moscow, an institution famous for its film archives. Frane Karabatić spent his summer at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching intensive elementary and intermediate Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian at the Summer Language Institute. Frane received a Language Teaching and Learning Research Grant from the University of Pittsburgh to develop and pi-lot the first few modules of what will be his open-access online resource for teaching elementary Bos-nian/Croatian/Serbian. In July 2019, Frane accepted a Lecturer position at the University of Texas at Aus-tin where he now teaches Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Russian.

The University of Pitts-burgh benefited from high-quality summer language instruction by two more of our graduate students: Oksana Husieva taught beginner’s intensive Russian at the Summer Language Institute and Olga Savchenko worked there as the instruc-tor of Russian for STARTALK. Meanwhile, back at KU, 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.

Oksana Husieva giving a talk

about East Slavic witches and

sorcerers at the Haunting Hu-

manities event, organized by the

Hall Center for the Humanities

Anna Karpusheva giving a Brownbag talk on Svetlana

Alexievich’s Last Witnesses at CREES

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Slavic graduate students have also been very active represent-ing KU at a variety of international, national, and regional conferences. Several of them (Anna, Molly, Oksana) orga-nized panels and roundtables for the ASEEES convention; others presented their research at ASEEES (Anna, Molly, Oksana, Devin, Frane, Ekaterina), the meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (Molly), the Midwest Slavic Conference at Ohio State University (Frane), the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Conference at the University of Kentucky (Frane), the conference of the Midwest Association for Language Learning Technology (Molly), the STARTALK conference (Olga), and the conference on gender in Russian realism, or-ganized by Slavic faculty and held at KU (Devin). All of this in addition to giving Brownbag talks at CREES, speaking on work in progress in the reformatted departmental colloquium, completing graduate certificates in Second Language Studies and in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and engaging in a dizzying array of outreach and extracurricular activities! Congratulations to our dedicated and hard-working graduate students on a productive academic year! Truly, you make us very proud.

Finally, let me welcome this year’s cohort of incoming gradu-ate students: Diana Chilton, Jakob Johnson, and Pavlo Popov. They come to us from places as near as KU itself and as distant as the University of Munich. Diana, Jakob, and Pavlo – Ласкаво просимо!

Undergraduates in the Department of Slavic Languages & Litera-tures have always been high achievers, and last year they cont inued their tradition of excel-lence. Several of our students studied abroad in the summer of 2019: Jacob Springer spent five weeks studying Russian in Moscow through the

Pittsburgh University’s Summer Language Institute, for which he received the 2019 Joseph L. Conrad Undergraduate Travel Scholarship; Mason Hussong spent nine weeks studying Russian in Riga, Latvia through Project GO (hosted by Geor-gia Tech and the Baltic School of Professional Development); Matthew Pyskir spent six weeks studying Ukrainian through KU’s own Language Institute in Lviv, Ukraine.

This year’s Joseph L. Conrad Undergraduate Russian Scholarship was shared by Amanda Birger, who is majoring in Journalism with a minor in Russian Business and Professional Culture, and Alaina DeLeo, who has a Russian Emphasis as her major.

MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDIESby Stephen M. Dickey

Slavic GTAs Chul Hyun Hwang (left), Krzysztof E. Borowski

(middle), and Olga Savchenko (right).

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Elizabeth Wenger was selected as the 2019 Russian Scholar Laureate for the American Council of Teachers of Russian. This multi-talented senior also received the Brosseau Creativ-ity Award for Writing, for her essay “Still Frame.” Congratula-tions to Elizabeth!

Russian major, Eric Allen, graduated with Honors, complet-ing two independent projects in his last semester: one, on the variation v/na Ukraine in the Russian press for his Capstone Seminar, and the other for his Honors Thesis, on changes in Putin’s rhetoric in his annual policy addresses. Either one of these would have been an achievement on its own, and it therefore makes sense that Mr. Allen was recognized as the outstanding graduating major in the department in 2019. Congratulations to Eric!

GTAs Olga Savchenko (far left) and Anna Karpusheva (far right)

with a group of their students.

Ani Kokobobo (right) congratulating GTA Molly Godwin-Jones.

Dr. Renee Perelmutter (right) with a group of award-winning

undergraduate students.

One final note: since we introduced OPI exams to assess our majors’ speaking ability in the last semester of study and began keeping records in 2017, our undergraduate majors have been meeting or exceeding our BA language outcomes benchmark (Intermediate Mid, which is standard across US Russian programs for those without a study-abroad experi-ence) almost without exception. One final congratulations, to our majors on making the mark!

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Last summer three KU students and one stu-dent from the Universi-ty of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign took part in a six-week Summer Language Institute, or-ganized jointly by KU and the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv. All KU partici-pants benefited from the CREES-adminis-tered Jarosewycz Fam-ily Scholarship, which made the p rogram

much more affordable for them. Dedicated language instruc-tors from the Ivan Franko University made daily intensive study of Ukrainian very effective and highly enjoyable. This year’s area studies classes often went beyond the usual lecture format and included, for example, a literary walking tour of Lviv and a Ukrainian pysanky workshop. Students and I also explored local culture through numerous excursions inside the city and weekend trips to other parts of Ukraine. We walked up many flights of stairs to catch a bird’s-eye view of Lviv from the top of High Castle Hill and the rooftop of the city hall in the heart of medieval downtown. We descended into the cel-lars and basements of churches and museums to learn about the eventful history of the city. We attended an opera at Lviv’s beautiful opera house and caught a local circus show. Whether touring the castles around Lviv, hiking and souvenir-shopping in the Carpathian Mountains, or exploring the ancient architec-ture and contemporary politics of Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, students took in Ukrainian culture together with the language and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. A couple of them did not even want to go back home!

-Oleksandra Wallo, Lviv SLI 2019 Director

POSTCARDS FROM LVIV

“This past summer I attended the Summer Language Institute in Lviv, Ukraine. For six weeks we took classes in Ukrainian along with occasional lectures in Ukrainian history and litera-ture and local excursions. We also drank a lot of coffee! Lviv is the coffee capital of Ukraine and coffee shops are located everywhere. One excursion took us through an underground café (designed to look like a mine) where they would torch your coffee right in front of you. We toured castles in the re-gion and also went on trips to the capital Kyiv, where we rode the world’s deepest subway system, and Yaremche, a small, beautiful town in the Carpathian Mountains. I also got the opportunity to visit my hometown, Rivne, on one of our free weekends. One of my favorite places during my time abroad was Rivne’s central park lake, known for its swans.”

-Diana Chilton, Lviv SLI

“The trip to Lviv was the most rewarding experience of my life. It is one thing to study a language at university, but go-ing to the place where it is spoken reminds you why you even chose to begin that adventure in the first place. Walking the beautiful streets of downtown Lviv and hearing Ukrainian all around you reminds you that it is all real. Being able to use what is drilled into your head during class immediately after your lesson only gets you more excited for the next day and fosters an environment of progress. Although we were in Ukraine for over a month, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t enough time. How I wanted to come back as soon as possible to soak in every bit of the country! After this trip, I realized that I had made the right choice in studying Slavic languages and I can’t wait to take my next trip abroad.”

-Matthew Pyskir, Lviv SLI

Rivne Lake

Ukrainian Study Abroad Students in Kyiv

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Stephen M. Dickey presented two keynote lectures: “An Epistemic Approach to Russian Aspect” (at Aspect in the Arctic, Tromsø Uni-versity, 5 September 2019) and “Slavic As-pectology: Structuralist Legacies and Cognitive Approaches” (Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Harvard

University, 14 October 2019). He was also an instructor at a PhD course at Tromsø University, “Aspect Across Languages and Linguistic Schools” (2–4 September 2019). He published two articles on aspectual usage in the imperative, “Subjectiv-ity, Intersubjectivity, and the Aspect of Imperatives in Slavic Languages,” in a special issue of Cahiers Chronos; the second is forthcoming in Journal of Linguistics. He is now working with Dr. Astrid De Wit of Antwerp University on a new gen-eral-linguistic typology of aspectual systems, and has started examining parallels between aspect in Russian and Mandarin Chinese. He is currently on a research-intensive semester, and became Director of Undergraduate Studies in August.

Prof. Ani Kokobobo gave an invited talk at Cambridge University in January 2019, sharing the honors with Anna Berman (McGill U). She organized a “Russia and the Right” round-table last spring which was attended by over 60 people, as well as a conference on gender and Russian realism. She

wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post “How Alabama’s New Abortion Law Echoes Communist Albania’s Extreme Abortion Ban” and an article on teaching Crime and Punishment and ethics. She has multiple articles under review and is preparing two other articles for submission. Prof. Kokobobo is putting

FACULTY NEWSfinal touches on vol. XXX of the Tolstoy Studies Journal that should be coming out any day now, while also continuing to make progress on her monograph on Tolstoy and gender/sexuality, which she hopes to conclude by the end of 2020. She is giving a keynote talk at an undergraduate conference at Dartmouth College in November.

This summer Prof. Kokobobo went back to visit her native

Albania and got to meet the famous world writer, Ismail Kadare

(pictured with Kokobobo, above).

During her time in Albania, Prof. Kokobobo also gave several

interviews on Albanian TV on Russian and Albanian literature.

Including ReportTV above.

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For the past five years Marta Pirnat-Greenberg has been providing a brief language and cultural preparation for the KU Self & Business Leader-ship Program in Slovenia study abroad, which she developed into a new, one-credit course, Introduction to Slovene. The course will be offered in spring

2020 and will provide a structured introduction to Slovene language and culture. Last spring, Marta and her Slovene students were featured in the Slovene daily Večer; more recently she contributed an essay on the history of Slovene studies at KU to a volume celebrating 100th anniversary of the University of Ljubljana. Her online Beginning BCMS course has been fully implemented this fall and is providing the framework for the development of the online version of the BCMS sequence courses (Elementary BCMS 1 and 2), to be offered in 2020/21. During the summer, she met with her Slovene colleagues, Professors Eva Sicherl and Andreja Žele at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts, with whom she is collaborating on a project titled “Compilation and Comparison of Slovene and English Linguistic Terminology.”

Prof. Marc L. Greenberg recently published “Notes on a New Dialectology of Montenegrin” in a Fest-schrift for Brian D. Joseph. Recent activity includes: his inaugural lecture (in Slovene) for his position as Corresponding Member of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts “The agony and the ecstasy:

Shaping the largest reference work of Slavic languages and linguistics to date”; the opening paper at the conference Cetinjski filološki dani II in Cetinje, Montenegro, 10 Sept 2019: „Former Yugoslavia as a Crossroads of Sprachbünde“ (in Montenegrin); the paper „Language Contact as Reflected in the Brill Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics“ presented at the first meeting of the Commission on Language Contact under the auspices of the Congress of Slavists, held at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany. He con-tinues his work as Editor-in-Chief of the Brill Encyclopedia and recently brought on Professor Stephen M. Dickey as an Associate Editor.

Prof. Greenberg with

t h e Co m m i ss i o n o n

Language Contact in

Mainz, October 2019.

Marta Pirnat-Greenberg with her

student Amy Millet in Ljubljana.

Amy spent the month of July in

Ljubljana, studying Slovene at the

Seminar of Slovene Language,

Literature, and Culture and

doing archival work for her PhD

dissertation dealing with the

Habsburg culinary history.

Prof. Greenberg presenting in Cetinje, Montenegro.

Prof. Greenberg giving his inaugural lecture at the Slovene

Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28 June 2019

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I n 2 0 1 9 , D r. R e n e e Perelmutter’s research continued to focus on Is-raeli Russian Online: Con-testing Jewish Identities through an Immigrant ver-nacular, a monograph that examines multilingual-ism and code-switching in an online community of ex-Soviet Jews living in Israel. Dr. Perelmutter

enjoyed teaching courses in Slavic Folklore (both the under-graduate SLAV 148 in the summer, and the graduate SLAV 630 this semester), and Languages of the Jews. This May, Dr. Perelmutter was honored with the Grant Goodman Un-dergraduate Mentor Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Last but not least, Dr. Perelmutter became the new Director of the Jewish Studies program – an exciting and personally meaningful opportunity!

Prof. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova gave a talk “Post-German Objects in Contemporary Polish Migrant Prose,” on Octo-ber 1, 2019 at the CREES Brownbag series. She at-tended the German Studies Association’s annual con-ference in Portland, OR, October 5, 2019 where she presented a paper titled “Post-German Objects in

Stefan Chwin and Joanna Bator’s Prose.” In late October Prof. Vassileva-Karagyozova participated in the World Language Fair organized by the KU Open Language Resource Center where she gave two presentations on the Polish Language and Cultural Assumptions. She served as reviewer for two fellowship programs of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She continues to make progress on her book manuscript The Body and the City: The Post-1989 Reimagining of the City of Wałbrzych in Contemporary Polish Prose, Drama and Film.

This has been a busy year for Vitaly Chernetsky. He published two articles, “Russophone Writing in Ukraine: Historical Con-texts and Post-Euroma idan Changes,” in the volume Global Russian Cultures (University of Wisconsin Press) edited by Kevin Platt, and “So-fiia Andrukhovych’s Felix Austria: The Postcolonial Neo-Gothic and Ukraine’s

Search for Itself” in Canadian Slavonic Papers. His transla-tions from Ukrainian of poetry by Iryna Tsilyk and of an excerpt from a novel by Yuri Andrukhovych were published in the journal Apofenie. His book Перетини і прориви: українська література та кіно поміж ґлобальним і локальним (in Ukrainian), is forthcoming from Krytyka. In February, Prof. Chernetsky was elected a member of PEN Ukraine. In April, he delivered the keynote address at the Midwest Slavic Conference. Later in July, he traveled to Cam-bridge University where he served as an external examiner at two Ph.D. dissertation defenses, and in August he delivered several presentations at a conference focused on Russia and Eastern Europe at Ft. Riley.

Prof. Chernetsky with Dr. Iryna Shuvalova and Dr. Uilleam

Blacker at Cambridge.

P r o f . C h e r n e s t s ky

and Ukrainian writer

Yuri Andrukhovych at

Knyzhkovyi Arsenal

Literary festival in Kyiv.

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Esra Predolac presented a paper titled “Flipping the Foreign Language Class-room— What is it, How to Do it, and How Web 2.0 Tools can help” at the 5th International Congress of Teaching Turkish as a For-eign Language (ICOTFL) on June 27, 2019 in Ath-ens, Greece. She continues to work with AAAS on the

Benchmarks project for Teaching Effectiveness in the Arabic Language Program through a CTE grant. Through a grant from KU’s Open Language Resource Center (OLRC), Esra and her colleague S. Ebru Ergul (Stanford) continue to work on their third-year Turkish language textbook. She serves an execu-tive board member of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic (AATT).

Oleksandra Wallo com-pleted all revisions on her monograph, Ukrai-nian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan, in 2019. She received two grants to support the pub-lication of the book: an ASEEES First-Book Sub-vention as well as a grant from the Shevchenko Sci-

entific Society, USA. The book is forthcoming in December of 2019 from the University of Toronto Press. In April she presented on her new pedagogical project about using au-thentic materials in lower-level language courses at the 2019 Chicago Language Symposium. She has also been working on her open-access online textbook in Ukrainian, Добра форма, supported by KU’s Open Language Resource Center, and will present on this project at the 2020 AATSEEL conference. In the summer she served as the on-site faculty director of KU’s Language Institute in Lviv, Ukraine, leading students in their intensive study of the Ukrainian language and exploration of Ukrainian culture.

Dr. Irina Six received a Course Development Grant from CTE to revamp Advanced Russian I. She published a book review of Benjamin Rifkin’s, Ev-geni Dengub’s, and Su-zanna Nazarova’s textbook Panorama: Intermediate Russian Language and Culture (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017) in Russian

Language Journal. Dr. Six presented two conference papers: “Pohozhdeniia Totoshki v Kanzase: Kontekst v prepodavanii glagolov dvizhenia” at the HSE’s annual conference in Mos-cow on April 12, 2019 and “Hen or Egg? Vocabulary versus Syntax in Russian for the Professions” at the AATSEEL’s annual convention, New Orleans, LA, February 8, 2019. At the same conference, Dr. Six served as a discussant for the panel “Content-Based Russian Textbooks: Theory and Practice (dedicated to the memory of Professor Olga Kagan)” and a chair for the stream “Approaches to Teaching Slavic Languages: Connecting Form and Function and Creating Meaning: Lexico-Grammar.”

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Upon earning a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 2017, John Bidwell (BA, 2002) moved to Camp Pendleton, CA, to lead a small team of Marines responsible for testing the Marine Corps’ new Amphibious Combat Vehicle. Earlier this year, however, he received a promotion to lieutenant colonel and a wonderful opportunity to be the next Marine Attaché in the U.S. Embassy, Muscat, Oman. To prepare for the job, he has been studying Modern Standard Arabic in Washington, D.C., since April. He will continue to study Arabic and also attend additional training next year. He expects to move to Oman in July 2020 and remain there for three years. During that time, he will represent the Department of Defense abroad, serve as military advisor to the U.S. ambassador, report on in-country and regional political-military activities, and sup-port U.S. military security cooperation activities in the region.

Johannah White (BA, 1992) is now the OER & Instruction Librarian at Baton Rouge Community College. She advocates for increasing faculty use of OER, offering help adapting or creating OER. She is also a member of the second cohort to complete the Open Education Leadership certificate from SPARC this June. Additionally, she presented at the OLC Innovate conference on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness Goals Using OER in April.

Since September 2018, Howard Solomon (PhD, 1997) has been serving as Minister Counselor for Economic and Politi-cal Affairs and Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to the UN and other International Organizations in Geneva, Switzerland.

ALUMNI NEWS

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