Dear friends,
We are ready to greet the academic year with new energy—looking forward to new students, new opportunities, and of course new challenges.
Our entering class of master’s students includes talented young people who have come to us from across the globe—fresh from Fulbrights in Moldova and Bulgaria—and from our own campus, with several newly minted B.A. graduates from Ohio State choosing to continue their education with us. Most exciting, perhaps, is our students’ diversity of linguistic interests: we will have specialists in Polish and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian joining those who focus on Russian, and many students will take the opportunity to expand their knowledge by taking elementary Ukrainian.
Eastern Europe is in the spotlight, in the international news of course as Russia continues to pursue its unconscionable war against Ukraine, but also in Ohio. My recent appointment to the Governor’s Commission on Eastern European Affairs—led by chair Marta Liscynesky Kelleher and vice-chair Tomasz Kaczki, both from the Cleveland area—will enable me to interact more closely with colleagues on the state level as we seek to promote public awareness of Eastern Europe.
Students at Ohio State often have new opportunities to study the various languages and cultures of the region: in spring 2024 Rexhina Ndoci taught introductory Albanian language—anyone curious about Albania should check out our new Albanian module, authored by recent Ohio State History PhD Dr. Chris Kinley. Congratulations to Chris on defending his dissertation, "Demarcating Epirus: Disentangling Religious Communities in Europe's Forgotten Borderland." His advisor was Theodora Dragostinova and committee members included Bruno Cabanes and Yiğit Akin. When he graduated, Chris’s transcript also reflected his Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in East European and Eurasian Studies, a great way that we share our expertise with those beyond our M.A. program. Rexhina also recently received her PhD and will remain at Ohio State as a lecturer in Linguistics in 2024-25.
The university has affirmed its commitment to both Polish and BCS by granting Drs. Matthew Boyd and Diana Sacilowski new status as assistant teaching professors in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. This promotion will enable them to spend additional energy on promoting student organizations and activities related to Poland and the former Yugoslavia. In other faculty news, many CSEEES affiliate faculty members were granted promotion and/or tenure this year: among them Drs. Nicholas Breyfogle and Robin Judd in the Department of History, Dr. Alexander Burry in DSEELC, Dr. Andrea Sims in Linguistics, Ashley Bigham and Dr. Erik Herrmann in Knowlton School of Architecture, and Mara Frazier at the University Libraries.
New hires for autumn 2024 include a lecturer of Yiddish, Dr. LeiAnna Hamel, and Dr. Helen Myers who will replace spring semester teacher Ivan Savvine at the Columbus International High School teaching Russian language. Beloved linguistics professor Dr. Brian Joseph retired this spring, but he will still be active at the university through his Laboratory for the Study of Greek Language. Replacing him as the second Kenneth E. Naylor Professor will be CSEEES alumna Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang, whose expertise in South Slavic cultures makes her an excellent fit for the position.
This year’s summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellows studied mostly Russian—in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Bloomington, Indiana and Middlebury, Vermont—with one valiant graduate student pursuing Bulgarian language in Sofia! A few of them, along with CSEEES MA student Luke Bendick who studied in Kraków, Poland, even engineered social media takeovers of the CSEEES Instagram account, enabling a closer look at their experiences.
Our new academic year FLAS fellows will pursue Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Polish, Uzbek and Russian studies on campus. We love being able to help students come closer to their fluency goals, and we are so grateful to continue to have the U.S. Department of Education funding that helps us do so. Renewed FLAS fellows include Eleanor Grazier (Russian for the Professions MA program (RFP), Jay Hadfield (Russian), Liam Martin (Russian) and Luke Bendick (Polish). We also have brand new graduate fellows for Polish (Sarah Hohman) and BCS (Devon Rancourt) as well as for Russian, including Adam Johnson (RFP), Kelly Gallagher, Sascha Rohde and Chaeli Rule. New and returning undergraduate fellows include Sophie Boelk, William Slabodkin and Denis Yasyrev for Russian and Kale Fuller for Uzbek.
Recent and future outreach initiatives include the 2024 Global Teacher Seminar: People: Global Efforts to Alleviate Food Insecurity and Poverty, led by Dr. Maria Fedorova (Macalester College), an expert in agricultural history in Russia, and Dr. Daniel Redman from the Ohio State College of Education and Human Ecology. and the much-anticipated autumn 2024 K-14 Workshop: Exploring the Environmental History of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, taught by Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle, Professor of History, co-lead of the Environmental History Initiative, and Director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University. Breyfogle will also lead a group of students to our region this fall to attend the Climate Action Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. Our final K-14 program for 2024-25 will be the Global Fellowship Program that focuses on Indigenous peoples across the globe. A maximum of 30 teachers will have the opportunity to explore content related to this topic in various regions, including Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and earn continuing education credits as they do so.
We aim to increase our ability to support Polish studies opportunities at and through Ohio State through significant fundraising efforts and have begun to invite our many Polish Studies Initiative alumni to “pay it forward” for the next generations. Our initial Buckeye Funder campaign for PSI did just that, and we will draw on that experience in future. If you are interested in supporting PSI, you can donate today. In support of Polish area studies, outreach coordinator Alicia Baca spent six weeks this summer in Poland working on her Polish language skills, learning more about the country’s history, and scouting out more resources to share with audiences in Ohio and beyond. Her trip was funded in part by DSEELC’s Luczkowski-Habash Award for Polish Studies and a Critical Difference for Women Professional Development Grant from The Women's Place at Ohio State. This trip also facilitated the development of our upcoming Introduction to Poland online learning module that was created by Alicia, Dr. Julia Keblinska, and Dr. Diana Sacilowski. The module will provide readers with an overview of Polish history, culture, food, language, and more.
In yet more award news, affiliate faculty member Dr. Philip Gleissner recently won the 2024 James Beard Media Award for Food Issues and Advocacy. Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis, Essays and Recipes was co-edited with Harry Eli Kashdan (Rutgers University Press). Dr. Robin Judd won two National Jewish Book Awards for her 2023 publication, Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust (UNC Press), which CSEEES supported with a faculty publication subvention grant. She was also a finalist for the annual Ohioana Readers’ Choice Book Award. In addition, both Dr. Robin Judd and Dr. Andrea Sims received 2023-24 College of Arts and Sciences Mid-Career Faculty Excellence Awards to recognize their outstanding performance in all three areas of research, teaching and service.
We begin the academic year with a new page on our website devoted to Ukraine-related events at Ohio State this year, and if you’re not subscribed yet, remember that our weekly newsletter always includes information about our affiliate faculty and their projects—some of which also touch on Ukraine. For example, if you are in New York City this fall, don’t miss the exhibition co-curated by Ashley Bigham: Constructing Hope: Ukraine presents architectural ways to support Ukraine’s short- and long-term reconstruction efforts and illuminates the critical role architecture plays in building a collective resistance. Or if you can’t make it to New York, you can read about the exhibit here.
As director, I get to benefit from working with our fantastic Center staff and our amazing affiliates, guests, and students. I also work with the higher ups ;) CSEEES is thrilled to have the support of a new Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs, Dr. Kaya Şahin, who is an Ottoman historian and one of our newest affiliates. Please share all our news with your own cohorts and check out our distance language and culture courses, “On the Ground” courses for BCS, Polish and Romanian, on the ScarletCanvas platform.
With warmest greetings from Ohio State,
Angela