News

Dr. Lauren Brooks (PhD, 2018), Assistant Teaching Professor of German at North Carolina State University, has received a Fulbright Fellowship for 2024-2025 to travel to Germany and develop a course on Black German diaspora. For more information, see here:https://news.ncsu.edu/2024/06/8-faculty-members-named-2024-25-fulbright-scholars/

On July 10, Professor Yuliya V. Ladygina, Associate Professor of Slavic and Global and International Studies, took part at the conference “Stronger Together: U.S.-Ukraine Partnership in Education and Science” or

ganized in conjunction with the NATO Summit and co-hosted by the Ukrainian Embassy and the American National Academy of Science (NAS). The conference took place at the NAS headquarters in Washington DC and brought together academics and policymakers from the two countries to identify how they can collaborate to ensure that Ukrainian scholars and scholars of Ukraine can continue to develop the expertise needed to win the war and rebuild the country. The First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska was the keynote speaker at the event, where she announced the launching of a new U.S.-Ukraine joint initiative, “Global Coalition of Ukrainian Studies,” to support the development of Ukrainian Studies worldwide.

Professor Ladygina was an invited speaker on the panel “Bridging Scholarship and Policy or Why Do We Need Ukrainian Studies Today More Than Ever Before?” and spoke about the employment of Ukrainian history and culture to build a better and more secure future for Ukraine and the broader democratic world. At the conference, Professor Ladygina received a recognition award from the Ukrainian government for promoting Ukrainian Studies in the U.S. through her research, teaching, and service to the field.

George and Nina Woskob, long-time donors and supporters of Ukrainian Studies in the Colleges of Agriculture and Liberal Arts at Penn State, were also present at the event and received a recognition award from the Ukrainian government for their generous support and promotion of Ukrainian Studies in the U.S..

Hannah Matangos (German Ph.D., 2023) works for the Art of the Rural, a national nonprofit that focuses on promoting rural communities through arts, culture and leadership programs. One of their programs, the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX), was recently featured in the New York Times. RUX has brought together an adverse cohort of urban & rural Kentuckians each year since 2014 for weekend-long, cross-sector, locally-organized, arts-and-culture-based leadership conferences.

Check out the full article here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/us/politics/national-divisions.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0E0.PZLq.mNfDOPRh26yv&smid=url-share&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR1jAmyCDoLZ3aIwkpxX51r4MLCmO5B83C0T0QeGsQKWG_Et7dBziQ-6F80_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw

Please see this exciting story about a recent graduate who recently completed a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship in Austria! https://www.psu.edu/news/education/story/alumna-blazes-trails-german-language-education-overseas/

Please see this featured article from our student’s recent trip to the country of Georgia.

https://www.psu.edu/news/liberal-arts/story/penn-state-students-travel-georgia-through-liberal-arts-embedded-program/

James is a Germanic linguist, specializing in variationist sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and second language acquisition. One of his current research projects focuses on intensification in Germanic languages (modern and historical), a project which involves an examination of how intensifying adverbs develop over time and how linguistic and social factors influence their use. A second major project aims to extend the use of variationist methods to the study of underrepresented speech communities and languages. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University in 2022 and will be coming to Penn State from the University of British Columbia where he served as an Assistant Professor in the department of English Language and Literatures. He has a forthcoming book, Expanding variationist sociolinguistic research in varieties of German, and looks forward to opening a sociolinguistic research lab at Penn State.

April 18, 2024

On Saturday, February 24, members of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures joined State College community members in a rally for Ukraine to mark the second-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and ten years since the Russian occupation of Crimea and part of the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Speakers included Ezra Nanes, the mayor of State College, Oleksandr Kodola, the mayor of State College’s sister city in Ukraine, Nyzhin, Igor Latsanych, President of the Penn State Ukrainian Student Society and Svitlana Jones, local community member and organizer of the event.

Professor Michael M. Naydan, Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, has just been awarded the Outstanding Contribution to the Profession Award by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and E. European Languages (AATSEEL). The award was conferred on Prof. Naydan at the national convention of the organization on February 16, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  

The award is given “to individuals at any stage in their career whose scholarly and administrative leadership, collaboration, and/or mentoring has had a significant impact on the profession, especially in terms of opening up and sustaining new directions and new opportunities for our scholarship and our teaching and/or bringing the insights of our field to new audiences.” In conferring the award, the President of AATSEEL Prof. Gabriella Saffron of Stanford University noted: “The many submissions nominating Michael for this award laud his collegiality, collaborativeness, mentorship of junior scholars, generosity, ‘willingness to take on hard work for a good cause,’ and the ‘low profile, encouraging, mild-mannered,’ and consistent support he has given to others.” He was particularly pleased to receive the award in the presence of two of his former MA students at Penn State, both originally from Ukraine: Dr. Olha Tytarenko (now a Senior Lector at Yale University) and Dr. Olesia Wallo (now an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas).

Prof. Naydan received his B.A. (1973) and M.A. (1975) from The American University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University (1984). He has taught at The Pennsylvania State University since 1988 after previously teaching at Yale University from 1982-1986 and at Rutgers University from 1986-1988. He became Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Penn State in 2007 following a large donation by the Woskob Family for the promotion of Ukrainian studies at Penn State. Over the course of his career, he has distinguished himself as both a translator and scholar, who has published more that 40 books of translations with critical introductions. Additionally, he has published 40+ articles and 80+ translations in literary journals and anthologies. Some of his translated, co-translated, and edited books include: Selected Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies (Bucknell UP, 2024, paperback reprint), My Final Territory: Selected Essays of Yuri Andrukhovych (U of Toronto P, 2023, paperback reprint – co-translated with Mark Andryczyk), Zelensky: A Biography (Polity Books, 2022 – co-translated with Alla Perminova), Maria Matios’ novel Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages and Yuri Vynnychuk’s novel Tango of Death (both with Spuyten Duyvil Publishers in 2019 and co-translated with Olha Tytarenko), Abram Terz’s Strolls with Pushkin and Journey to the River Black  (Columbia UP, 2016) co-translated with Slava Yastremski, Olha Tytarenko, and Maria Badanova, Herstories: An Anthology of New Ukrainian Women Prose Writers (Glagoslav Publishers, 2014 with multiple co-translators), Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel Perverzion and Igor Klekh’s Ukrainian-themed short stories A Land the Size of Binoculars (both with Northwestern UP 2005-6 – the latter co-translated with Slava Yastremski. He has earned the Translation Prize from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies three times and the George S.N. Luckyj Prize in Ukrainian Literature Translation in 2013 from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies. His selected literary criticism was published in Ukrainian under the title From Hohol to Andrukhovych: Selected Literary Essays (Piramida Publishers, 2017). His novel about the city of Lviv Seven Signs of the Lion appeared in English with Glagoslav Publishers in 2016 and in the Ukrainian translation of Marianna Prokopovych with Piramida Publishers in 2017. He has served as editor of Slavic and E. European Journal (1993 to 1999)  and has been mentor to a number of graduate students who have gone on for Ph.D.s and careers in the Slavic field, including Olha Tytarenko (teaching at Yale U.), Olesia Wallo (teaching at U. of Kansas), Oksana Husieva (teaching at the Monterey Language Institute), Roman Ivashkiv (teaching at the U. of Alabama), Oksana Lushchevska (Ph.D. U. of Georgia with whom he has co-translated ten Ukrainian children’s books), and several others.  He has also worked closely with a number of undergraduate students who have gone on to graduate study in various fields and law school, or to work in the U.S. government and for NGOs. He completed one of his book-length translations, Nikolai Gumilev’s Africa (Glagoslav Publishers, 2018), with undergraduate student Maria Badanova, who has continued her Ph.D. studies at the Max Planck School of Cognition in Leipzig, Germany. Prof. Naydan has been a Fulbright scholar in Lviv, Ukraine twice, has been designated a Senior Fulbright Scholar over the past three years, and has hosted over 40 Fulbright scholars, mostly from Ukraine and Romania, at Penn State.

CEN SP24 RUS 197 Georgia Embedded Program Flyer

This one-credit embedded course in Georgia provides a one-week immersion
in Georgian culture combined with lectures on Georgian history and
contemporary politics, including the long history of Georgian-Russian lovehate
relations. The program includes a tour of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and
its surroundings; key museums and monasteries, interaction with local
students, a cooking class, calligraphy workshop, day trips to Kakheti and
Kazbegi, a visit to a Georgian sulfur bath, and more!
This program is open to students taking any Russian course in the spring
2024 semester (RUS 2, RUS 100, RUS 142, RUS 200, RUS 403, RUS 420).
Students participating in the embedded program will be manually enrolled in a
1-credit travel course, RUS 197.
This program is led by Dr. Irina Mikaelian (ixm12@psu.edu) and Dr. Yuliya
Ladygina (yvladygina@psu.edu).