News

Three scholars from Ukraine will join the department as non-residential scholars in 2025 thanks to an innovative fellowship program started at Indiana University in 2022 that has now expanded to nine Big Ten universities. With support from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the fellowship provides a stipend to scholars who for professional, legal or personal reasons needed to stay in wartime Ukraine. In enables them to continue their research and teaching despite Russia’s invasion by giving them access to Library resources and allowing them to collaborate with US colleagues in research, teaching and publishing.

After Indiana University, Penn State is sponsoring the second greatest number of scholars of all Big Ten institutions at seven (from a total of 35). Three of these scholars will be housed in our department. They will give at least one online lecture per semester, participate in a bimonthly seminar, and an online conference. Their PSU faculty liaisons are Yuliya Ladygina, Yelena Zotova, and Adrian Wanner.

Oksana Pukhonska, an Associate Professor at The National University of Ostroh Academy whose research focuses on contemporary literature, memory and trauma studies, will investigate inherited traumatic memory in film and literary texts of the Ukrainian diaspora. Filmmaker Lesya Kalynska, the director of the award-winning 2022 documentary A Rising Fury shown at Penn State in Fall 2023, will be working on a new docuseries provisionally titled Before the Dawn (or Voices of Resilience in Ukrainian). Oleksandr Zaitsev, a Professor of History at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, will explore the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and German National Socialism from 1930 to 1939.

James Stratton has received the 2024 NFMLTA/MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in World Language Education. He will receive his award at the ACTFL convention in Philadelphia in November. This is in recognition of his article “Implicit and explicit instruction in the second language classroom: A study of learner preferences in higher education” in Die Unterrichtspraxis.

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.