Prof. Michael M. Naydan Receives The Outstanding Contribution to the Profession Award From The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and E. European Languages

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.