Welcome to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Welcome to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
News and Announcements
In Memoriam: Louis Iribarne
Emeritus Professor Louis Iribarne (b. 1940), who influenced generations of students studying Polish at the University of Toronto, passed away on December 5, 2020. He began to teach in the Slavic Department in 1975, and retired in 1998. He introduced new undergraduate and graduate courses including Polish Culture and Civilization, Polish Avant-Garde Cinema, Polish Drama, Polish Prose, and Polish Poetry. In the 1990s, he developed a popular undergraduate Polish Studies program with courses in Polish literature, language and history; and a graduate program (both an MA and a PhD). His courses on Scholarly Polish: Reading and Translation for Academic Research and Special Projects in Literary Translation were innovative and popular. Professor Iribarne was also a renowned translator of Polish experimental writers: Gombrowicz, Lem, Miłosz, Schulz and Witkacy.
Prof. Dragana Obradovic has won an SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the research topic entitled “Between Socialist Modernity and the Peasant Co-Operative: Communalism of the Rural in Yugoslavia.” Her collaborator is Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, from Aston University in Birmingham, England.
Welcome, Prof. Zdenko Mandušić!
Prof. Zdenko Mandušić joined the Slavic Department in Fall 2020!
Prof. Mandušić researches and teaches Russian and South Slavic cinemas, film theory, East European art and culture after communism, and the articulation of nationalism in literature and films. In particular, his writing focuses on issues of cinematic authenticity, reality effects, the imaginary conceptualization of technology, and the influence of discourse on the production and reception of art. He is currently working on a book project, titled Restoring Truth: The Documentary Turn in Soviet Cinema After Stalin, which focuses on the mobilization of documentary elements in Soviet fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s. This project correlates the visual strategies of feature-length films with the discourse on the divide between documentary and fiction aesthetics during the post-Stalinist revitalization of Soviet cinema. In his next book, Mandušić will examine the representation of history in contemporary Russian and post-Yugoslav cinema and literature, addressing the function of novels and films as de facto sites of historical (re-)narrativization.
Alex Averbuch has published in a Russian poetry review a block of poems written by his UofT students as part of the Russian language course he taught at the Slavic Department.
Alex Averbuch's interview for Linor Goralik's upcoming volume of interviews with contemporary poets was published on Colta.ru.
Major Russian animation company Союзмультфильм has used all-time favorite Soviet cartoon characters to create instructional videos about the coronavirus.
Congratulations to Prof. Tamara Trojanowska, whose recent publication, Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918., has won the 2019 AATSEEL Prize for best edited volume.
A collection of poems by our graduate student, Alex Averbuch, from his recent book "The testimony of the fourth person" was published in French translation in the Swiss literary journal "La Revue de Belles-Lettres."
The Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) has awarded our Finnish program a generous grant for the next two years. This is a sign of the respect the Finnish government has for the work Prof. Anu Muhonen is doing here at Toronto, and we congratulate her on winning this grant.
A new book by Prof. Leonid Livak, on the life and work of a Russian-French translator and poet Ludmila Savitzky, has been published in Moscow. For more details click here.
Students in Elementary Ukrainian and Prof. Mariana Burak have produced a new video.
Prof. Leonid Livak has won this year’s prestigious Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, awarded biennially, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Studying 'Ukrainian language and literature enriched my life': A&S alumnus Mark Strychar-Bodnar
Click here to read the article about an alumnus of the Slavic Department and how his Ukrainian studies enriched his life.
Czech and Slovak Culture Event and Czech Award Ceremony
On November 27th, our Department hosted the event in which students from Czech Language Course and Czech and Slovak Culture Course were presenting to our guests from Czech Community their class projects which included the interviews with some of the Czech community members. The Award Ceremony was a part of it - Nicolle Mitacek got the Ernest Tauber Award and Alex Bercik got the Tibor P. Gregor and Arthur J. Langley Sr. Award.
Click the image below to see more photos!
Prof. Holland's project, "Digital Dostoevsky," which will create an open-access database of Dostoevsky’s works and then use methods of digital text analysis and mapping on those works. The project also includes a book co-authored by Prof. Holland and her co-applicant, Prof. Katherine Bowers (UBC) that shows how different techniques of digital reading can open up old questions about Dostoevsky’s novels in new ways. The grant runs from 2019-2025. Slavic Librarian Ksenya Kiebuzinski is a collaborator on the project.
Alex Averbuch's new article "The Theurgy of Impurity: Fin-de-Race and Feminine Sin in Russian and Ukrainian Modernisms" has just been published in the latest issue of the Russian Review.
In his project, "The Final Chapter of Russia Abroad," Prof. Livak, in collaboration with Prof. Siggy Frank of the University of Nottingham (UK), will research and write the cultural history of the disintegration of the anti-Soviet Russian emigre community in France during and after the Second World War.
