Dear Friends of the Slavic Department,
Greetings to everyone at the end of another school year!
And what a year it was! Severe budget cuts caused massive administrative reorganization that affected all we do. Our Slavic faculty, however, valiantly dealt with the new and ever-changing work environments and kept their high-quality teaching, research, public outreach, and service to others. Our courses were well-attended, and our number of majors and graduates grew exponentially. Aside from our traditional majors in Slavic and Russian, the increase was largely due to our newest major in Global Literary Studies.
At the convocation, the Slovene specialist and prolific translator of all things Slovene, Dr. Michael Biggins, presented our first ever Boniecka-Cienciała Slovene Studies Award. Aside from BCMS, Polish, Russian, and Slovene, our department also offered a year-long course in advanced Ukrainian. The Ukrainian language lecturer, Yana Koza, joined us for a year from Kiev. With her winning personality and dedicated work on the promotion of Ukrainian language and culture, Yana became a dear colleague and a beloved teacher. We are truly sorry she must leave us, and we fervently hope that the war in Ukraine ends soon!
While celebrating our graduates and wishing them all the best at the start of their new, post-college lives, I would like to end this letter with a note of deep gratitude to our Associate Teaching Professor Zoya Polack. After teaching advanced Russian language for fifty-three years, Zoya retired at the close of this year.
Visiting Zoya’s language class was a humbling experience. It all seemed so easy, fun, and fluid, and yet so much was covered and learned in one hour – poetry and history, proverbs and jokes, the music of the language and the intricacies of its grammar. Zoya helped generations of students to get to know and love Russian literature and culture. She has been a colleague and a friend to all of us and a cherished teacher to hundreds of students. We will miss her greatly.
With best wishes,
