Subjects of interest to our faculty include literature and cinema of former Yugoslavia and Yugoslav successor states; Slavic linguistics; Slavic minority languages; bilingualism; the literature and culture of Siberia; the role of visual art in Russian culture; Vladimir Nabokov; Russian Jewish literature and film; Russian intellectual history; Russian art and architecture; regional identity and sacred landscapes in early modern Russia; theories of literary translation, cultural representations and perceptions of disability, death, and dying in late/post-Soviet Russia; language pedagogy; and literary theory.
UW’s Suzzallo Library has one of the most distinguished Slavic studies collections in the U.S., comprising over a half-million volumes and with stand-out strengths in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Slovenian materials. Also featuring rich and up-to-date Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Baltic holdings, the Slavic collection enables in-depth study of nearly any literature or language of the region. Our Slavic media collection numbers over 2,000 feature and documentary films from Eastern Europe available to students on one-week loan.
We are home to the William Brumfield Russian Architecture Collection, a database in development featuring 30,000 digitized photographic images of noteworthy buildings located throughout Russia, taken by North America’s leading expert on Russian architectural history. The collection was made possible through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.