Department of Slavic Languages

Welcome to the Slavic Department!

First established as the Department of Slavonic Languages in 1915 and redesigned as the Department of East European Languages in 1935, the Department of Slavic Languages embarked on its present trajectory in 1946, when a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation permitted the establishment of the Russian (now Harriman) Institute. Consequently, it was necessary for the Department to expand its language offerings. At present, the Department offers five Slavic languages— Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian.

On our website, you can find out more about our faculty, our students, and our undergraduate and graduate offerings in Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages, literatures, and cultures. Choose a link in the menu to the left, click here for a list of Fall 2020 courses conducted in English with no prerequisites, or check us out on Facebook.

2020 - 2021 ACADEMIC YEAR - SLAVIC LANGUAGES COURSES

2020 - 2021 ACADEMIC YEAR - LINGUISTICS COURSES

Russian Placement Test

Russian Placement Test – Fall 2020

The Russian placement test consists of two parts – written (grammar and essay—about two hours) and oral (a 20-minute long interview). This year, both parts are administered remotely via zoom The written part will be offered on Friday, August 28 at 1:00-3:00 Follow-up oral interviews will be held on Monday, August 31 You need to sign-up for the interview. See links below for both meetings and the sign-up sheet.

Questions? Contact Alla Smyslova as2157@columbia.edu

Written part: Friday, August 28 at 1:00-3:00

Oral interviews: Monday, August 31
Sign-up sheet is available here

SLAVIC DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCES WINNER OF 2020 PUSHKIN PRIZE

Stephen Andrew Bruce (Ph.D. candidate, Slavic) was named the 2020 winner of the Slavic Department's Pushkin Prize for his translation of a poem from Aleksandr Veltman's novel, The Wanderer. Jiashi Yang and Evan James Mortimer received Honorable Mention for their translation of poems by Anna Akhmatova and Aleksandr Blok. Mark Lipovetsky and Ronald Meyer served on the prize jury. You can read the winning translations here.

Stephen Bruce earned a BA in Humanities from Yale in 2009 and a MA in history from the University of Illinois in 2015. Before coming to Columbia, he worked as an English-language teacher in Moscow. His research deals with Russian literature and the cultural history of the Russian Empire. His article “The Pan-European Justification of a Multilingual Russian Society in the Late Eighteenth Century” was published as a chapter in French and Russian in Imperial Russia, edited by Derek Offord et al. (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). He plans to write his dissertation about fantastic travel stories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, investigating how these stories reflect the developing notions of national identity in the expanding Russian Empire. He has also completed a translation of Alexander Veltman’s novel The Wanderer, and is currently preparing it for publication.

Evan Mortimer is an undergraduate studying Political Ccience at Columbia University. He hopes to continue learning more about Russian language and literature.

Jiashi Yang is a sophomore at Columbia College studying Russian Language and Culture as well as Sustainable Development. She has the same birthday as Akhmatova’s, but was born 111 years later.

The Waclaw Lednicki Award in the Humanities

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

The Wacław Lednicki Award in the Humanities

Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA)

Deadline: November 15, 2020

Named after the first director of the Literature and Arts Section of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, the Wacław Lednicki Award recognizes the most outstanding book or creative work published, produced or presented in any of the fields encompassed within the Humanities as defined by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to include fine arts, history, languages, literature, philosophy, religion, etc. However, since Polish history has its own PIASA award, works in this field are ineligible.

Criteria:

If the nomination is based on a book, film, play or literary translation, it must be written or rendered in the English language.
The author or creator must be residing and working in North America.
The book or cultural product must have been published or appeared during the 2019 calendar year.
Both books containing original research or new, original syntheses are eligible for consideration; edited collections are ineligible.

Nominations, including self-nominations, should include:

A letter of justification why the particular candidate is deserving of the award;
A curriculum vitae of the nominee that includes a bibliography of significant publications and/or list of the nominee’s artistic accomplishments;
Any additionally relevant materials such as book reviews and letters of support.

Nominations are made by submitting the requested materials to Dr, Anna Frajlich-Zajac at af38@columbia.edu by November 15, 2020.

The recipient of the Wacław Lednicki Award in the Humanities will be recognized during the 8^th World Congress of PIASA in Białystok, Poland, June 10-13, 2021.

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2020 - 2021 ACADEMIC YEAR - SLAVIC LANGUAGES COURSES2020 - 2021 ACADEMIC YEAR - LINGUISTICS COURSES

2020 - 2021 ACADEMIC YEAR - SLAVIC LANGUAGES COURSES

2020 - 2021 ACADEMIC YEAR - LINGUISTICS COURSES