Columbia University in the City of New York

Department of Slavic Languages

Black Sea Networks

Russian Language students at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, January 2018

"Graduate course on Academic Discourse - March, 2017"

Yuri Shevchuk speaks at the United Nations International Mother Language Day, on Feb 22, 2016

BLACK SEA MYTHS AND MODERN EUROPE - Friday, October 6, 2017 3:00pm Second Floor Common Room, Heyman Center for the Humanities

Bobok, the Barnard-Columbia Slavic Department Band

Valentina Izmirlieva delivers the inaugural memorial Shevelov Lecture in Ukrainian Studies (April 2018, Columbia University)

Russian Language students at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, January 2018

Welcome to the Slavic Department!

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 2017 courses conducted in English with no prerequisites, or check us out on Facebook.

CALENDAR of EVENTS

Remaining a Ukrainian Woman: Normative Femininity as "Armor" in the Gulag

Thursday, October 17, 2019 - 12:00pm

A Human with a Stool (2019)

Monday, October 21, 2019 - 7:00pm

Beshoot (2019)

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 7:00pm

SUMMER (2018)

Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - 7:30pm

‘Interdisciplinary Slavic Conference Workshop'

Thursday, October 31, 2019 - 4:00pm

RUSSIAN FILM CLUB ANNOUNCES 2019-2020 SEASON

The Russian Film Club, organized by Mark Lipovetsky (Slavic Languages) and Daria Ezerova (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harriman Institute), has announced its 2019-2020 season, "Russian Cinema between Protests." Released betrween two waves of protests, spanning the years 2011-19, the Club's selection of independent films offer a critical reflection on life in contemporary Russia, cutting across genres and styles.

First screening: October 16, 7:30 PM, ZOOLOGY (2016) by Ivan Tverdovsky. Location: MATH 417

All films will be presented with English subtitles.

Introduction and moderation of discussions by Lipovetsky and Ezerova.

Stay tuned for special events with the filmmakers.

Adam Leeds, 2020 - 2021 Heyman Fellow

Assistant Professor Adam Leeds is the recipient of the 2020 - 2021 Heyman Fellowship. Funded by the Office of the Executive Vice-President of the Arts & Sciences, the Heyman Center Fellowships provide four junior and four senior Columbia faculty with course relief during the academic year. These fellowships allow faculty to reduce their teaching loads to a minimum of one course per semester during the award year in order to conduct research and to participate in a regular weekly seminar, chaired by the Heyman Fellows Seminar Director (a member of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities). In 2020-2021, we anticipate the seminar directors to be Eugenia Lean (EALAC) and Dorothea Von Mücke (German). For more information on the Heyman Fellowship, please click here.

MAX DANIEL LAWTON IS ASSISTANT DIRECTOR & TRANSLATOR ON FILM "GIVE ME LIBERTY"

Max Daniel Lawton (Ph.D. student, Slavic Languages) is second assistant director and Russian translator on the film Give Me Liberty, set to open in NY and Los Angeles on August 23rd.

Official trailer.

From Film Comment:

Kirill Mikhanovsky’s Give Me Liberty is relentless and altogether exhausting—but it’s also a joyous, tender blast, and was rightly one of the hits of this year’s Cannes, where it featured in Directors’ Fortnight after premiering in Sundance.

Variety’s review in Sundance compared the film in part to the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, and while you’re likely to have more of an unalloyed good time with Mikhanovsky than with the Safdies’ exhilarating but often discomforting drama, the comparison holds. Like their film, Give Me Liberty kicks in with a whomp and never lets up, apart from the odd moment when it briefly seems to lean back and fill its lungs before the next plunge into mayhem. It has all the exuberance of a youthful debut, although it isn’t one: Mikhanovsky’s first film, the Brazilian-set Sonhos de Peixe, played in Cannes Critics’ Week back in 2006. But his follow-up Give Me Liberty has an autobiographical directness: based on a job that the director once had when he first came to the US, it also has the vivid agitation you might associate with an expatriate Russian community still adjusting to a new environment, while sustaining some of the habits and attitudes of the old country. It is very Russian in its manic humour, turning Milwaukee, of all places, into a milieu as imbued with chaos as the East seen in Alexei German’s or Sergei Loznitsa’s films (or indeed, if you’ll excuse the geographical drift, Emir Kusturica’s). It is also, however, very American in its mixing of cultures, communities, and energies.

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