Department of Slavic Languages

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.

Russian Placement Test – Fall 2019

The Russian placement test consists of two parts – written (grammar and essay--about two hours) and oral (a 20-minute long interview). The written part will be offered on Wednesday, August 28 at 3:00-5:00 in Kent 413.

Follow-up oral interviews will be held on Thursday, August 29in Ham 707 (the sign-up sheet for interviews will be available at the written part of the test on August 28).

Please make your travel plans accordingly.
Questions? Contact Alla Smyslova as2157@columbia.edu

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.

Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon - Aleksandar Boskovic

Bošković has been named a Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon for the 2019-20 academic year for his project, "Bioscopic Book: Slavic Avant-Garde Cinépoetry." The Collegium de Lyon, an Institute for Advanced Studies within the Université de Lyon, hosts researchers in an environment allowing them to focus fully on innovative scientific research projects.

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