The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures includes among its aims the training of graduate students in the linguistics and literature of the Slavic peoples. Doctoral candidates specialize either in linguistics or in -literature, but are required to have some knowledge of both fields. The department offers courses in the various Slavic languages and literatures, including Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.

Instruction in Russian, Polish, and Old Church Slavonic was introduced at Harvard in the academic year 1896-97 by Professor Leo Wiener, who later added a course in Bohemian, as Czech was then called. In 1930 the late Professor Samuel Hazzard Cross took over the teaching of courses in the Slavic languages and literatures; under him offerings were expanded to include a course in Serbo-Croatian.

The present Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures was established as a separate department of the University under the Division of Modern Languages and Literatures by a vote of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on January 4, 1949. Professor Michael Karpovich was appointed chair of the department. In the same year, through the devotion and generosity of Professor Cross’s classmate, Mr. Curt Reisinger, the Samuel Hazzard Cross Professorship of Slavic Languages and Literatures was established, and Professor Roman Jakob-son named to it. In 1954 the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professorship of Slavic Languages and Literatures was created, with Professor Michael Karpovich as first incumbent. The Alfred Jurzykowski Professorship of Polish Language and Literature was activated in 1971, and held first by Professor Wiktor Weintraub. Chairs in Ukrainian Philology and in Ukrainian Literature were endowed in 1973.

The department, although its specific concerns center on the fields of language and literature, maintains close working ties with other groups studying the Slavic world at Harvard; among these are the Regional Studies Program, the Davis Center for Russian Studies, and the Ukrainian Studies Program of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

The department has two fellowships, the Boris A. Bakhmeteff and the Michael Karpovich, specifically designated for students in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Candidates for degrees in this field are also eligible for regular Graduate School grants-in-aid. The department requires that doctoral candidates work as teaching fellows in its language and literature courses, regarding such experience as an integral part of doctoral training.

Admission

Applicants should show knowledge of Russian (or the language of the student’s major field) equivalent to Harvard’s Slavic 103 (third year). Formal training in literature or linguistics is highly desirable for admission to the program. In order to anticipate the language requirement, the candidate for admission should have a reading knowledge of French or German, although this is not a prerequisite.

All applicants to the department are required to submit General GRE scores, as well as an extensive writing sample in English. Any applicant whose native language is not English is required to take the TOEFL exam, and achieve a score of 550 or better, or to receive a degree from an institution where the language of instruction is English. Applications without GRE scores and TOEFL results (where applicable) will be considered incomplete.

The department ordinarily interviews finalists for admission over the telephone in February. Admitted students are invited to campus for a two-day visit in mid-March to meet with faculty and graduate students and to find out more about programs of study available within the department. We strongly urge applicants who may be out of the country in February to so inform the department and try to visit Cambridge before their departure.

Financial Aid

Graduate students pay full tuition for two years, reduced tuition for two years, and a facilities fee or active file fee thereafter. A student must be in good standing and making satisfactory progress toward the degree to be eligible for financial support. To apply for financial aid, a student must complete a financial aid application each year.

Generally, incoming students, unless they are self-supporting, are offered a full financial aid package. Each package includes five years of tuition, plus a stipend in years one and two and guaranteed teaching in years three and four to cover cost-of-living expenses.

After the first two years of graduate study students are eligible and expected to teach in the Slavic Department, the Core program, or in other related Harvard programs to help defray living expenses. In addition to such support, students are encouraged to apply for appropriate Harvard and outside fellowships, and departmental research assistantships.

Library Resources

The collections of Widener Library offer resources for the study and research of Slavic culture without parallel at any American university. The Kilgour collection in the Houghton Library is the finest holding of Russian first imprints in the Western world. The library of the Davis Center for Russian Studies houses a separate specialized collection available to enrolled students.

Master of Arts (AM)

The department does not admit candidates for a terminal AM degree. PhD candidates may, however, apply for a master’s degree after having completed, with satisfactory grades, eight half-courses that satisfy department requirements. The degree may also be offered to students unable to complete the doctorate.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The requirements for this degree are:

Residence (Academic) — Minimum of two years (see The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Handbook). In practice, most students should expect course work to extend into the third year.

Good Standing — The minimum standard set by the department for satisfactory work by graduate students is an A-/B+ average (as many A’s as B’s). Students who fall below this level must, in the following term, demonstrate their ability to meet this minimum in courses taken within the department. Only students who remain in good standing are eligible to take the PhD general examinations.

Special Fields — Slavic literatures, Slavic linguistics.

Program of Study — Out of the 16 half-courses required, at least two must be seminars or conference courses, which involve the -writing of a substantial research paper. One-hundred-level courses in literature may be counted for graduate credit with permission of the chair and the professor involved, and on condition that a graduate-level paper be submitted as part of the course work.

There are two general programs of study, corresponding to the special fields listed above. All students are required to take the Proseminar and Old Church Slavonic, the former in the first term of the first year.

Plan A — Slavic languages and literatures with concentration on the study of literature. The candidate will choose one major Slavic language and literature and a minor field, which can be another Slavic language and literature, another European language and literature, Slavic linguistics and language pedagogy, Russian and East European history, or comparative literature (six courses in the major field and four in the minor field). Additionally, one other Slavic linguistics course is required.

Plan B — Slavic languages and literatures with concentration on the study of Slavic linguistics. In this program the candidate will choose one Slavic language as the major (four courses), a second Slavic language as the first minor (two courses), and a related elective field as the second minor (two courses). Additionally, Introduction to Comparative Slavic Linguistics, Introduction to Linguistics, and one other Slavic literature course are required.

Languages — Before the candidate is eligible for the general examinations, a reading knowledge of both French and German must be demonstrated, and departmental requirements in the major Slavic language and in the minor Slavic language or languages (one for candidates who have chosen a second Slavic field under Plan A, two for Plan B) must be satisfied. (See the Graduate Program Requirements document available in the department office for more specific details.)

Teaching — As part of their preparation candidates are expected to teach within their areas of specialization. Teaching is supervised by members of the department and includes a program of teacher training.

General Examinations — Before proceeding to write a dissertation, the candidate must pass the following examinations; they will be offered only during the fall and spring terms.

Plan A: Literature

Part 1. A minor field portfolio and collective presentation.

Part 2. A three-hour written examination on the whole literature in the candidate’s major language; this is taken no more than one month before Part 3.

Part 3. A two-hour comprehensive oral examination centering on (although not limited to) five “fields” in the candidate’s major literature; the fields are to be chosen by the candidate in consultation with the director of graduate studies.

Plan B: Linguistics

Part 1. A two-hour written examination, testing the candidate’s knowledge of Slavic linguistics from a comparative-historical or contrastive perspective.

Part 2. A three-hour written examination on the linguistics of the candidate’s major language in the context of the Slavic family; this is taken no more than one month before Part 3.

Part 3. A two-hour comprehensive oral examination centering on (although not limited to) five “fields”; the fields are to be chosen by the candidate in consultation with the director of graduate studies.

Dissertation — A dissertation prospectus must be submitted for review and approval by all members of the department, ideally after three and a half years, but no later than the end of four and a half years. When a student submits the prospectus to the department, however, he or she also names an advisor to direct the dissertation as first reader, and second and third readers as well. Once the department approves the prospectus, the student will work with these three faculty members (at least one of whom must be a department member) as needed throughout the dissertation process.

The dissertation must give evidence of original research or of original treatment of the subject and must be in good literary form. The dissertation should be completed within three years after the general examinations. A candidate for the PhD must present the major findings of the dissertation in a formal two-hour oral defense as the final requirement for the degree.

One bound and one unbound boxed copy of the dissertation, with the department’s signed dissertation acceptance certificate attached, must be delivered to the registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences by the deadline established for each degree conferral date. The final manuscript should conform to the requirements described in The Form of the PhD Dissertation. Further information regarding courses and programs of study in Slavic Languages and Literatures may be obtained by writing to: Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Barker Center 374, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, or by viewing the Website at www.fas.harvard.edu/~slavic .

Information on admission, tuition and registration policies, and grants may be obtained by writing to the Admissions Office, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Byerly Hall, 2nd floor, 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. We encourage online submission of the application. See www.gsas.harvard.edu .

Selected Dissertation Titles

Jacob Emery. “Stock Exchanges: Heredity, Identity, and Metaphor in Modernist Slavic Literature Modernist Slavic Literature” (2006).
Séamas Stiofan O’Driscoll, “Invisible Forces: Capitalism and the Russian Literary Imagination (1855-1881)” (2005)
Julia Vaingurt, “Wonderlands of the Russian Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in the 1920s” (2005).
Alexandra Kirilcuk Lyons, “A Hermitage of Poets: Russian Emigre Poetry in Prague, 1922-1939” (2004).
Rachel Slayman Platonov, “Marginal Notes: ‘Avtorskaia Pesnia’ on the Boundaries of Culture and Genre” (2004).
Julia Bekman Chadaga, “The Language of Glass and the Transformation of Vision in Modern Russia” (2003).
Kylie R. Richardson, “The Case for Meaningful Case: The Interaction of Tense, Aspect, and Case in Russian” (2003).
Edyta Bojanowska, “Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism” (2002).
Griorgio DiMauro, “The Furnace, the Crown, and the Serpent: Images of Babylon in Muscovite Rus” (2002).
Justyna Beinek, “The Album in the Age of Russian and Polish Romanticism: Memory, Nation, Authorship” (2001).
Timothy C. Harte, “Russian Motion: Kinetic Dynamism and Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Poetry, Painting, and Film” (2001).
Taras Koznarsky, “Kharkiv Literary Almanacs
of the 1830s: Shaping Ukrainian Cultural Identity” (2001).
Annette Gertraude Pein, “How Stories Are Told in Romantic Verse: Problems of Narration in Vasily Zhukovsky’s Vadim” (2001).
Aida Vidan, “Ballads by Women Performers in the Oral Traditions of the South Slavs” (2000).

Faculty List

Baranczak, Stanislaw, Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature. MA 1969, PhD 1973, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland.
Interests: Modern Polish literature, Polish poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, literary translation.
Selected Works: A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (1987); Breathing Under Water, and Other East European Essays (1990); ‘Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun’: Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule (an anthology, ed. and transl. with Clare Cavanagh); Wislawa Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995, ed. and transl. with Clare Cavanagh); Jan Kochanowski, Laments (1995, transl. with Seamus Heaney).
Work in Progress: Polish Poetry After 1944; Three Great Polish Romantic Poets (transl. with Clare Cavanagh).

Bolton, Jonathan, Assistant Professor.
BA 1990, Harvard University; MA 1995, University of Texas at Austin; PhD 2001, University of Michigan.
Interests: Czech literature, history, and culture from the medieval period to the present; discourses of Central European identity after World War II; Jews in Central European literature; Communism as ideology and culture; language, narrative form, and political power in first-person writing under Communism; literary theory and theory of literary history.
Selected Works: New Historicism/Nov´y Historismus (edited volume, 2007); “Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau” (2006), “What Lies in Wait Behind the Wall: Metamorphoses of Domestic Space in Czech Literature after 1989” (2006), “Mourning Becomes the Nation: The Funeral of Tomá?s Masaryk in 1937” (2004), “Public and Private Elegies: Melancholy in Seifert, Orten, and Blatn´y” (2001), “In the Puppet Gardens: The Skeptical Imagination of Ivan Wernisch (forthcoming 2007), “Czech Litera-ture” (forthcoming in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2008).
Work in Progress: Everyday Life under Normalization: Power, Language, and Stories in Czech Literature after 1968; Prague Between Two Empires: Literary Culture in Czechoslovakia Between the Wars.

Boym, Svetlana, Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature. BA 1980, Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute; MA 1983, Boston University; PhD 1988, Harvard.
Interests: 20th-century Russian literature (poetry, essay, autobiographical fiction), film and contemporary art, cultural studies, comparative literature, literature of exile, literary theory, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, East European expatriate writers, study of memory and nostalgia, political and artistic freedom.
Selected Works: The Future of Nostalgia (2001); Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991); Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994); “From Russian Soul and Post-Communist Nostalgia” (1995); “Socialist Realism and Kitsch” (1995); “Estrangement and Exile: Shklovsky to Brodsky” (1996).
Work in Progress: Freedom/Liberty/Svoboda: Cross Cultural Approaches.

Buckler, Julie A., Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. BA 1980, Yale; PhD 1996, Harvard.
Interests: Russian literature, 19th-century and pre-revolutionary prose, 18th-century literature, West European and American literature, cultural studies and semiotics, performing arts (opera, ballet, drama, music) and performance studies, urban studies, imperialism, monuments and commemorations, literary canon and popular culture.
Selected Works: Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (2005); The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (2000); “The City’s Memory: Texts of Preservation and Loss in Imperial St. Petersburg” (2007); “Eccentricity and Cultural Semiotics in Imperial Russia” (2006); “Eclectic Fabrication: St. Petersburg and the Problem of Imperial Architectural Style” (2003); “Reading Anna Karenina: Opera, Tragedy, Melodrama, Farce” (2003); “Melodramatizing Russia: Nineteenth-Century Views from the West” (2002); “Novelistic Figuration, Narrative Metaphor: Western and Russian Models of the Prima Donna.” (1998); “Her Final Debut: The Kadmina Legend in Russian Literature” (1998).
Work in Progress: Russian Imperial Masterworks and their Post-Histories; Cultural Properties: Afterlives of the Imperial in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia; Staging Russianness: Cultural Life in Performance; The Over-Examined Life: New Perspectives on Tolstoy (conference volume).

Chaput, Patricia R., Professor of the Practice of Slavic Languages, Director of the Language Program. BA 1968, UCLA; MA, PhD 1979, Harvard.
Interests: Russian verb aspect, lexical semantics, pragmatics, language and culture, -language teaching.
Selected Works:
“Shifting Culture from Custom to Context” (2000); “Culture in Grammar” (1997); “Functional and Semantic Factors Affecting Aspect Choice in Questions” (1990); “On the Question of Aspectual Selection in Denials” (1986).
Work in Progress: College Language Teaching; “The Pragmatics of Aspectual Choice in Russian Imperatives”; Topics in Russian Grammar: An Instructor’s Handbook; Pervyj shag (textbook for beginning Russian).
Flier, Michael S., Oleksandr Potebnja Professor of Ukrainian Philology. BA 1962, MA 1964, PhD 1968, University of California at Berkeley.
Interests:
Slavic linguistics, semiotics of medieval East Slavic culture.
Selected Works: “Surzhyk: The Rules of Engagement” (1999), “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Ukrainian Phoneme j in Context” (1998); “The Jer Shift and Consequent Mechanisms of Sharping (Palatalization) in East Slavic” (1998); “Pokrovskii sobor i arkhitektonika moskovskikh srednevekovykh ritualov”
[The Church of the Intercession and the Architechtonics of Medieval Muscovite Rituals] (1998); ed. Ukrainian Philology and Linguistics (1996); co-ed. Medieval Russian Culture, II (1994); co-ed. Medieval Russian Culture (1984); Aspects of Nominal Determination in Old Church Slavic (1974).
Work in Progress:
A book on the semiotics of the Apocalypse in Medieval Rus’; articles on Ukrainian case government, Ukrainian-Russian code-mixing.

Grabowicz, George G., Dmytro C?yz?evs’kyj Professor of Ukrainian Literature. BA 1965, Yale; AM 1970, PhD 1975, Harvard.
Interests:
Ukrainian literature, Russian-Ukrainian and Polish-Ukrainian literary -relations, literary theory (especially reception theory), Romanticism, the Baroque.
Selected Works:
Toward a History of Ukrainian Literature (1981); The Poet as Mythmaker (1982); In Search of a Great Literature (in Ukrainian, 1993); Do istorii ukrainskoi -literatury (1997); Poet jak mifotvore´c (1998).
Work in Progress: The Reception of Sevcenko; Ethnicity and Populism in Modern Ukrainian Literature; Russian-Ukrainian Literary Relations in the 19th Century.

Malmstad, John, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. BA 1963, Northwestern; MA, PhD 1969, Princeton.
Interests:Russian poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries; the culture of the “Silver Age”; the Russian avant-garde.
Selected Works: Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art (with Nikolay Bogomolov) (1998); Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism (1987); transl. (with Robert Maguire) of Bely’s Petersburg (1978); editions of the works of Bely, Kuzmin, and Khodasevich; articles on modern Russian poetry and Russian avant-garde.
Work in Progress: A biography of Andrey Bely; the correspondence of Bely and E.K. Metner.

Nizynska, Joanna, Assistant Professor. MA 1991, Adam Mickiewicz University; MA 1996, PhD 2002, University of California at
Los Angeles.
Interests: Post-WWII Polish literature, comparative approaches to literature, literature and philosophy, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, trauma and memory studies.
Selected Works:

• “The Impossibility of Shrugging Your Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara and Post-1989 Polish Poetry” (forthcoming Fall 2007).
• “The Something More of ‘almost nothing’: Miron Bialoszewski’s Kairotic Everyday”(forthcoming 2007)
• “Marsyas’ Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Apollo and Marsyas’” (2001)
• Translations of S. Grochowiak, Z. Herbert, E. Lipska, S. Baranczak (1998)
• “The Reception of Sappho in Antiquity,” “The Reception of Alkaios in Antiquity” (1994)

Work in Progress:

• The Glaring Identity of ‘Now’: Trauma, Memory, and the Quotidian in the Works of Miron Bialoszewski, book manuscript. 
• Co-editor of Polish-German Post/Memory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics.
• Co-organizer of the international conference “Polish-German Post/Memory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics.” Indiana University, Bloomington, April 19-22, 2007.

Sandler, Stephanie, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures. BA 1975, Princeton; PhD 1982, Yale.
Interests: Contemporary Russian poetry; modern Russian poetry and theory; feminist approaches to Russian literature; Pushkin and myths of Pushkin in Russia; cinema; psychoanalysis; literature and religion.
Selected Works: Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989, Russian translation 1998); Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (co-edited collection, 1993); Rereading Russian Poetry (edited collection, 1999), Self and Story in Russian History (co-edited collection, 2000); Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (2004).
Work in Progress: A book on Russian poetry since the 1960s; articles on contemporary women poets in Russia and the US, and on the films of Sokurov and Tarkovsky.

Todd, William Mills III, Harvard College Professor, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature, and Professor of Comparative Literature. AB 1966, Dartmouth; MA 1968, Oxford; PhD 1973, Columbia.
Interests: 19th-century Russian and European literature, Russian pastoral, journalism and literature, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, theory of narrative, semiotics, literary sociology, and cultural
Selected Works: Sovremennaia Amerikanskaia Pushkinovedenie: Sbornik Statei (St. Petersburg, 1999); The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (1976, Russian transl. 1995); Literature and Society in Imperial Russia: 1800-1914 (1978); Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, Narrative (1986, Russian transl. 1996.); Soviet Sociology of Literature: Conceptions of a Changing World (1990).
Work in Progress: A book on the serialization of the Russian novel (1860s-80s), articles on Russian literary theory.

Weir, Justin McCabe, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities. BA 1991, University of Minnesota; MA 1993, PhD 1997, Northwestern.
Interests: 19th- and 20th-century Russian prose, Russian film, literary theory.
Selected Works: The Author as Hero (2002); Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays, ed.
and trans. with Timothy Langen (2000);
Work in Progress: Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative.