Contact Eva Eckert
Education
B.A., Charles University, Prague, Czechoslovakia;
M.A., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley
"My teaching of Russian and linguistics is motivated by the persuasion that language is a key to one's mind, a road to understand self and value others. Its study, I believe, should be a truly transformational experience (that can hardly be measured by any sort of guidelines) -- it forces the student to reevaluate his perception of the world and accept his role in it, and exposes him to the plethora of views and ways to comprehend his environment."
Professor Eckert's letter to prospective Russian students.
SATA
Prague 1999, 2002
SATA
Prague 2004
Eva Eckert
Professor of Slavic Studies and Linguistics
Joined Connecticut College: 1990
Specialization:
- Linguistics
- Russian and Czech
No matter what language you study, sooner or later you will encounter questions such as: How do language rules originate? Why knowing words is not enough to speak a language? Is the order of words in a sentence related in any way to how action unfolds? Who makes up idioms? Can you be sarcastic in any language? Why can we speak about one thing in so many different ways? Why don’t dogs bark in the same way in all languages?
Such questions point to language as a fundamental characteristic of humans, an engine that sets our lives in motion. Learning a language is a life-long mission of composing a puzzle that cannot be replicated in any individual. Yet, we use it to communicate and share the same language brain rules.
In teaching linguistics and Slavic languages, Eva Eckert strives to relate this capacity for language to daily activities, social behavior, mental processing as well as history. She explains: "Doing linguistics means tackling structural complexity of language, i.e., accounting for rules involved in patterning of sounds, words and meaning. It’s a complex business. But then, so is language. For the uninitiated this complexity may be at first perplexing and unexpected. After all, even small children can handle language. We all use language no matter how smart and old we are. Language is the elemental requirement for functioning in any sort of a group."
The task of a linguist is to clarify this hidden complexity of our sentences and networks of our thought processes, and explain it in relation to neurological functioning of the human brain. As Ray Jackendoff puts it in his masterpiece of Foundations of Language, “The study of linguistic structure can provide an entrée into the complexities of mind and brain. Not the only one by any means, but one with unique insights to offer.” (xii)
A Czech native, Professor Eckert teaches Russian and occasionally also Czech, and an array of linguistics courses, and coordinates linguistics minor and self-designed linguistics major.
In her research Eckert has focused on immigrant languages and communities as well as immigrant acculturation, and most recently on the study of immigrant press. Her writing spans topics such as languages in contact, language maintenance and death, immigration history, and standard and vernacular language variants. Eckert’s scholarly work is interdisciplinary, oscillating between linguistics and history, and drawing on primary sources collected while photographing gravestones at Czech cemeteries in Texas, interviewing descendants of pioneer immigrants, reading immigrant press and digging in emigration archives in Prague. Eckert has published Stones on the Prairie: Acculturation in America (Slavica Publishers 2007; the Czech edition of the book came out in Prague in 2005). The books analyze acculturation and identity reconstruction of a homogeneous group of Czech and Moravian farmers in Texas whose is interspersed with that of the author who underwent an immigrant journey from Czechoslovakia to Texas a century after the immigrants. Her interest in language structure and variation led her to publishing Varieties of Czech: Studies in Czech Sociolinguistics (1993).
Eckert has delivered papers at conferences of American Cultural Association, Czech Academy of Sciences as well as meetings of Slavic professional organizations. Her recent articles appeared in the Czech historical journal History and the Present; Journal of Slavic Linguistics; ethnographic journals and gravestone research journals; Journal of Modern Philology in Prague and various collections of Slavic linguistic articles. Her research in acculturation and immigration involved many trips to Texas and the Czech Republic.
Eckert is leading SATA Prague 2007 in the Fall, a semester abroad focused on Czech and Central European Studies (Read the students’ and her own comments on the SATA Prague 2005 Blog).
In 1995, Eckert received a U.S.D.E. Fulbright-Hays National Endowment for the Humanities research/curriculum development grant that enabled fourteen colleagues to journey through the Czech Republic and Slovakia while seeking to comprehend European transition from the Czech perspective.
View the complete Slavic Studies Web site, and the Linguistics Web site.