Slavic Studies faculty and students are actively engaged in scholarly research, and regularly present their work at national and international conferences.

Slavic Studies students on a research trip.

All Slavic studies majors are required to conduct original research and to produce a senior integrated project (SIP) or an honors thesis in the senior year. Graduating seniors present their work before graduation in May in an annual showcase that includes department faculty, graduating seniors, and continuing students.

 

In recent years, honors thesis topics have included:

  • Writing the Border between Socialist Self and State: Christa Wolf's East German Autofiction (Emma Dinkelspiel)
  • Fostering Communist Elites: Cold War Czechoslovakia's Foreign Student Program (Emily Hackett)
  • Black October: The Migration of Black Americans to the Soviet Union in the Interwar Period (Alice Volfson)
  • Out of Odesa: Yefim Ladyzhensky and the "Odesa text" of Jewish-Soviet Culture (Beatrice Voorhees)
  • An Ethnography of Russian Language Teaching in Bulgarian Schools During Socialism (1944-1989): Textbooks and Memories (Devon Rancourt)
  • Museum Representations of Contested Spaces: The Kuril Islands (Emily Sandall)
  • Navigating Narratives: A Meta-Ethnography of the Russian Ethnographic Museum (Kamal Kariem)
  • Skeletons in the Soviet Closet: The Last Tsar and his Family in the Early Soviet Era, 1918-1937 (Olivia Chap)
  • Gender in the Everyday Life of the Russian Home (Jyoti Arvey)
  • Competing for the Motherland: Sports Spectacle and Nationalism During the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (Tara Law)

Slavic studies majors routinely produce exceptionally good work during their senior year.

In 2023, Beatrice Voorhees honors thesis, “Out of Odesa: Yefim Ladyzhensky and the ‘Odesa text’ of Jewish-Soviet Culture,” won the Claire Gaudiani Prize for Excellence in the Senior Integrative Project. Voorhees’s thesis is the first sustained study in any language of the biography, cultural context, and works of Yefim Ladyzhensky (1911-1982), an artist and set painter who came of age in Imperial Odesa. Voorhees describes the unique culture and history that shaped Ladyzhensky’s sense of self and analyzes the artist’s contributions to the “Odesa text” of Jewish-Soviet culture, a less studied counterpart of the “Petersburg text,” an interpretive paradigm according to which the city’s history, geography, architecture, and creative texts are intertwined. Professor Laura Little advised this thesis.

In 2014, Slavic studies major Jyoti Arvey received the prestigious Oakes and Louise Ames Prize for the best honors thesis for her study, “Gender in the Everyday Life of the Russian Home.” Based on ethnographic interviews with 20 residents of Ufa, Russia, Arvey’s thesis illuminates the social structures within the post-socialist Russian home and broader social relations in modern-day Russia. Her thesis was advised by Professor Petko Ivanov . Arvey went on to win a Fulbright award to return to Russia in 2014-2015.