Grad Program: PhD in Slavic Literatures and Cultures (University of Illinois)

Deadline: December 11, 2020

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invites students interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic literatures and cultures to apply to our graduate program. Qualified students beginning their graduate career at Illinois are guaranteed five years of financial support (contingent on satisfactory progress). This includes fellowships, teaching, research, and graduate assistantships, summer support, and the opportunity for an editorial assistantship at Slavic Review, one of the world’s leading academic journals in our discipline. We also welcome applicants who have completed an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures or related fields. 

While the Russian classics continue to be a focus of our program, oriented toward students concentrating on 18th- through 21st-century Russian literature, our Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures also offers a cultural studies track and other interdisciplinary work. A wide range of opportunities for individual specialization includes the languages, literatures, and cultures of Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, as well as Yiddish. Interdisciplinary study is facilitated by our close ties with other campus units such as the federally funded Russian, East European & Eurasian Center; the Program in Comparative & World Literature; the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory; the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies; the College of Media; and the Program in Jewish Culture and Society. Students may earn formal graduate minors or certificates from these units or they may create their own minors to satisfy Ph.D. requirements. 

In addition to Slavic literatures and cultures, our faculty have a broad range of interests ranging across the disciplinary fields, e.g., comparative literature; translation; gender studies; postcolonial studies; Jewish studies; Balkan studies; violence studies; film theory and history; language pedagogy; psychoanalysis; and history. Specific research topics include empire and the Gothic; race and empire; race and Slavic societies; gender, sexuality, and the body; literary mystifications and forgeries; Czech revival culture; Polish borderlands; Socialist Yugoslavia; Solzhenitsyn; Russian and Eurasian sci-fi and pop culture; and political and cultural charisma. We also offer instruction in Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian and Bulgarian. For more, see http://www.slavic.illinois.edu/people/ 

The Slavic collection of the University of Illinois Library is the third largest in the country; together with our outstanding Slavic Reference Service it attracts researchers from all over the world, especially during the Summer Research Laboratory. 

The deadline for national and international applicants is December 11, 2020 

To apply, please go to the Graduate College site:http://www.grad.illinois.edu 

For further information, please visit 

Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures: http://www.slavic.illinois.edu/ 

Graduate programs: http://www.slavic.illinois.edu/graduate/ 

Admissions Info: https://slavic.illinois.edu/admissions/graduate-application 

You may also contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Professor Richard Tempest (rtempest@illinois.edu