CREEES Professional Resources Forum
Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin
Virtual Experiences Abroad
A new generation of digital learning content provided at your fingertips. VEXA provides students of all kinds and means with engaging and memorable experiences abroad
What is VEXA
Vexa is a secure, user-friendly platform that hosts and displays content and combines aspects of social media with a learning management system to drive engagement.
Continue reading “Study Abroad Online: VEXA”Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs (TVL) is now accepting applications for our Fall 2021 TVL Practicum class. If you would like to learn more about this unique course and our other programs, please attend one of our upcoming info sessions.
The TVL Practicum is a cross-campus elective course that teaches graduate students how to work and consult with startups. Multi-disciplinary teams of grad students work through a project-driven curriculum that immerses them in research, teaches about business strategy and terminology, and provides a framework for strategically thinking through business problems to directly deliver positive outcomes for Texas-based startups. These startup companies are from our TVL Accelerator and engage with the students as “consulting clients”, so this is real-world, hands-on experience for course credit!
Continue reading “Course: Fall 2021 Texas Venture Labs Practicum”First Meeting: March 2, 2021
Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural teaching and research organization, presents its first Spring course:
Dmitri Shostakovich: The Man, The Music, The Myth
Instructor: Harlow Robinson – expert in Soviet and Russian cultural history (Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, Northeastern University)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was not only one of the greatest composers of the modern era but also a reluctant political figure.
Born in Tsarist Russia, Shostakovich witnessed many of the defining events of his times: the creation of the USSR, the long nightmare of Stalinist terror, Hitler’s invasion, the Cold War, Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” Brezhnev’s era of stagnation. All these experiences were inscribed in his music that provoked subjective responses and widely divergent political and psychological interpretations.
From the triumphant premiere of his First Symphony in Leningrad in 1926 until his death, Shostakovich remained one of the most prominent representatives of Soviet culture. He received numerous honors from the Communist Party to which he belonged, and yet the extent of his personal and creative loyalty to the Soviet regime remains a hotly debated issue.
Dr. McAteer’s book should appeal to anyone interested in the history of translation from Russian, or indeed the histories of individual translators, or possibly anyone who has ever read a Russian novel as a Penguin Classic. She focuses on the cohort of translators who worked with Penguin in the 1950s to bring out the first batch of Penguin Russian Classics, including David Magarshack’s famous versions of Dostoevsky, but she continues her survey through the following decades, examining such hot spots as the race to publish Solzhenitsyn in English or the fates of women translators like Babette Deutsch. And most usefully, this book can be read or downloaded for free anywhere in the world, so it is easy to access or include on a reading list.
Continue reading “Resource: Open Access Book: Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics”We are pleased to let you know that, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched, the comprehensive volume of ours, The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), has been made open access.
The book is available for free download via this link: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46598
(In case the link does not work, here is an alternative link: https://www.postcommunistregimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2021.09.10.-Magyar-Madlovics-The-Anatomy-of-Post-Communist-Regimes.pdf)
For all Russian language learners: Master Class in Russian pronunciation is being offered this spring. Our mission: to learn to sound authentically Russian! It is a free six-session class held via Zoom.
Appropriate for:
all students and teachers of Russian
beginners who know the alphabet
students with experience (a little or a lot!)
adult professional non-native speakers who want to improve their pronunciation
Russian teachers who want to expand their repertoire for teaching pronunciation
Level of instruction is aimed at:
college students
grad students
adult professionals
advanced high school students age 16+
The February 2021 issue of Words Without Borders is all young Russophone writers in English translation:
Our February 2021 issue features nine young writers on the cutting edge of Russophone literature. The term “Russophonia,” coined by literary scholar Naomi Caffee, speaks to the diversity of Russian-language authors today—from Russian nationals to Indigenous writers in post-Soviet countries to émigrés around the world.
Featuring work by Olga Breininger, Alisa Ganieva, Ksenia Zheludova, Danyil Zadorozhnyi, Galina Rymbu, Ilya Danishevsky, Alla Gorbunova, Xenia Emelyanova, Dinara Rasuleva, and an introductory essay from guest editors Hilah Kohen and Josephine von Zitzewitz.
Continue reading “Resource: Words Without Borders Online Magazine: Russophonia”Decoding the 1920s: A Reader for Advanced Learners of Russian
The materials presented in this book were developed for an advanced-level content-based Russian language course at Portland State University entitled “Russian Literature of the Twentieth Century: The 1920s.” Literature of this period is a major part of the Russian canon, but is notoriously difficult for learners of Russian to read in the original, due both to its stylistic complexity and the relative obscurity of its historical, political, and cultural references. And yet, this decade is crucial for understanding Russia – not only in the Soviet period, but also today. This was the period, when Mikhail Zoshchenko, Isaak Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Platonov meticulously documented the birth of the “New Soviet Man,” his “newspeak” and Soviet bureaucratese; when Alexandra Kollontai, a Marxist revolutionary and a diplomat, wrote essays and fiction on the “New Soviet Woman”; when numerous satirical works were created; when Babel experimented with a literary representation of dialects (e.g.,Odessa Russian or Jewish Russian). These varieties of language have not disappeared. Bureaucrats still use some form of bureaucratese. Numerous contemporary TV shows imitate the dialects that Babel described. Moreover, Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” gave rise, due largely to its film adaptation, to catch-phrases that still appear throughout contemporary Russian media, satirical contexts, and everyday conversation. Thus, the Russian literature of the 1920s does not belong exclusively to the past, but has relevance and interpretive power for the present, and language learners who wish to pursue a career in humanities, media analysis, analytical translation, journalism, or international relations must understand this period and the linguistic patterns it established.
Envisioning Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL)
February 1 – March 8, 2021
Registration deadline: January 28, 2021
Envisioning Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL) is designed as a 5-week open-enrollment course for language educators beginning to learn about Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL). Successful learners will be able to describe essential features of high quality PBLL and to generate high-quality ideas for projects using the Product Square. Registration and the content for this MOOC (massive open online course) is FREE. However, if you wish to earn the optional digital badge for completion afterwards, you will need to meet the badge criteria and pay a nominal fee ($25) to have your submitted materials evaluated by NFLRC staff.
Continue reading “Envisioning Project-Based Language Learning Course”Recently compiled by Slavic language learners and instructors:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eiYqMdrDt_JVj6ZobFe1nuX0WtV3-LltBsqc2_JpdFE/edit