Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Welcomes New Faculty

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures is very pleased to welcome three new faculty members in the upcoming year:

Veronika Egorova, Preceptor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, comes to Harvard as a recent graduate from the University of Washington (Ph.D., 2013) where she has been teaching for a number of years. Her research in linguistics is related to pragmatics and manipulation in advertising discourse. She is also interested in cross-cultural semantics and pragmatics, as well as foreign language pedagogy and the use of classroom technology. A Russian native speaker, she is an experienced teacher who has taught Russian in both the U.S. and Russia. In her new role as a member of the Slavic Department she will offer Russian B. Intermediate Russian, Russian Ah. Grammar and Vocabulary Review for Heritage Speakers, Russian 103. Advanced Russian: Reading, Composition, and Conversation, and with Natalia Pokrovska, Russian 101. Advanced Russian I.

Daria Khitrova, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature from the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU, Moscow). A native speaker of Russian, Khitrova speaks fluent English and German, and reads Old Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, and French. Her research interests include 19th and 20th centuries, poetry, prose, film, theater, ballet, and the movement of cultural tropes from one tradition to another. Her latest work includes a book manuscript, Staging Feelings: Russian Lyrical Poetry in the First Half of the 19th Century, in which she offers a new approach to Russian lyric poetry of the time, concentrating mostly on the social functioning of poetic texts. The courses she taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles, covered a variety of topics from 18th-century poetry, to 19th-century novels, as well as 20th-century Revolutionary literature and film. In her new role as a member of the Slavic Department, in 2014-2015 Khitrova will offer Slavic 185. 18th-Century Russian Literature: Seminar, Freshman Seminar 39x. Watch Her Step: Ballet Past and Present, Slavic 140. 20th-Century Culture on Page, Stage and Screen, and Slavic 97. Tutorial — Sophomore Year.

Oksana Willis, Preceptor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, comes to Harvard with a Ph.D. in Russian Literature (2009) from Lomonosov Moscow State University and four years teaching teaching experience as an Assistant Professor at DLI in California. During her service at DLI, she has focused on foreign language acquisition theories and practices. As a native-speaker of Russian, Willis has taught all levels of Russian language and culture, led the Russian language immersion program, and collaborated on writing the Russian Basic Course Textbook and Area Studies Booklet. She also trained DLI faculty in Foreign Language pedagogy and technology. Her research interests include interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to Russian literature, Russian Modernism and Postmodernism; urban studies; spatiality and corporeality of literary text; Vladimir Nabokov, Georgy Ivanov, and Vladimir Sorokin. In her new role as a member of the Slavic Department she will offer Russian At. Elementary Russian through Authentic Texts (Russian through Pushkin), Russian Bt. Intermediate Russian through Authentic Texts (Russian through Bulgakov), and Russian 102r. Advanced Russian: Introduction to the Language of Social Sciences and the Media. How did AfroAm do their page?