The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
1. Vision
We are one of the top-tier programs in North America and the premier Slavic program in
Canada. We take a two-pronged approach to our future. We seek to remain an
internationally recognized centre of excellence in Slavic studies with a focus on humanistic
areas of enquiry. At the same time, we want to integrate more fully into the university by
cross-listing courses with units with whom we are already cooperating. With curriculum
renewal, we have an ambitious plan to increase by at least 50% the number of
undergraduates in our courses. We are poised to provide more international experience and,
through service learning initiatives, to tap into the wealth of opportunities available for
students here in Toronto. Our new hires will help move us into new areas of curriculum
development and cooperation. Our teaching and research excellence will continue to serve
as the pillars on which we will build our reputation in the university, the community, and
the world.
Our students today were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wave of
revolutions, both velvet and violent, that transformed Central and Eastern Europe. The
subsequent dislocation, the redrawing of the boundaries of Europe, the wars in Yugoslavia,
and on-going tensions in Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asian nations, have reshaped our
discipline. Our department has been transformed by these events. During the Cold War
there was no question that a Slavic Department was Russian-focused with satellite
interests. The fact that Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Serbian and Croatian were
taught in the same department was not questioned. As events swept through Europe, these
underlying assumptions unraveled. New connections and approaches to scholarship are
bringing a new dynamism to our areas of interest. It is an exciting time to be a Slavist.
2. Key strengths
Internationally recognized research and cooperation, superlative teaching, student
mentorship, plus community outreach form the core of our activities. Our department is a
disciplinary hub with a focus on the humanities. In 2007 external reviewers noted that we
were poised to enter a “golden age.” Not only was our program among the best in North
America but, in several areas, Toronto had become “the place to go.”
We offer programs in five Slavic areas covering the three major language divisions in our
area: East Slavic (Russian and Ukrainian), West Slavic (Polish and Czech), and South
Slavic (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian). We also have one of the top Finnish programs on the
continent, and a unique two-year sequence of Macedonian language.
Across the university we are known as “a language department.” Indeed, we pride
ourselves on our rigourous language programs and the fact that almost every faculty
member teaches in the language sequence, following MLA best practices1. We are also a
centre for literary and cultural studies. Fully half of our courses are not language courses
and attract students of diverse academic interests. The non-language strengths of our
department are apparent in courses offered this academic year: major authors;
interdisciplinary study; literary theory; cinema studies; media studies; literary genres;
1
See, for example, the report on two-tiered teaching at http://www.mla.org/flreport
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language and politics; comparative Slavic linguistics. We are especially strong in the 19th
and 20th centuries. We draw upon colleagues who work in Slavic disciplines in
departments of Religion, History, Jewish Studies, Drama, Cinema Studies, Comparative
Literature, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and others to expand the breadth of our
offerings.
In our department, a language course is never ‘just’ language, but is itself a subject of
intellectual enquiry. Under the leadership of our language coordinator, we have well
articulated sequences, clear benchmarks, and an understanding of the separate demands
required for teaching heritage learners. We have a well-conceived and broadly shared
approach of teaching language as an integrative subject encompassing language
acquisition, stylistics, grammatical study, and socio-linguistic and cultural knowledge.
2a i. Research and scholarship
Our key strength is a dedicated faculty with creative minds interested in academic
excellence in teaching and research.
We have scholars at different stages in their careers, all actively engaged in research. Our
most recent external reviewers noted that our faculty’s scholarly and teaching specialties
span a wide range of cultures and historical periods and expertise not limited to literature
alone, but including a variety of cultural phenomena—film, theatre, art, architecture, and
music. Interdisciplinary courses figure prominently in the department’s undergraduate and
graduate curricula. The reviewers called our faculty “top-notch and among the best of its
peer group in North America.”
• In the past five years our faculty have published (or have accepted and in press) 13 books
and 46 articles or book chapters written in eight different languages.
• In the past five years our faculty members have presented 33 invited talks and have
organized a dozen conferences. We have presented over 70 conference papers at national
and international venues.
•
We have served as officers of significant professional organizations including the
Canadian Association of Slavists, the North American Tolstoy Society, the South East
European Studies Association, and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages,
(the Foreign Language division of the Modern Language Association).
•
We serve on the editorial and advisory boards of publications here and abroad (including
Slavic and East European Journal; Canadian Slavonic Papers; Tolstoy Studies Journla;
Toronto Slavic Quarterly; The University of Toronto Quarterly; Postscriptum (Poland);
Problemy istorii, filologii, kul'tury (Russia); Sarmatian Review (US); Electronic Library of
Ukrainian Literature; The Bulletin of the North American Chekhov Society; Ukrainian
Literature: A Journal of Translations; and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press).
Julia Mikhailova serves as head of the Pedagogy Division of the largest professional
organization in North America for teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
(AATSEEL).
•
We publish with major presses and journals: Toronto, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cambridge,
Cornell, Wisconsin, McGill, Penguin, Barnes and Noble, Slavic Review, Slavic and East
European Journal, Stanford Slavic Studies, Russian Review, etc.
•
We win awards. In a field with few book prizes, it is notable that members of our
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department have won: an AATSEEL award for the best pedagogy book; The VolianykShvabinskyi Fund of the Ukrainian Free University Foundation for the best book in
Ukrainian Studies; a special AATSEEL award; and an honorable mention for the
prestigious Vucinich Prize for Distinguished book in Slavic Studies (AAASS).
•
We win major research awards. Currently two members of the Department hold SSHRC
grants, and another has just completed an ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies).
Our work has been supported by NEH, IREX (International Research and Exchange
Board), Fulbright, and ACTR (American Council of Teachers of Russian). Other awards
and honours include Research Fellowships from Yale University, and the University of
London; an outstanding achievement award from Warsaw University; the Pushkin Medal,
awarded by Vladimir Putin; and election to the Macedonian Academy of Arts and
Sciences.
•
We are engaged in a broad range of international initiatives. Some recent and up-coming
projects include: the “International Workshop on Balto-Slavic Accentology and
Dialectology” and “Geolinguistics in Central Europe Today” (Opava, Czech Republic);
“Bai Ganyo Bulgarian to English translation project” (Chicago, Cornell, Arizona, Wayne
State NB); “Growing up Bilingually” (Berlin); an international interdisciplinary conference
on Polish translation (Indiana, Michigan, and Jagiellonian); “A New History of Polish
Literature” (Poznan and Harvard); international symposium on Nikolai Gogol (Fribourg,
Switzerland and Ukrainian Society of Switzerland); an international symposium
“Imagining the Other in Jewish and Ukrainian Literatures; War and Peace at West Point
(Canada, US, Russia, Britain, and Germany); “Semiotics of drama and theatre” (U. of
Brno, Czech Republic); an international multi-disciplinary symposium “Poltava 1709:
Revisiting a Turning Point in European History” (Harvard); and Areal Linguistic Group
(Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences).
•
Our expertise has been sought for institutional reviews; tenure and promotion files; grant
adjudication; article peer review; conference adjudication; the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; the American Council of Teachers of Russian;
National Science Foundation; Radio Free Europe; and others.
2a ii. Graduate education
We are the primary centre of Slavic research for the country. Our Department is one of
approximately 40 Slavic graduate departments and one of 30 PhD granting institutions in
North America. We are one of three PhD granting institutions in Canada. The Department
offers both an MA and PhD. We attract the top Canadian talent and applications from
around the world. Our current students have come from Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic,
England, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the US. Applications for next year are arriving from
China, Ghana, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Of course, the funding model
and restrictions on visa students have made admission to our programs highly competitive,
and the quality of students, particularly visa students, has risen.
Our reputational peer group includes U. of Chicago; U. of California, Los Angeles; U of
California, Berkeley; Harvard; and U. Wisconsin, Madison. We have 11.27 FTE (plus Finnish
5-year CLTA) compared with Harvard 20; Berkeley 13, Chicago 12, Wisconsin 13. Despite
our smaller faculty, we are able to compete through a heavier than normal teaching load for a
Research 1 Institution (2.5) and creative use of faculty across disciplines.
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The Slavic languages are difficult to acquire. The Foreign Service Institute estimates that it
takes nearly double the contact hours (1100 plus 2 hours outside for each hour in class for
Slavic languages and Finnish vs 500-600 for French or Spanish) to achieve fluency.
The MA is an intense year – four courses and two languages - but students typically finish
in nine months. In addition to courses in literature and cognate subjects, and Old Church
Slavonic, they must acquire at least intermediate high knowledge of their major language,
and a first-year foundational level in their second Slavic language.
The average time to degree for the PhD is six years. PhD students must attain advanced
mastery of their major Slavic language and intermediate low in their second language,
together with reading knowledge of French or German. Linguistic complexities coupled
with the comparative Slavic nature of our degree, and the fact that the majority of our
students do field work in countries where it is often difficult to get access to archives,
means the average time-to-degree of six years is difficult to lower.
The ADFL survey of PhDs awarded in foreign languages notes that in 2006, 614 PhDs
were awarded in foreign languages, of which 61.6% were women. Only 47.6% of PhDs
also held a BA in the same field. These figures are reflected in our own cohort. 64% of our
graduate students are women (eleven of seventeen). Their undergrad degrees are in fields
ranging from psychology to philosophy, English literature, ethnology, international
relations, and Russian and Czech language and literature. In short, our graduate students
are often not building on an undergraduate foundation, but are moving into new and
complex disciplines.
In the ADFL survey, 83% of doctoral degree holders in foreign languages went on to teach.
Of these, in 2006 only 56% of foreign language PhDs were hired in tenure stream jobs. We
are competing for those jobs and winning them.
• Only one or two programs in Canada do not have a graduate of the U. of Toronto on their
faculty in Slavic fields.
• Our students teach from coast to coast: from Memorial to McGill, U. of Ottawa, Toronto,
Manitoba, Calgary, and U. of Victoria. They also teach as faculty or fellows in the United
States at institutions ranging from Columbia, Northwestern, U. of Washington, U. of
Florida, U. of Utah, Salt Lake, Willamette State, The Air Force Academy, and The U. of
Texas, Arlington.
• Our students also hold positions in Europe: The universities of Glasgow, Novi Sad,
Belgrade, Nottingham, and Warwick.
• Graduate students receive early professional mentoring, they participate in national and
international conferences, and they publish their work.
• Our MA students have continued on to doctoral programs at Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, and
other leading institutions. Those who choose other professions have moved on to law
school, OISE, and successful careers in provincial and federal government.
• Our students win awards. Two have recently won ACTR awards for summer study in
Russia. Another is currently on a Fulbright, the second such award won by students in our
Department. One holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, another
the Ernest Tauber Scholarship. One of our SSHRC award-winners was a finalist for a
Vanier in the first year it was granted.
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• We serve in supervisory capacities to students in Drama, Comp. Lit, German, OISE, and
others.
• We attract applications for post-doctoral fellows from Harvard (our former Harvard PDF is
now on the faculty at Indiana U.), Stanford, Yale, and U. of Alberta.
2a iii. Undergraduate education
There are very few Russian undergraduate programs in Canada, few Slavic, and no other
Finnish programs. Our programs are among the top in North America. One indicator of the
quality of our program is the fact that our undergraduate majors go on to such schools as
Harvard, Yale, and Michigan; they enter government service, law school, business, and
teaching faculties. Enrolments in our programs are some of the most robust in North
America. Obviously we are small in comparison with Spanish or French, but when we look
at North American data for the languages we teach, the strength of our programs is clear.
The MLA Survey of 2006 provides data on language courses. Most of these schools have
both a language and foreign culture requirement. Many, if not most, of these programs
offer only language for Slavic languages other than Russian. In the data below, for
Toronto, we put language enrolments to the left, and full program enrolments, to the right
of the slash. 2
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (31 institutions) comparators: Columbia 21, Michigan 5,
Indiana 15, Wisconsin 20, UCLA 12, Berkeley 15, Harvard 7, Toronto 47/96
Czech (29 institutions) comparators: Wisconsin 8; U Washington 15; Harvard 8, Chicago
14; Berkeley 9; Columbia 17, Toronto 13/30
Polish (67 institutions) comparators: Wisconsin 29, UCLA 7, Chicago 27, OSU 18,
Columbia 15, Toronto 29/71
Ukrainian (16 institutions) comparators: Columbia 9; Harvard 9; Penn State 12
27/115
Toronto
Russian (484 institutions) Wisconsin 159, Penn. 73, Berkeley 170, Chicago 105, UCLA
130, Harvard 116, Toronto 108/503
Unlike other universities, we provide separate POSt for students majoring and minoring in
different Slavic areas. This is driven by community and student interest. If we pool these
numbers, as other universities do, our success as a strong program becomes evident.
2004: 23 majors, 38 minors, 15 specialists; 2005: 32 majors, 63 minors, 16 specialists;
2006: 41 majors, 60 minors, 20 specialists; 2007: 39 majors, 68 minors, 13 specialists,
2008: 32 majors, 80 minors, 14 specialists.
How does this compare with other universities?3 For comparison, we here select the largest
numbers cited for fourth year and put our graduating majors in Slavic Languages and
Literatures in comparison (2006 data):
Toronto: 16, Brigham Young 39, Georgetown 6, Arizona State 9, Indiana 14,
Data taken from http://www.mla.org/2006_flenrollmentsurvey ,
http://www1.american.edu/research/CCPCR/COLLEGEENROLL.htm )
2
3
Data taken from http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~aaass
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Stanford 6, Virginia 14, Grinnell College 11.
We have taken advantage of our ability to provide stellar small group experiences. The
responses on student questionnaires for both our small and medium-sized classes clearly
show us as leaders in the faculty for exceptional teaching.
Over the past five years our average response to Question 11 was 6.24, Question 19, the
overall educational experience, 5.71%, and Question 20, the retake rate, was 92.2%. For all
three we are well above the faculty average.
Teaching awards in the past five years: Livak, Outstanding Teaching Award; Barnes, TVO
finalist, best lecturer top 30; Mikhailova, Teacher of the Year Award, St. Michael’s
College; Päiviö, Indiana U. Trustee’s Teaching Award for Lecturers; Kramer, Nomination
for President's Teaching Award; Kramer and Livak, nominated for L.I.F.T. Award;
Trojanowska, nominated twice for Outstanding Teaching Award.
• We actively mentor students in writing, language, and professional development. We
provide an incredible array of extra-curricular events including: symposia, language tables
for active practice outside of class, film clubs, Czech teas, a talent show, Russian carnival,
student-faculty colloquia, etc.
2b) What has your unit done over the past five years to enhance these strengths?
• We have made four new hires: Julia Mikhailova, language coordinator; Kate Holland, 19th
century Russian literature; Dragana Obradović, South Slavic languages and literatures
(with a strong interest in Diaspora Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies); and Pia Päiviö,
CLTA in Finnish. We are in the process of tremendous renewal.
• Since the campaign in 1997 we have raised $1,962,797. In the past five years we have
raised: $841, 377 including: Polish: $563,000 endowed fund and over $60,000 in
expendable; Finnish: $500,000 endowed; Russian $43,497 endowed and $30,000
expendable; Macedonian $100,000 expendable; Ukrainian $235,000 endowment; Serbian
$20,000 expendable; Estonian $44, 039 expendable; Croatian $135, 275 expendable.
• 18 graduate and 14 undergraduate new or redesigned courses have forged new crossdisciplinary ties. We work particularly closely at the undergraduate level with Jewish
Studies, Book and Media Studies, the UC Drama program, Diaspora and Transnational
Studies, Linguistics, Cinema Studies, History, and European Studies. At the graduate level,
we have strengthened links with Comparative Literature, Drama, Jewish Studies, Diaspora
and Transnational Studies, and CERES.
• Curriculum Renewal has opened up exciting possibilities for cross-unit cooperation and
expansion. This is a significant shift for us, and we are poised to help other units meet new
guidelines.
• Last year we began an exchange consortium with U. of Utah, Salt Lake, and The U. of
Krasnoyarsk. We envision this becoming a multi-disciplinary summer institute in
Krasnoyarsk, Siberia that combines intensive language study with additional modules in:
Gulag literature, the ethnography and geography of Siberia, Sino-Russian relations, and the
ecology of Lake Baikal. This coming year we will introduce the first module – the
ethnography and geography of Siberia working in conjunction with the Krasnoyarsk
Museum of Natural History.
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2c) How have resources been used effectively by your unit to enhance these strengths?
• We continue to maintain a 2.5 teaching load. In order to meet the demands of graduate and
undergraduates, we have combined more courses, but teach them more hours, providing
separate instruction to graduate students. Many of us teach six-ten hours per week.
• We have greatly enhanced graduate education in pedagogy – new students take a semester
course on methods and issues in teaching Slavic languages. Graduate students teach in our
first and second year language sequences under close supervision by our language
coordinator (and they receive ratings above 6.0).
• We have tapped resources in cognate disciplines: e.g., T. Allen Smith, of T.S.T., teaches
Medieval Russian texts; Ann Komaromi, Comp. Lit, is teaching a graduate course in
samizdat; Allison Smith, history, is co-teaching a course on Russian literature and history.
• We share resources, e.g., cross-appts; co-teaching, etc.; placing T.A.s from other units, etc.
• We have created international course modules (Trojanowska took students to Poland,
Obradović and Kramer are taking students to the Balkans, spring 2010).
• Significantly, we have stopped doing some things: Hungarian is no longer taught in our
department and Estonian is now taught solely as a community-supported language course
when there is sufficient demand.
• We are now able to focus on Finnish. Pia Päiviö, a linguist and specialist in child language
acquisition, fits well with the departmental focus on research and teaching in the
humanities. We are hiring fewer adjunct professors in order to save money and also, where
possible, to have our advanced graduate students teach non-language courses.
3. Priorities
•
•
•
•
•
•
Remain among the top five departments in North America. We must remain
independent since this is the sine qua non to keep our profile as a recognized
international centre of Slavic research and teaching. Without our independence, the
University of Toronto could lose this centre of excellence.
Increase undergraduate enrolment FCEs by 50% by leading a Faculty-wide
initiative to facilitate cross-listing and cross-enrolment. This can only be done
through institutional and cross-departmental cooperation. 4
Increase internationalization, service learning, and community engagement.
Continue to attract top students to our graduate programs.
Collaborate with St. Michael’s College and other language and literature
departments.
Increase and strengthen ties with other units within the University.
4. Plans for achieving our priorities
4a. Given current resources:
4
Possible mechanisms might be a new cross-enrolment POSt code or a listing of courses by
degree-requirement field, i.e. some mechanism to enable students to find courses outside of
disciplinary silos.
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•
Use better mechanisms of cross-listing, and better publicity to alert registrars and
students to our department. Our undergraduate courses, many of which are in
English, are well suited to help students meet new breadth requirements while
continuing to provide writing intensive courses with a disciplinary and crossdisciplinary liberal arts focus.
•
Use more extra-curricular activities and emerging technologies to bridge the gap in
lost contact hours in language courses due to the shortened academic year (a 40hour deficit over a four-year program).
•
Enhance opportunities for every major to have an international experience and
develop new partnerships like those with Krasnoyarsk, Jagiellonian, Univ. of
Warsaw, and University of Brno.
•
Develop community-based service learning using target languages. The city around
us has been under-utilized and we have a tremendous untapped opportunity (CRIF
application pending).
•
Find new funding sources to enable graduate students to complete their degrees in a
timely fashion.
•
Find ways to create shared resources and state-of-the art facilities (more smart
classrooms), perhaps at Kelly, for use of language learning technologies and film
viewing.
4b. If there were additional resources
Each of our top three priorities is in cooperation with a different unit:
•
Our top priority would be to share with Comparative Literature (2/3 COL, 1/3 SLA)
a specialist in modernism and East European studies and in translation theory. This
will strengthen our twentieth and twenty-first century Russian literature section,
enhance interdisciplinarity, and bring new areas of strength to our unit.
•
We would hope to establish a cross-appointed lectureship with Jewish Studies (75%
Jewish Studies, 25% Slavic) to support interdisciplinary humanistic study in Slavic
and Jewish literature and culture, an area that would build on resources and
potential already in the faculty. •
We have an incredible opportunity to become the first centre in Canada to expand
our national expertise in Central Asia, an area of increasing critical geopolitical
importance. We wish to explore together with CERES the introduction of Kazakh,
Kazakh, a Turkic language, is spoken by about 15 million residents of Kazakhstan.
Here we would hope to cooperate with Ed Schatz, a political scientist, and a
specialist in the region. Numbers for the language will be small, but Kazakh plus
Russian is of vital importance for regional study of Central Asia.
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