Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures

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Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures We teach and research Slavic and Eurasian literatures, languages, cinema, and cultures.

Chair:
Edyta Bojanowska

Director of Graduate Studies:
Marijeta Bozovic

Director of Undergraduate Studies:
Claire Roosien

Registrar:
Cheryl Morrison

Street Address:
Slavic Languages & Literatures
2704 Hall of Graduate Studies
New Haven, CT 06520

Please join us TONIGHT (October 9th) at 5pm in HQ L01 for THE TROUBLESHOOTERS (1989)!Three unemployed friends come up wi...
10/09/2026

Please join us TONIGHT (October 9th) at 5pm in HQ L01 for THE TROUBLESHOOTERS (1989)!

Three unemployed friends come up with an unusual business idea: they start a company to solve other people’s personal problems. The issues they help resolve range from dating difficulties and family disputes to organizing a fake awards ceremony for an unsuccessful writer. By staging the problems of ordinary citizens alongside contemporary rock music, fashion, and disco dancing, The Troubleshooters offer a unique perspective on the concerns and aspirations of Chinese society in the late 1980s.

Post-screening discussion led by Zijing Yu (Film and Media Studies) will follow.

This screening is part of the “Dropouts and Dreamers: Films of the Socialist 1980s” series, which explores the experiences of youth in the state socialist world during the transformative period of the 1980s. Find more information about the series--including future screenings--here:
https://slavic.yale.edu/node/27/2026-10-09-dropouts-and-dreamers-film-series-the-troubleshooters-1989

Presented by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Please join us on Wednesday, October 7th at 12pm in HQ 532 (note the changed location!) as we welcome Professor Alisa Ba...
09/29/2026

Please join us on Wednesday, October 7th at 12pm in HQ 532 (note the changed location!) as we welcome Professor Alisa Ballard Lin to the Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium!

Alisa Ballard Lin is a scholar of East Central European theater and performance, with additional expertise in literature, as well as teaching competency in film and culture. Her research examines the theory and philosophy of historical theater performance in areas including Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Czechia. She has written and presented on theater’s relation to philosophy and psychology, philosophy and history of acting, religious performance, and costume design, all in the East Central European historical context. Much of her work has thus far centered on the modernist period. In parallel to her academic work, Lin does public writing on knowledge-work productivity, feminism, and the role of care in our lives. She authors a popular Substack newsletter, The Tending Project, and is completing a trade book entitled Tending: Realistic Productivity for Everyone with a Life outside of Work for Rutgers University Press.

Her talk, "The Actor's Consciousness in the Theater Philosophies of Russian Modernism," explores Russian modernist theater of the late 1890s through the early 1930s. It examines how the anti-materialist (and anti-Soviet) concepts of mind and consciousness, as developed by Gustav Shpet and Lev Vygotsky (among others), fed the new acting practices and philosophies of acting formed by great theater makers such as Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Based on Lin's recent book, Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism, this talk touches on theater phenomenology, theater and cognitive science, the value of theater for Russian modernism, and the philosophy and politics of the human in the early Soviet Union.

We hope to see you there!

Please join us on Thursday, October 1 at 7pm in HQ L01 for a screening of Andrzej Wajda's THE PROMISED LAND (1975)! Thre...
09/28/2026

Please join us on Thursday, October 1 at 7pm in HQ L01 for a screening of Andrzej Wajda's THE PROMISED LAND (1975)!

Three ambitious friends join forces to build a factory in a booming nineteenth-century industrial city, chasing wealth in a world of ruthless competition. As fortunes rise and loyalties fray, commerce begins to feel like combat—and is sometimes just as bloody. Wajda’s scathing spectacle immerses us in the smoke, clamor, and moral compromises with intoxicating energy and sharp social vision. His first Oscar-nominated film is seductive, savage, and gloriously excessive, and has been described as “an expressionist comic opera of toxic capitalism and bad faith” (Peter Bradshaw). 179 minutes. In Polish with English subtitles.

This screening is a part of the "Man of Vision: Andrzej Wajda Centenary Film Series," celebrating the Polish director through six of his greatest films. More information about the series here: https://web.library.yale.edu/film/wajda100.

Please join us on Wednesday, September 30th at 12pm in HQ 136 as we welcome Adrian Wanner to our Slavic and Eurasian Col...
09/21/2026

Please join us on Wednesday, September 30th at 12pm in HQ 136 as we welcome Adrian Wanner to our Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium!

Dr. Adrian Wanner is a Distinguished Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. His colloquium talk, "Writing Poetry Translingually: A Reconsideration of Karolina Pavlovna," considers the strategic stakes of translation and self-translation in the works of Russia's foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, as well as her own complicated relationship to Rusianness.

We hope to see you there!

Please join us this semester for "Dropouts and Dreamers: Films of the Socialist 1980s"!The series kicks off on Saturday,...
09/17/2026

Please join us this semester for "Dropouts and Dreamers: Films of the Socialist 1980s"!

The series kicks off on Saturday, September 19th (at 7pm, in HQ L01) with COMING OUT (1989), an East German feature film about a young teacher named Philipp who gradually learns to accept his homosexuality. While Philipp attempts to be in a heterosexual relationship with his colleague Tanja, an encounter with a gay friend from the past pushes him to explore his repressed self. As he wanders through the gay bars of East Berlin, Philipp meets Matthias. This new relationship sets him on a difficult path toward liberating himself from internalized prejudice and accepting his sexual identity. Released on November 9, 1989 — the evening the Berlin Wall fell — COMING OUT became the first and last East German film to openly discuss homosexuality.

DCP | 1989 | directed by Heiner Carow | GDR | 113 minutes | German with English subtitles

No registration required. Post-screening discussion led by graduate students will follow.

Presented by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Please join us on Wednesday, September 23rd in HQ 136 as we welcome Dr. Lindsay Ceballos to our first Slavic and Eurasia...
09/17/2026

Please join us on Wednesday, September 23rd in HQ 136 as we welcome Dr. Lindsay Ceballos to our first Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium of the year!

Dr. Lindsay Ceballos is an Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Lafayette College. Her research focuses on the novels and cultural legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the history of Russian poetry, and modernist literature, criticism, theater, and religious culture. She has held fellowships granted by ACLS and the Davis Center at Harvard University. Her first book, Reading Faithfully: Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of Dostoevsky, 1881-1917, was published through Cornell University Press.

We hope to see you there!

Please join us on Wednesdays at 12pm for this semester's Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium! Our first talk, by Professor Li...
09/15/2026

Please join us on Wednesdays at 12pm for this semester's Slavic and Eurasian Colloquium! Our first talk, by Professor Lindsay Ceballos, is next Wednesday, September 23rd in HQ 136. We hope to see you there!

Please join us at 11:30 in HQ 136 as we welcome two distinguished colleagues from the University of Warsaw, Professors J...
09/11/2026

Please join us at 11:30 in HQ 136 as we welcome two distinguished colleagues from the University of Warsaw, Professors Joanna Piotrowska and Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk! We welcome this opportunity to learn about their research, and we hope to see you there!

Please join us TONIGHT (Thursday, September 10) in HQ L01 (320 York) for this semester's first installment of Man of Vis...
09/10/2026

Please join us TONIGHT (Thursday, September 10) in HQ L01 (320 York) for this semester's first installment of Man of Vision: Andrzej Wajda Centenary Film Series at the Yale Film Archive.
Tonight's screenings will include:

7pm: A GENERATION (Andrzej Wajda, 1955, DCP, 87 mins)
In Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a reckless teen drifts from petty crime into the underground resistance, discovering purpose and first love amidst the brutality of war. Through restless camera movements and vivid location shooting, Wajda’s debut feature captures both the exhilaration and the terrible cost of political awakening, and introduces themes that would define his career: moral ambiguity, national identity, and the hard choices demanded by history. The opening salvo in one of cinema’s greatest trilogies. Introduction by Archer Neilson. In Polish with English subtitles

9 pm: KANAL
As the Warsaw Uprising collapses around them, exhausted resistance fighters attempt a desperate escape through the city’s sewer system, its dripping tunnels dissolving into a disorienting labyrinth of fear and endurance. “Wajda cuts through any official mythology of military discipline and honorable defeat” (Michael Sragow), crafting a visually imaginative war film stripped of triumph but suffused with humanity. Kanal shared the Jury Prize at Cannes with The Seventh Seal and established Wajda as one of postwar Europe’s essential filmmakers. Introduction by Archer Neilson. In Polish with English subtitles.

All screenings are free and open to the public. Check out the full series here: https://web.library.yale.edu/film/wajda100
We hope to see you there!

We wanted to share the wonderful news that Katerina Clark has been awarded a Laura Shannon Prize Silver Medal for her la...
06/19/2025

We wanted to share the wonderful news that Katerina Clark has been awarded a Laura Shannon Prize Silver Medal for her last book, Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons (Harvard UP, 2021). The prize was announced a day after her passing, sadly, but we can continue to take comfort and pride in her towering achievements and impact.

"Deeply researched and expertly written, Katerina Clark’s ‘Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons 1919-1943’ is a path-breaking study of the Soviet ambition to create an international ‘leftist literary commons.’ Clark invites us to reimagine the territory of Modernist ‘world literature’ as she also raises significant questions about the political aims and consequences of literary forms. Russia’s turn to the East, with its mandate that Moscow remain the ‘center,’ here stands in dramatic contrast to the Paris and Berlin-located models of global republics of letters that have dominated Modernist studies. Clark narrates the ways earlier tenets of socialist realism were replaced by a broader set of aesthetic possibilities as the aim of anti-imperialism gave way to anti-fascism. In doing so, she enriches our sense of how an obligation to the representation of proletarian life famously came into tension with the formal ambitions of the radical avant-garde. She traces the complex networks and reciprocal relationships between internationalist literary figures as they promoted a left agenda, forging new audiences of South and East Asian, Soviet, and European readers. Throughout, Clark offers detailed and fully contextualized accounts of individual artists and individual works. To be cosmopolitan in this world meant not so much to take an urbane and high culture viewpoint, but to become familiar with, and represent, the worlds of the working class wherever they were found. With ‘Eurasia without Borders,’ Katerina Clark truly redraws the map of twentieth-century comparative literature.”

The Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. Read more about the prize and its recipients here: https://nanovic.nd.edu/news/nanovic-institute-awards-the-2024-laura-shannon-prize-to-ukrainian-studies-scholar-rory-finnin-for-book-on-poetics-of-solidarity-in-the-black-sea-region/

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