I am delighted to welcome you to the website of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Let me take this opportunity to provide you with some information about our graduate program and about some innovations that we have recently introduced.

Our graduate program, like most in the U.S., has in the past focused primarily on Russian literature in preparing students for the Ph.D. degree and a career in research and teaching, although we have always also required knowledge of a second Slavic language and literature as well. We anticipate this Russian “track” as still being a frequent choice for our students. Our faculty teaching courses in Russian literature includes Professors Omry Ronen, Michael Makin, Olga Maiorova, Sofya Khagi, Benjamin Paloff and myself. Together we cover all periods of Russian literature, from the oldest periods to the present, in a series of six survey courses. In addition, we offer courses and seminars on major authors (for example, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Nabokov) as well as on a growing number of special topics (like national identity, modernism, social fiction, dystopian literature, post-modernism, literature of the provinces).

Our new curricular innovations will allow students to make an East or Central European literature and culture (for example, Polish, Czech, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Yiddish) a major focus, with a second language and literature (usually Russian) in a supporting cross-cultural role. Faculty that we have added in recent years have greatly enhanced our ability to offer such a program, because they have major research interests in areas other than Russian literature: Professors Olga Maiorova in literature and nationality, Mikhail Krutikov in Yiddish and Russian literature of the modern period, Tatjana Aleksic in Serbian and other Balkan literatures and national mythologies, Sofya Khagi in the interaction between Russian and Baltic literatures, and Benjamin Paloff in Polish literature and in comparative study of Russian, Polish and Czech literatures. A number of us also have very strong research interests that go beyond literature: Professors Jindrich Toman in Czech visual culture of the modernist period, Andrew Herscher in Central European and Balkan architecture and its relation to ethnicity and politics, and me in Russian and East European cinema and the surprising creativity in film language while under Communist control. Our faculty will actively mentor graduate students and encourage work in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary areas.

We are able to provide funding for graduate students in several different ways. In general, we offer students a five-year funding package consisting of a combination of fellowships and graduate teaching instructorships, with the norm being two or three years of fellowship support and two or three years of teaching. Other sources of funding, such as the U.S. government sponsored Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship program (for U.S. citizens and permanent residents) and the Rackham Merit Fellowships, are available on a competitive basis. Prospective graduate students who are eligible are strongly encouraged to apply for a FLAS fellowship; the Rackham Merit Fellowships are by departmental nomination. Further funding opportunities, in particular for research, are offered by programs such as Fulbright, Fulbright-Hayes, IREX, our own graduate school’s Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship Program, and the CREES Research, Internship, and Fellowship program grants from our Center for Russian and East European Studies.

The Slavic Department has long been known for its curricular breadth as well as for its strong ties with other units across the University, such as the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES). CREES, along with the newly instituted Center for Emerging Democracies, have now become parts of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia. CREES is a leading U.S. Department of Education-designated National Resource Center, where our graduate students can interact in seminars, lectures and brown bags with professors from other disciplines (History, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Art, Music) whose work centers on Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The Slavic Department, the Center, and the other University of Michigan departments offer you prominent scholars who can help direct graduate students’ studies and research in a range of areas which few other universities can match.

For more information about our department, see our newsletter The Slavic Scene. The most recent issues will be sent out with the applications packets and is also available on this website. If you have any questions or would like more detailed information about our program, don’t hesitate to contact me or my assistant Jenn White at slavic@umich.edu or (734) 764-5355.

Sincerely,

Herbert J. Eagle, Chair