Flagship Teacher Training Workshop

Anna A. Alsufieva is Assistant Professor of Russian and Assistant Director of the Russian Flagship Program at Portland State University (since 2009). She earned her Ph.D. in Language Teaching Pedagogy at Herzen State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg, Russia (2001). She taught at Herzen University, the Middlebury Russian School, the University of Texas, Austin, and Reed College. She is a specialist in Russian grammar, syntax, stylistic, and teaching methodology. At PSU she teaches advanced level Russian courses and specialized courses for majors in the Russian Flagship program: Globalization, Russian in the Major, and Senior Capstone, course provide students the opportunity to explore language skills needed for successful communication and interaction in Russian in the professional field and focus on the preparation of global professionals.

Dr. Comer teaches courses in Russian language, literature and culture. He started his academic career at the University of Kansas, moving to Portland State in 2014 to direct the innovative Russian Language Flagship Program. His current research work focuses on the learning and teaching of Russian, especially the areas of vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension.  His pedagogical edition of Viktoria Tokareva’s short story A Day without Lying (Slavica, 2008) was awarded the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2010, and he is co-author of Mezhdu nami (Between you and me), an online, open-access textbook for elementary Russian, which won the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2017. Since 2015, he has directed two grants from the National Security Education Program to promote linkages between the PSU Russian Flagship Program and K-12 Dual Language Immersion Programs for Russian and community college Russian programs. In 2017, he received a Flagship Collaborative Technology Grant to lead a team to develop an online tutorial program for improving reading comprehension in Russian. The project resulted in the application STAR: Steps to Advanced Reading, which is an open access tool for students of Russian.

Evgeny Dengub is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Russian Language Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian and second-language acquisition from Bryn Mawr College. He teaches Russian at all levels and is an ACTFL-certified oral proficiency and writing proficiency tester. He is a co-editor of The Art of Teaching Russian (Georgetown UP, 2020) and a co-author of Panorama: Intermediate Russian Language and Culture (Georgetown UP, 2017). The new 2nd year Russian textbook "Этажи" that Evgeny co-authored with Susanna Nazarova is coming out this Fall at Georgetown University Press.

Karen Evans-Romaine is a Professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and directs the Russian Flagship Program. She previously directed the Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian at Middlebury College (2003-2009) and the Russian program at Ohio University (1996-2009). In addition to teaching Russian at all levels, she has taught courses on Russian cultural history and literature, as well as music and literature in European Modernism. Her research focuses on Russian language pedagogy, Russian literature, and in particular, the intersection between music and literature. She is also co-author of the Russian-language textbook Golosa and co-editor of the volume Exploring the U.S. Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence in a Second Language by Graduation (Multilingual Matters, 2016).

Thomas Jesús Garza is UT Regents' and University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and the Director of the Liberal Arts Texas Language Center. He is also an Affiliated Faculty in the Program in Comparative Literature, and the Center for Mexican-American Studies. He teaches Russian language and literature at all levels, foreign language pedagogy, and courses in contemporary Russian culture. He has been traveling to and researching in Russia since 1979 and has lived in Moscow for over five years. A native Texan, Dr. Garza received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1987. During his thirty-year tenure at the UT, he has received numerous prizes for undergraduate and graduate teaching, including the Texas Excellence Award, the President's Associates Award, the Harry Ransom Award, was inducted into the University Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2003, selected for a Regents Outstanding Teaching Award in 2009 and was named to the Texas Ten by the Texas Exes Alumni Association in 2018. His current research is on intensive language teaching methods, and cultural portraits of machismo in contemporary Russian and Latino cultures.

Dr. Glowacki is most interested in language pedagogy, methodologies, and cross-cultural communication in Kazakh and Russian languages, literature and culture. She currently works on teaching Kazakh language as well as the development and integration of tools to accelerate learning. She is working with CeLCar (Indiana University) to develop Kazakh language textbooks for beginner and intermediate levels. She is affiliated with the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ (GNS+), Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute (CESSI), and Russian Flagship Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian, Svitlana Melnyk received her PhD in Philology from the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University in 1996 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Svitlana specializes in sociolinguistics and bilingualism and she has published a number of articles examining linguistic minorities and the intersection between bilingualism and State policies in Ukraine. Svitlana is also a certified ACTFL OPI Tester.

Dr. Benjamin Rifkin is Professor of Russian at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. His teaching and research interests lie in foreign language education, applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and contemporary Russian film. He has taught courses on Russian literature, film, applied linguistics, and methods of teaching foreign languages, including graduate and freshmen seminars, as well as Russian language courses from first- through fifth-year Russian. Rifkin has published over two dozen articles in peer-reviewed journals both in the USA and Russia, as well as chapters in edited volumes on these topics. He is the author or co-author of textbooks for Russian including Advanced Russian through History (Yale University Press), and Panorama: Intermediate Russian Language and Culture (Georgetown U. Press). Rifkin was the leader of the RAILS (Russian Advanced Interactive Listening Series) Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, funded by a grant from the US Department of Education. He has served on the Editorial Board of the Slavic & East European Journal, the Russian Language Journal, the NECTFL Review, and the Foreign Language Annals. He has also served on the boards of directors of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (and served as president of the association), the American Council of Teachers of Russian, the Northeast Conference (on Language Teaching), the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and the NJ Council for the Humanities. He has been recognized by awards for scholarship (AATSEEL), teaching and advising (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and service (AATSEEL, ACTR, Middlebury College) and most recently, the Interfaith Service Award from the Islamic Center of Long Island and the Wilga Rivers Award for Excellence in Leadership for Foreign Language Education from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Shannon Donnally Spasova is an Assistant Professor of Russian and Technology Specialist at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her ongoing teaching and research interests include instructional technology in language teaching, blended learning, and curricular design, and she completed a second Master’s degree in instructional design in 2015. She is the webinar coordinator for the International Association for Language Learning Technology and the Editor-in-Chief of the FLTMAG, an online magazine about technology integration in language learning and teaching.

Olga Thomason's primary area of expertise is historical and comparative linguistics. Her research interests include prepositional semantics in IE languages, Historical Slavic linguistics, Russian language and culture. She teaches courses in Russian language at all levels, Contemporary Russian Culture, Slavic Folklore, and Introduction to Slavic Linguistics. Olga Thomason created and directs the UGA Study Abroad in Russia program, and is the Assistant Director of the new Russian Flagship Program at UGA.

Anna Tumarkin (PhD, Russian Literature, UW-Madison) is Russian Language Program Director and Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Slavic Languages at UW-Madison. Her research interests include language teaching methodology, instructional technology, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. Dr. Tumarkin teaches Russian at all levels and is an ACTFL-certified oral proficiency tester in Russian.