OUR FACULTY

Our senior Professor, Snaford Couch, came to ASU from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1962. He is the primary designer of our program and the initiator of most of our courses. As a specialist in foreign language pedagogy, he is the author of six of our program's course texts and most of its language laboratory resources. He led the section through its accreditation of the Bachelor's Degree program which gave its first degree in 1965. Professor Couch has spent a great deal of time in Russia and in diverse areas of the former Soviet Union. He may be the only U.S. academician to serve as resident director of both the IREX exchange program and the CIEE study-abroad program in the Soviet Union, and he remains active in exchange work. He has been the National Executive-Secretary of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) as well as DOBRO SLOVO, the National Slavic Honor Society. He is a curriculum advisor to the Ukraine Ministry of Education. He is one of five recipients of the Joe Malik, Jr. Arizona Slavic Studies Award for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of Slavic Studies in the State of Arizona.

Ekmanis, Rolfs, Ph.D. (Shelley) 602-965-8882 Professor, Languages and Literatures LL-C-435 85287-0202

A native of Riga, Latvia, Professor Rolfs Ekmanis came to ASU in 1963 from a teaching position at Florida State University. After finishing his doctoral work at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, he set about to establish our university's scholarly credibility in the field of Baltic literature, publishing numerous books, articles, and reviews, and working as a bibliographer for the Modern Language Association's yearly compilations of scholarly contributions. It was he who began and sustained the growth of ASU's library holdings in Russian and East European languages and literatures until their dimensions merited dedicated in-house management in the mid-1970's. He has attained much international visibility in the years since the break-up of the Soviet Union as a long-time contributor (pseudonymously before 1992 as "Maris Rauda") to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts. His work as Director of the RFE Latvian Broadcasting Department in Munich and his setting up of the first RFE/RL News Bureau on former Soviet territory in Riga in 1992 earned him important commendations. His teaching at ASU focuses on the literature of the Soviet Period and on the literatures of the former-Soviet minority nationalities.

Sample Publications: 1. "Russia, the West, and the Baltics." Lituanies. Vol. 41, No. 4, 1995, pp. 5-28
2. Rigas strelnieku un milas dziesminieks. Piezimes par Aleksandru Caku, 1901-1950-1981. In: Muzibas skartie. Latrju Solidaritate, 1981, pp. 217-250
3. Die Literatur in Lettland in den 60er und 70er Iahren. In: Acta Baltica. Komigstein: Institutum Balticum, 1979, 176pp.
4. Latvian Literature Under the Soviets, 1940-1975. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978, 533 pp.

Croft, Lee B., Ph.D. (Lesley Hoyt) 602-965-1002 Professor, Languages and Literatures LL-C-453 85287-0202 11622 S. Tusayan Ct. Phoenix, AZ 85044 496-0229

L. Croft with wife Lesley (L.) and daughter Cathy (R.) - 1992

A native of Cut Bank, Montana, Professor Lee B. Croft came to ASU as a faculty member from Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1973. He had been a student of both Professor Couch and Professor Ekmanis in the 1960's as he pursued Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mathematics at ASU. He completed his Master's Degree in Russian, however, at the University of Arizona in Tucson before going on to doctoral work and his first professorship at Cornell. His professional specialty is Slavic Linguistics. He was a participant of the first Joint Soviet-American Conference on the Russian Language in 1974, and he served as the Dean of Soviet Programs for the American Institute for Foreign Study in 1977. Since 1975 he has served as Coordinator of the Slavic Languages Section of the Department of Languages and Literatures, which he has also served as Assistant Chair and as Faculty Senator. He has been active in the development of ASU's academic exchange with Universitet Kiril i Metodij (UKIM) in Skopje, Macedonia and is one of the founding members of ASU's Russian and East European Studies Consortium (REESC). Professor Croft's professional publications focus on linguistic iconicity, on the formal aspects of poetry and poetic translation, and on the mnemonotactics of language learning. He is one of the department's leading grantspersons and has won several awards for excellence in teaching and student mentorship. Like Professor Couch, he is a recipient, as well as the fund founder and supervisor, of the Joe Malik, Jr. Arizona Slavic Studies Award.

Sample Publications: 1. "Triplicity and Textual Iconicity: Russian Literature Through a Triangular Prism," in Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes: The Human Dimension (Marge E. Landsberg, ed.), Mouton De Gruyter Publishers, Berlin/New York, 1995, pp. 249-265.
2. "Spontaneous Human Combustion in Literature: Some Literary Uses of Popular Mythology," in CLA Journal (Journal of the College Language Association), Vol. XXXVII (March 1989), No. 3, pp. 335-347

Burton, Dora, Ph.D. 602-965-4634 Assistant Professor, Languages and Literatures LL-C-434 85287-0302

Born in Russia, Professor Dora Burton came to ASU in 1976 from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Professor Burton had previously received an M.D. degree in Russia, studying mostly in Leningrad at the First LMI-I.P. Pavlov and completing in Kazan. In the course of gaining her Ph.D., she taught for twelve years as an instructor of the Russian language and literature at the University of Washington. At ASU she teaches all levels of the Russian language, focusing primarily upon the intermediate composition and conversation series as well as advanced specialty courses in the literature, taught in both English and in Russian. Her specialization is in 19th-century Russian literature and poetry. Her scholarly publications and numerous presentations, in even international fora, have established her as an insightful interpreter of the poetry of Pushkin and a pioneering scholar of Boratynsky's verse as well as the works of Chekhov. In the Spring of 1991 she was awarded ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award.

Sample Publications: 1. "Stixotvorenie Boratynskogo 'Blagosloven svjatoe vozvestivsij!...'" in Russian Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 2 (February 1985), pp. 183-201.
2. "The Theme of Peter as Verbal Echo in Mednyj Vsadnik," in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 12-27.
3. "The Poet of Thought in 'Vse mysl' da mysl': Truth in Boratynskij's Poetry" in Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 35 (1981), No. 1, pp. 31-43.

Budisavljevic-Oparnica, Maria, Ph.D. 602-965-3168 Faculty Associate, English LL-C-453 85287-0202

Maria Budisavljevic-Oparnica is, like Professor Croft, a graduate of Arizona State University, finishing her B.A. in Russian here in 1978. She went on to complete her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California in 1990, writing a dissertation on "The Archaic Roots of Balkan Surrealism: A Study of Modern Serbian and Greek Poetry." She is a native-speaker of Serbo-Croatian and served as an instructor of Serbo-Croatian, as well as English, at USC. Since 1987 she has been an instructor of English composition in the English Departments of both Mesa Community College and ASU, where she is a receipent of the Golden Key Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a publishing poet and in 1991 she was named an Honorary Member of the Association of Serbian Writers in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Buzarovska, Eleni, M.A. (Dimitrije) 602-965-1002 Faculty Associate, Languages and Literatures/REESC Instructor, English, UKIM-Skopje, Macedonia LL-C-453 85287-0202

The 1996 CLI Macedonian class. Eleni Buzarovska, Instructor (front, 2nd from left)

Eleni Buzarovska is a Lecturer in the English Department of Skopje, Macedonia's Universitet Kiril i Metodij (UKIM). She earned her Bachelor's degree there in English and in Russian with recognition as the outstanding student at the UKIM Faculty of Philology. Her Master's degree there on the linguistic history of the Macedonian language was completed under the direction of Prof. Blaze Koneski, the modern father of the Macedonian language. She is currently a doctoral candidate at UKIM, working on a dissertation involving polylingual verbal semantics and syntax with Prof. Zuzanna Topolinska. She first came to ASU in the 1992-3 year with her husband, renowned composer Dimitrije Buzarovski, who was that year's ASU-UKIM exchange Professor at the ASU School of Music. She taught Macedonian at ASU at that time and, subsequently, in the summer of 1993, 1995, and 1996. Her recent publications include "Active Drills for Second-Year Russian" (with Prof. Lee Croft, ASU-Language Learning Center, 1993), and she is one of the authors of "Zboruvate li Makedonski?" ("Do you speak Macedonian?", Medis-Informatik, Skopje, 1995), the textual materials used in her Macedonian classes at ASU.

Kefeli, Agnes, A.M. (Eugene Clay) 602-965-1982 Faculty Associate, Languages and Literatures/REESC % Dept. of Religious Studies ECA-322 85287-3104 1852 E. Flores Dr. Tempe, AZ 85282 966-9543

Agnes Kefeli began her education in France, where she received both the A.B. and the A.M. (Maitrise) in the Russian language from the Sorbonne and a D.E.A. (the equivalent of an M.Phil) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes under the direction of Professor Bennigsen, the noted French turcologist. In 1989, she earned a grant to study Tatar with Professor Uli Schamiloglu at Indiana University. Furthermore, she has spent considerable research time in Russia studying the Tatar language and culture, winning for her efforts prestigious fellowship support. She is currently a doctoral student in both the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the History Department at ASU, where she is working to advance western scholarship on the Tatar people and their language. She recently returned from an IREX-supported three-month stay in Kazan, Tatarstan, gathering materials for her pioneering efforts to teach Tatar to Americans. At the same time she is developing first-time textbooks and pedagogical aids in support of this effort.