On Friday, May 2, St. Olaf students joined Professor Dossi for the premier of “Sickle” at Novi Most / New Bridge Theater in Minneapolis. Abbey Fenbert’s “Sickle” tells the story of four women as they struggle to survive the genocidal Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine (Ukr. Holodomor, Rus. Golodomor) in the 1930s. The show is hauntingly beautiful and left a long-lasting impression on everyone.
The St. Olaf Russian Language and Area Studies department stands with Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian war. We also unequivocally condemn the genocidal policies of the Russian Federation in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Please support Ukraine at Stand with Ukraine Minnesota.
Ryan Moore presented a paper at the undergraduate conference called “Encounters and Entanglements in Eurasia and Beyond” that took place at Macalaster College on April 26th, 2025.
Ryan’s paper combined nineteenth-century Russian literature and philosophy, using concepts originally introduced by Hegel and further elucidated in Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony to explore the opposition between Western and “Eastern” (or Russian) values in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early work White Nights.
The departments of Russian Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at Macalaster worked together to create an amazing undergraduate conference. Students from Macalester as well as Carleton, Claremont McKenna, Grinnell, Gustavus Adolphus, and St. Olaf shared their intellectual discoveries with one
another.
Everyone enjoyed the thought-provoking scholarly panels, a stimulating keynote talk titled “Finding the Universal: Modernism and Cultural Encounters” by Dr. Jinyi Chu of Yale University, and a beautiful musical performance featuring Miles Rakov on violin and Wendy Zheng on yangqin. After the panels, participants gathered at the Chinese House for tea and pastries from Kramarczuk’s East European deli.
The organizers of the conference —Xin Yang, Masha Fedorova, and Julia Chadaga— are extraordinarily grateful to our presenters, attendees, the Community Engagement Center, the Kofi Annan Institute of Global Citizenship, the residents of the Chinese House and the Russian House, and all of the people who helped make our event a success: Alan Barenberg, Martha Davis, Karen Flannery, Dean Hu, Simon Koebbe, Lilly Lu, Liz Matlin, Anna Moan, Miles Rakov, Chuen-Fung Wong, Kun You, and Wendy Zheng. You can find the full program here.
This summer, Profs. Dossi and Morse will travel to Latvia, Estonia, and Finland to conduct site visits for an exciting new Russian Studies J-term program, and conduct research at the Helsinki Slavonic Library at the University of Helsinki.
At the Slavonic Library, Prof. Dossi will examine the extensive collection of nineteenth-century Russian medical journals kept in their archives. Prof. Morse will examine documents from the personal library of Theophan Prokopovych.
The site visit portion of the trip is funded through the Smith Center for Global Engagement and the research portion through the Professional Development fund at St. Olaf.
House of the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, RigaTallinn, ShorelineHelsinki Cathedral
In mid-March, the Russian Studies Department invited Dr. Andrey V. Ivanov to St. Olaf to give a public lecture on his recent book, A Spiritual Revolution: The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1825. Dr. Ivanov’s lecture was followed by a reception and exhibition of 17-18th c. Protestant theological works drawn from Rolvaag Special Collections and curated by Jillian Sparks.
