Current Graduate Students
2007-2008
Petia Alexieva is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Slavic Linguistics. Before starting her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago she got an MA in English Philology in Bulgaria and an MA in Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. After moving to Chicago she worked as an ESL teacher at Richard Daley College and in the past three years has been teaching Russian at the U of C. The languages she focuses on are Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian. Her interests include sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. alexieva@uchicago.edu
Demelza Benton is a 2nd year graduate student in the interdisciplinary track. Her main areas of interest are Russian women's lit, gender identity / the body, post-Soviet mass culture and early Russian cinema, most of which are carried over from her undergraduate days at UCLA. She has more recently also become interested in South Slavic literature and plans to take up BCS again next year. demelza@uchicago.edu
Radoslav Borislavov – Rad Borislavov is a fourth-year PhD student in the interdisciplinary studies track. He is interested in European intellectual history, Russian modernism/Formalism, and cinema. rad@uchicago.edu
Andrew Dombrowski is in his second year of the Ph.D. program in Slavic linguistics, working primarily on Russian and Balkan linguistics, with a side interest in the Caucasus. Most of his work falls under the broad rubric of language contact and language change, including more specific interests in phonological contact, loanword phonology, and sociolinguistics. adombrow@uchicago.edu
Kathryn Duda is a graduate student in Russian literature. She wishes to focus on the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly samizdat. Which brings one to her subsequent interests: Czech literature. One day there will be a work that delves into the questions these different traditions of samizdat pose. Meanwhile, she is busy to finish up her classes. Prior to joining the team of stellar graduate students, she taught English in Sokolov, the Czech Republic for a couple years. She has a great love for other Russian and Czech literature not the least of which include Dostoevsky and Hasek respectively. She tends to get excited when talking about either Plato or Aristotle or mathematical traditions of the Greeks. She has never been known to turn down an invitation to a pub. zipk81@uchicago.edu
Christian Hilchey is in his fourth year in the Slavic linguistics program. Before joining the University he worked as a translator in the Czech Republic where he has spent a number of years working, researching, and traveling. He works primarily on Czech, but also works on Slovene, BCS, and Russian. He is interested in verbal aspect, definiteness, and Cognitive linguistics. He has side interests in translation theory, corpus linguistics, and Computational linguistics. hilchey@uchicago.edu
Katherine Hill-Reischl is a third year in the Slavic Interdisciplinary Studies track. Her major field is in Russian literature, with a focus on the image in modern prose. Her minor field is in mimetic theory. Her interests include Soviet photography and art, ideological imaging, modernist prose, visuality and text, and Russian iconography. hillk@uchicago.edu
Erik Houle is a fifth year Ph.D student in Slavic Linguistics. Prior to moving to Chicago he taught Russian, French, German and ESL at the high school level for five years. His languages of focus are Russian, Polish and Ukrainian, though he has also studied Bulgarian. He is interested primarily in language contact, language and globalization, and discourse analysis. erhoule@uchicago.edu
Vera Koshkina is a first year student in Russian Literature. She is interested in spiritual questions in literature especially as expressed in the artistic development of authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She is also interested in the treatment of religious themes in 20th century Russian Literature and Film from Bulgakov to Tarkovsky. verak@uchicago.edu
Kinga Maciejewska is a doctoral candidate in the Slavic Department. She concentrates on Polish literature and film. She is writing her dissertation on the ethical aspect of modern Polish reportage. She is interested in factual writing (American and Polish), ethics, the media, interior design, and Baroque metaphysical poetry. kkmaciej@uchicago.edu
Zdenko Mandusic is in his first year of the Interdisciplinary Program. He hails from Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and is an avid fan of East European cinema and Balkan politics. His research interests include the visual aesthetics of nationalism, film theory, and Post-Communist Literature. He received his B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studied English Literature and Education. zmandusic@uchicago.edu
Annikea Miller entered the Interdisciplinary Studies program in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2007. She earned her B.A. in Russian Language and Literatures and Political Science from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her research interests include Contemporary Russian Literature, Blacks/non-Ethnic Russians in Russian Literature and Art, and Language Loss and Obsolescence in Russia. annikea@uchicago.edu
JungHee Min – My main research interest lies in the relation between the structure of grammar and lexical semantics, and how grammatical constructions are motivated by the structure and symbolization of conceptual content within the framework of cognitive linguistics. The conceptual motivation in grammatical constructions is a key point in my current research interest on which I am completing my Ph.D dissertation. jmin@uchicago.edu
Esther Peters is in her fifth year in the department. She is on the literature track specializing in Czech literature with a minor in Russian literature. Other interests include
theories of time, space, and narrative, as well as the philosophy of language. She is currently working on her dissertation proposal involving Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka,
and Bohumil Hrabal. She also serves as the student representative for the Slavic Department. empeters@uchicago.edu
After receiving her BA from the University of Chicago in 2003, Antje Postema has occupied herself with a lively set of activities ranging from working nights in a mid-Michigan ER to reining in willful kindergarteners in Beograd, Serbia. Having returned to the academic fold in Autumn 2007, she is studying Balkan literature within the Interdisciplinary track. In addition to her long-term nattering about a broadly-defined Central Europe, she hopes to take up questions of national identity and its foundational myths in both literary and historical contexts. She can most easily be found in Ex Libris coffeeshop or careening around campus (and the Midwest) on her bicycle. apostema@uchicago.edu
Daniel Pratt is a 3rd Year Graduate student in the department studying Czech Literature. He received his A.B. from Princeton in 2003 and his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 2007. His main areas of interest include Czech, Russian, Polish, German Languages and Literature, History of Ideas, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Cinema. dpratt@uchicago.edu
Tanya Skubiak is a first year graduate student in Slavic Linguistics. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, she graduated from Georgetown University and spent time teaching English in Seville, Spain and Prague, Czech Republic. She grew up in the Ukrainian-American community of Chicago, and is interested in specializing in East Slavic languages, and specifically working with Ukrainian language contact and language change. skubiak@uchicago.edu
Jason Swiecki is a first year student in Slavic Linguistics. He majored in Slavic and linguistics at U.C. Berkeley, and in the course of his studies became obsessed with Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. His other languages are Russian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and he hopes to confront Polish soon. He studied for a year in Novi Sad, Serbia and took the opportunity to visit all the major tourist attractions from Konjicko Polje to Jablanica. His major interests include phonology (especially prosody), dialectology, and sociolinguistics. He is also fascinated by everything ex-Yugoslav (linguistics, literature, politics, history, music), computational linguistics, and syntax. danicic@uchicago.edu
Karen Underhill is a Doctoral Candidate in Polish Literature, with a minor in Jewish Studies. She is currently working on a dissertation on Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity. Her areas of speciality include Polish-Jewish Studies (Polish-Jewish
writers, mutual literary and cultural influences; contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, and the cultural history of Jews in Poland); Modernism in Poland & Central Europe; Mickiewicz; and mysticism and messianism in Polish literature in the 19th
and 20th centuries. She currently teaches Polish literature and language on the faculty of Modern Languages & Literatures, Loyola University Chicago. She is owner and co-founder of Massolit Books, Krakow, and founder and Director since 2002 of the Krakow Open Forum on Central & Eastern Europe – a non-profit cultural institution based in Krakow, sponsoring cultural events relating to Polish literature in translation, the promotion of contemporary literatures of Poland and other Central and East European countries, Jewish culture and history of Eastern Europe, and the development of civil society initiatives in Poland. She is also Co-Founder and Assistant Director of the Jewish Social History Project, a non-profit educational project based in Krakow, Poland, providing educational lectures and tours on East European Jewish history and Polish-Jewish relations. kcunderh@uchicago.edu