Congratulations to our Russian/Slavic students!

We are happy to announce that our Russian/Slavic students won several prizes at the New England Olympiada of Spoken Russian held at Harvard University on April 6, 2025.
Working with Professors Tony Lin (right) and Leon Kogan (third from left), our students competed with 17 other universities and won the following awards:

Rebekah Che (1st place, monologue; 2nd place, poetry)
Louise Madigan (3rd place, monologue)

In addition, Russian/Slavic students won BC-sponsored awards to study and research in various countries:

Advanced Study Grant
Rebekah Che (Russian summer program in Middlebury)
Nicholas Fisher (Polish summer program in Poland)
Connor O'Brien (research in Georgia)

Omar A. Aggad Travel & Research Fellowship 
Connor O'Brien (research in Tajikistan)

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!

Congratulations to our Japanese students - winners in the 14th Annual Japanese Language Contest!!!!!

The final round of 14th Annual Japanese Language Contest was held on March 29 (Saturday) at the Consulate General of Japan, Boston.  The contest is annually organized and sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan, Boston.  Japanese language students in New England are invited to enter.   While these students from many prestigious colleges, including Harvard, Brown, Yale, Tufts, Smith and Amherst, demonstrated their excellent Japanese writing and speaking skills, our very own BC students beat those competitors!  BC did not have any winners last year.  But with the students’ hard work, BC is back!   

Congratulations and Cheers to these students:

Connor Jang (EALC3222) 1st place Advanced Speech
Jackson Yates (EALC3222 last year)  2nd place Advanced Essay
Adam Laboissonniere (EALC2222)   3rd place Intermediate Speech
Emily Lavins (EALC2222) 1st place Intermediate Essay

"What next for Syria? Challenges, Opportunities and Paths Forward for a Fractured Country."

A lecture by Amr Al-Azm

Friday, March 28th 2025
1pm
Fulton Hall 511

Amr Al-Azm is Professor of Middle East History and Anthropology at
Shawnee State University in Ohio, and Georgetown University-Qatar.
His main research deals with terrrorism, threats to cultural
heritage in conflict zones, and looting and trafficking of cultural property.

Daniel Bowles longlisted for International Booker Prize

The English-language version of Christian Kracht’s novel Eurotrash—translated from its original German by Associate Professor of German Studies Daniel Bowles—has been longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. The annual prize, split equally between author and translator, recognizes fiction from around the world that has been translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland.

Eurotrash is one of 13 titles—representing novels and short story collections—on the longlist. The longlisted books have been translated from 10 languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Romanian and Spanish. The judges chose their longlist from 154 books submitted by publishers.

This is the first time Bowles, a scholar and translator of German-language fiction and nonfiction, has been named to the International Booker Prize longlist. He previously was awarded the Goethe-Institut’s Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his 2015 translation of another Kracht novel, Imperium. He also is the author of the book, The Ends of Satire: Legacies of Satire in Postwar German Writing.

Kracht is a Swiss writer who has been compared to Nick Hornby and Bret Easton Ellis. The protagonist of Eurotrash is a jaded writer named Christian who embarks on a tragicomic road trip with his elderly mother and her ill-gotten wealth. The acclaimed novel received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was named one of the Best Books of 2024 by The Times (U.K.).

As described by the judges of the International Book Prize, Eurotrash is “one of the most entertaining and ultimately moving stories we read. It is brilliantly, bitterly funny, even as it documents a vicious and tarnished emotional universe.

”The judges called Bowles’ rendering “immaculately and wittily translated; on every page its sentences sparkle and surprise like guilty-legacy gold.”

The six-book International Booker Prize shortlist will be released on April 8, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on May 20.

For more about the International Booker Prize, including an excerpt from Eurotrash, visit the International Booker Prize website.

(Article by Kathleen Sullivan, reposted from BC News)

Faculty News

Prof. Tony Lin, our Russian/Slavic Coordinator, has been awarded the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) Fellowship by the U.S. Department of Education to conduct research in Poland. He was also elected Vice President of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). Congratulations!

Former BC Linguistics Major, Michael Madoule, presents at the 2024 Fall Voice Conference in Phoenix

Michael Madoule (Boston College Linguistics, 2022) graduated from Boston University’s Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences in 2024. He is currently serving as a Speech-Language Pathology Clinical Fellow at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center. At the 2024 Fall Voice Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, Michael presented the results of research he conducted at the Stepp Lab for Sensorimotor Rehabilitation Engineering at BU. The poster showcasing his research can be found here.

"Eurotrash": A new translation by Prof. Daniel Bowles

Christian Kracht's Eurotrash, newly translated from German by Prof. Daniel Bowles, was published this Tuesday by Liveright, a subsidiary of W.W. Norton.

For more information about the book, visit the publisher's website. The translation has already garnered a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Holocausts: Israel, Gaza, Hezbollah, and the War Against the West A Lecture by Professor Gilles Kepel

Monday, November 11 at 11am
Gasson Hall 100

Gilles Kepel is Professor and Chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.An Arabist and Political Scientist who spent many years studying the Arab world in close proximity, in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, Prof. Kepel taught at Columbia, NYU, LSE, and l'Universita della Svizzera Italiana. In over 20 books published over the span of a 40-year career, Prof. Kepel probes political Islamist movements in the Middle East, North Africa, and the West.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
Click here to register.
BC ID required at entrance.

The event is sponsored by the programs in Jewish Studies, Islamic Civilization and Societies, the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning, and the department of Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies.

Director, Playwright, Puppeteer and Stage Designer Evgeny Ibragimov: Creative Residency at Boston College

We are pleased to announce a creative residency at Boston College with the award-winning Circassian-Russian director, playwright, puppeteer, and stage designer Evgeny Ibragimov, November 11-16, co-sponsored by the Department of Eastern, Slavic and German Studies and the Theatre Department, with funding from the ILA.

For more information, please visit the Institute for the Liberal Arts website: https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/academics/sites/ila/events/evgeny-ibragimov-puppeteer-workshop.html