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Oscar Swan, PhD
Academic and Founding Director
University of Pittsburgh Oscar Swan founded SLI in 1988, during his tenure as the Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Polish, Russian, and Slavic linguistics and pedagogy, and on Polish culture and cultural history. His Polish language website and online dictionary are cutting-edge, and his language textbooks and bicycle guides are his claim to fame.
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Kathleen Manukyan, PhD
Managing Director and Coordinator of Russian Program
University of Pittsburgh Katie Manukyan has taught all levels of Russian language and culture at the University of Pittsburgh since 2011. She has worked at SLI every summer since 2011, first as an instructor, then a director. Katie did her doctoral work in Slavic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, where she taught Russian language, Czech language, and Russian literature. Her research interests are Russian Romanticism, phonetics, opera and dance, and Gogol. Originally from northern Virginia, her travels have taken her to Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Armenia. She lived in Moscow for two years, where she studied Russian language and music performance, and she still actively maintains a career in opera performance.
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Ljiljana Durasković, PhD
Acting Academic Director
University of Pittsburgh Ljiljana did her doctoral work in Slavic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, where she taught Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. During the academic year she teaches Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian at the University of Pittsburgh and is the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She has been with SLI for 14 years, where she teaches all levels of BCS and is the director of East European and Near Eastern Languages Program. Ljiljana is a certified OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) tester for both Russian and BCS.
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Renee Narushoff
Program Assistant
University of Pittsburgh Renee is a senior at Pitt, majoring in Political Science with a minor in Computer Science and a certificate in Russian and Eastern European Studies. Her interests lie in Russian language, foreign policy, and computational linguistics. This is her second summer working at SLI and will be her third year studying Russian language. She is originally from Pittsburgh and outside of work, loves to go hiking. |
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Biljana Amidovic
Intermediate BCMS
University of Montenegro Biljana Amidovic earned her master’s degree in Business Psychology. She also graduated from the University of Montenegro with degrees in English language and Literature. She has been actively teaching language at the Gymnasium in Niksic, Montenegro for more than twenty-five years. She has been a Senior Teaching Advisor in Education since 2018 and an instructor of the Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian languages at the Summer Language Institute since 2008, for which she developed course materials and the manuscript used for the intermediate level. Currently, she is a site coordinator for the Pitt-Montenegro program in cooperation with UDG, where she has been working since 2010.
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Yuliya Basina
4th-Year Russian
Defense Language Institute Yuliya is an assistant professor at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey, CA. She teaches Russian language, coordinates team teaching, and develops Russian language curriculum for Russian school, UEL. She earned her M.A. at Columbia University. Her research interests are grammar and sociolinguistics. Outside of work, she likes to travel. This is her 11th year at Pitt with a 6-year break. |
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Tatjana Balażic Bulc, PhD
Advanced BCMS
University of Ljubljana Tatjana is an assistant professor at the University of Ljubljana. She teaches Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian and South Slavic Societies and Cultures at the Department of Slavistics, Faculty of Arts, and is also a developer and coordinator of BA and MA study programs South Slavic Studies. Her research interests are discourse analysis, academic discourse, and sociolinguistics, and in her free time she likes traveling, watching movies and gardening. This is her fourth summer teaching at the SLI. |
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Aleksey Berg, PhD
Advanced Russian
University of Pennsylvania Dr. Berg was born in St. Petersburg, where he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Linguistics. He has lived and worked in the United States for almost twenty years, teaching Russian language and culture at Boston College, Middlebury College, MIT, and the University of South Carolina. After he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2013, he served as a director of the Russian Studies program at the College of New Jersey for four years before accepting a lectureship at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. He resides in Philadelphia, and likes to read and play with his cat in his free time. |
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Andrzej Brylak
Intermediate Polish
University of Southern California, Los Angeles Andrzej is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Polish studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he teaches classes related to Polish language and literature, Jewish Studies and Central European culture. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research is devoted to Polish/Israeli writer Leo Lipski about whom he is currently writing a book titled: Literary Surrogacy of Leo Lipski. In his free time he enjoys cycling and playing acoustic guitar. |
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Evgeniya Dudina
Intermediate Russian
Dickinson College Evgeniya Dudina is at present an International Visiting Scholar at Dickinson College. She has also taught Russian at the Middlebury Program in Moscow, the Russian State University for the Humanities, at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, and this will be her seventh summer at SLI. Under the auspices of an EU program (Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts) studying the effects of climate change on indigenous populations, Evgeniya has worked with Nivkh communities in the Russian Far East (Sakhalin Island and the Amur River). For several years she has also worked with the Civic Assistance Committee in Moscow, teaching Russian to refugees and immigrants from Afghanistan and Africa and volunteering as an advocate. |
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Ahmed Farahat
Intermediate Arabic
University of Michigan Ahmed is a current PhD candidate at the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. He is interested in heritage language acquisition research. Ahmed worked as a teaching assistant of Arabic at the College of the Holy Cross in 2015. He has also been working as an Arabic lecturer at the SLI program since 2021. Ahmed loves watching and playing soccer. |
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Renáta Kamenárová, PhD
Intermediate and Advanced Slovak
University of Pittsburgh Renáta is the Director of the Slovak Studies Program and has taught all levels of Slovak language and culture at the University of Pittsburgh since 2019. She is a specialist in foreign language instruction with 20 years of experience in university education. She is the lead author of Krížom-krážom, a popular 4-book series of Slovak language textbooks for foreigners and co-authored the distance learning course www.e-slovak.sk. Renata taught Slovak language and culture at the Comenius University in Slovakia and at the University of Bologna in Italy. In her free time, she loves hiking and traveling with family and friends. |
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Frane Karabatić
Beginning BCMS
University of Texas at Austin Frane is a lecturer in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian studies and teaches primarily courses related to Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Russian language. He is also working on finishing his PhD studies at the University of Kansas focusing on second language acquisition. He holds an MA in Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Kansas, and an MA in Croatian and Italian Language & Literature from the University of Split, Croatia. His secondary research focuses on masculinity in the twentieth-century Russian literature. He has been teaching B/C/S as a second language since 2009. In the past, together with B/C/S, he has been also teaching all levels of Italian and elementary Russian. In addition to teaching at the University of Texas, Frane has significant experience working as an interpreter and teaching courses at the University of Kansas, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Iowa, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. |
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Ekaterina Kovaleva, MEd
Beginning Russian
University of Pittsburgh Ekaterina received a Master's degree in Education from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017 and is a native speaker of Russian. Her teaching career began in 2012 when she started teaching Russian as a foreign language in Zurich, Switzerland. After moving to the USA, she completed a Master of Education program with a major in Foreign Language Education at the University of Pittsburgh. In September 2017, she started to work for the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Pittsburgh as a leader of the Russian conversation table and also an official tutor of the Russian language. She spent the Fall of 2018 teaching Russian as a foreign language at the Higher School of Economics University in Moscow, Russia. Since January 2019, she has been back in Pittsburgh and continues to work at CREES. This is her fourth year teaching at SLI and she is sure that it is going to be an amazing experience!
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Amr Madi, PhD
Beginning Arabic
Harvard University Amr Madi is a Preceptor in Arabic, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Amr has been working and researching in the field of teaching Arabic as a second language since 2011. He worked as an instructor in the Flagship program with the American Councils for International Education from 2013 to 2016. Following this, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, then a lecturer at the University of Michigan. During this time, he also worked an instructor at several Arab universities, including Alakhawayn University in Morocco and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, as well as Alexandria University, where he worked with the study abroad programs of Georgetown University and Middlebury College. He was also the director of the Ningxia University study abroad program in 2015 In 2019, Amr earned his PhD in literary criticism from Alexandria University. His current research focuses on second language acquisition and the application of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to improve language proficiency. |
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Marcela Michálková, PhD
Beginning Czech
Ohio State University Marcela Michálková is a scholar and educator. Her areas of expertise include linguistics, foreign language instruction, and culture education. She earned her master’s degrees in Scandinavian Linguistics,Teaching Slovak Language and Literature, and Teaching English Language and Literature from the University of Tromsø in Norway and from P. J. Šafárik University in Slovakia. She received a PhD in Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures from the Ohio State University. Dr. Michálková has 22 years of experience in developing, teaching, and managing Slovak, Czech, Russian, and American Studies courses/programs at four American universities and one in Slovakia. In the past, she worked as Slovakia’s Deputy Prime Minister’s National Coordinator of Professional and Language Training in Central State Administration, Chief Communications Strategist for an international humanitarian organization, and Director of the Slovak Studies Program at Pitt. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, running, cross country skiing, antiquing, road trips, and fine arts. |
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Tetiana Muzyka, PhD
Beginning Ukrainian
King Danylo University, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine Tetiana is an Associate Professor at King Danylo University, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, where she teaches professional business Ukrainian to native speakers. From 2011-2022 she has been working as a Lecturer and as an Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Ivano-Frankivsk National Medical University, teaching Ukrainian to foreign medical students. Tetiana obtained a Master's Degree from Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Dr. Muzyka received her Ph.D. at Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Chernivtsi, Ukraine. She is one of the newest members of SLI and will teach Ukrainian at the beginning level at SLI in summer 2023. Her research interests include the History of Ukraine (the Holodomor of 1923-33s) and Diaspora Ukrainian literature. |
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Agnieszka Oskiera, PhD
Beginning Polish
Loyola University Chicago, University of St. Thomas Houston Agnieszka Oskiera is originally from Poland. She studied Polish Philology at the University of Lodz. Dr. Oskiera received her PhD in Polish Linguistics from the University of Lodz. She is an instructor of Polish language and culture at the Loyola University Chicago. She also collaborates with the University of St.Thomas in Houston where she teaches Contemporary Poland. Since 2018, she has been a rater of the Polish STAMP4S exam. Whenever she has free time, she enjoys traveling, biking, swimming, and playing badminton. |
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Elif Sayar
Beginning Turkish
Istanbul Technical University Elif Sayar is a lecturer at İstanbul Technical University, Turkey at the School of Foreign Languages and the vice director of the Turkish Language Center. Her decision to study English as an undergraduate and learn about other cultures transformed into a dedication to explore her own culture and language, in order to understand, frame, and eventually teach Turkish as a foreign language, concentrating her doctoral studies on the same subject. She was a Fulbright recipient at UPENN in 2017-2018, and this is going to be her third year teaching at SLI. Her research focuses on corpus linguistics, academic Turkish, and wordlists. Whenever she has free time (a lot she hopes as she has just defended her dissertation), she loves growing plants and taking part in arts and crafts. |
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Vlasta Štofová, PhD
Beginning Slovak
Comenius University Vlasta, a native of Slovakia, holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Comenius University of Bratislava and a MA in TESOL from the University of Central Florida. Her teaching background is quite long and diverse. She used to teach at the Department of Continuous Education at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, 10 years in Hungary under the Slovak Ministry of Education mandate, and 3 wonderful years as an adjunct instructor at the Center for Multilingual Studies at UCF and Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida. Currently, as a freelance instructor, she is giving Slovak lessons to foreigners – mostly Ukrainians and US students. Since 2003, she has been a part of the University of Pittsburgh’s SLI program teaching Slovak at all skill levels; this is her 21st year with a break in 2015 and 2018. She was also working as a site coordinator and Director of the Pitt to Slovakia program from 2009-2019.
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