Award Recipients (1991-2009)

Citations for Recent Recipients

Citations for Recent Recipients

Excellence in Teaching (Secondary): Elena Farkas

This year's recipient of the AATSEEL Award for Excellence
in Teaching at the Pre-College level goes to an extraordinary teacher – one who
has become the "go-to" person for anyone wanting advice on teaching Russian in
the very definitely pre-college world of elementary school language programs.
Whenever there are questions about Russian programs for the early grades, she is
the teacher everyone turns to. Elena Farkas teaches at Turnagain Elementary
School in Anchorage, Alaska, where she is the Russian Immersion Program
Coordinator. As lead teacher in the program, she is involved in teacher
oversight, community involvement, and parent liaison. The Turnagain School has
had a successful partial immersion program for a number of years, thanks in part
to Elena's dynamic, enthusiastic, energetic classroom presence. She has become a
leader in the area of curriculum and materials development for this age group,
so that other districts and teachers look to her for help in developing their
own programs. Elena is also a member of the Board of Directors of ACTR, a member
of ACTFL, and of course an active member of AATSEEL. She is an adjunct
instructor at the University of Alaska in Anchorage as well.

Elena's innovative approaches to classroom teaching make
her a model for those of us who have seen her presentations at AATSEEL and other
national conferences. She has an amazing variety of lively, engaging activities
that make her classes and her school exciting places to be. Her classes are
always taught in Russian and she has even been known to drop papers on the floor
of the classroom so that she can model the appropriate phrasing for "Oops. My
paper fell." Elena has developed a colorful set of visuals that enhance her
program and engage her young learners. Would that there were many more programs
for Russian in the early grades with teachers like Elena, able to capture the
excitement of eager youngsters and start them on a long sequence of Russian
learning.

Excellence in Teaching (Post-Secondary): George Pahomov

George Pahomov has left a lasting trace on generations of
students to whom he taught Russian language and literature at Bryn Mawr and
Haverford Colleges, earlier at Queens College in New York, and for several
summers in Middlebury. His teaching career included courses of all kinds,
balancing language and literature and always bringing out their connections. A
remarkable connoisseur of Russian language and culture, George is able to
describe nuances of meaning with great feeling, and his students wind up with a
strong and unforgettable sense of the power of crucial words, such as toska. He
has a marvelous zest for everything Russian and a feeling for the physical
realia of Soviet and Russian life; his interest in drama as a genre has come
through, for example, in dramatic presentation of the special qualities of
unidirectional and multidirectional verbs and vivid interpretation of texts.
Treating his students as adults, even junior colleagues, he perfected an
informal style of teaching that incorporates a love of food and drink and a warm
sociability. Behind his teasing sense of humor lies a thoughtful, amazingly
well- and widely-read scholar and a deeply spiritual human being. George retired
this year from Bryn Mawr College, and he will be greatly missed but fondly
remembered by his students.

Distinguished Service to AATSEEL: William Comer

An inspired teacher and mentor, an influential and
sophisticated theorist of language pedagogy, a cherished colleague: Bill Comer
is all that, and more.  He has served as the custodian of our organization's
central institution - the annual meeting.  During his years on the Program
Committee, Bill worked tirelessly to make every conference a vibrant event at
which representatives of every professional constituency would feel welcome, yet
could be challenged to reexamine the state of their fields. Bill has been one of
the leading figures, nationally, in the reevaluation of Russian-language
teaching practices based on innovative recent scholarship in other languages. He
brought this scholarly prowess to the Pedagogy Division of our conference and
showed colleagues in other fields that language pedagogy needs to be taken
seriously, both because our profession needs strong language teachers and
because it is a vibrant scholarly endeavor in itself, not merely lip service to
a "service" occupation. Bill is equally well-versed and well-read in language
pedagogy, literary scholarship, and the relationship between Russian literature,
philosophy, history, and religion.  As the chair of the Program Committee, he
used his own interdisciplinary interests to cultivate the creation of
roundtables, workshops and forums that stimulated genuine conversations across
fields and methodologies.  He has also reached outside the organization, as a
long-serving member of the AATSEEL-AAASS Joint Committee on Language Training,
so as to bridge the gap between language pedagogy and various forms of
interdisciplinary scholarship in literary and cultural studies in the Slavic
field.  We owe him our deep gratitude and we celebrate his remarkable service to
AATSEEL with this award.

Outstanding Contribution to the Profession: Helena
Goscilo

Helena Goscilo, Chair and Professor of the Department of
Slavic and East European Languages and Literature at The Ohio State University,
needs no introduction as a scholar and groundbreaking researcher in the fields
of Slavic women’s and gender studies, contemporary Russian literature, and
Polish and Russian culture. This award is less for her own talents and
achievements, and more for her generosity, her lively interest in other people’s
voices and ideas. This supportive engagement has led her to create myriad
opportunities for other scholars, especially younger scholars, to take part in
the creation and presentation of knowledge in the field. Organizing conferences
and anthologies, drawing graduate students and others into translation and other
projects, serving as an outside reviewer for tenure and promotion cases, reading
and commenting on book manuscripts – she has made all our work better, while
often injecting a note of her trademark stylistic and intellectual pizzazz into
the proceedings. Helena is not only a mentor for graduate students and junior
scholars, but also a role model for more established Slavists as they shape the
profession. We are delighted to honor her in this way.

Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship: Victor Friedman

Whenever one thinks of Balkan linguistics, Victor
Friedman’s name immediately comes to mind. Victor is recognized as one of the
world’s leading authorities in this field. He began his linguistic research at
the tender age of 9, collecting curses and obscenities in Russian and other
languages, and even this earliest work bore fruit later in delightfully risqué
and informative articles on Russian and Georgian obscenities, published in
Maledicta. His initial exposure to Balkan cultures was through the medium of
folk music and dance—as anyone who has attended the Balkan and South Slavic
Conferences can attest, Victor is an excellent dancer. But his real love affair
with the region was sparked by his first visit to Macedonia as a graduate
student in 1971; this led him to make the languages of the Balkans the central
focus of his research. Victor’s 1977 book The Grammatical Categories of the
Macedonian Indicative was the first book on the modern Macedonian language to be
published in North America. His subsequent research on grammatical categories in
Macedonian and other languages resulted in groundbreaking publications on
evidentiality and language typology, as well as dozens of valuable articles on
other verbal and nominal features. In addition to linguistic structure, Victor’s
research also focuses on sociolinguistic issues related to language contact,
standardization, ideology, and identity. He has played an active role in the
language standardization efforts of the Roma in Macedonia. His more than 200
publications are models of clarity and precision, full of subtle insights drawn
from his astonishingly vast knowledge of languages and dialects of southeastern
Europe, Turkey, and the Caucasus, and incorporating material that he has
collected himself in over 30 years of fieldwork. Always generous and supportive
of colleagues, particularly younger linguists starting out in the field, Victor
is an inexhaustible source of inspiration. As one of his former students has
said, he represents the best our profession has to offer: the supreme scholar, a
wondrous teacher, and the truest of friends. He has received academic awards too
numerous to list here, and AATSEEL would like to join in recognizing his
outstanding contributions to scholarship and to encourage his ongoing,
increasingly prolific, and ever-evolving scholarly work.