Recently the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski of Gazeta Wyborcza came to my home university, Ohio State, in Columbus, Ohio. When he discovered that I spent the recent spring semester teaching in Warsaw, he was fascinated. “How did you find Polish students?” he asked. And I got to thinking. My courses at the Studium Europy Wschodniej (Center for Eastern Europe) gave me the opportunity to teach out of two of my recent books. With my undergraduate students, I taught a course entitled War in 20 th Century Russian Culture , and we considered everything from poetry and novels to films, memoirs and monuments in the Russian and Polish experiences of war in the 20 th century. This was a fairly small class, almost a seminar, and I had the students reading chapters of my Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Literary Hero across the 20 th Century (Academic Studies Press, 2012), so they had the opportunity to practice many of their English-language skills: reading, summarizing...
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.