About | Fellows | Staff and Lecturers | Schedule
The following bios highlight the academic backgrounds, achievements, and interests of the staff and lecturers that facilitated and presented at the 2022 Slavic Library Institute.
Staff
Kit Condill is the Director of the Slavic Library Institute and the Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is a 2004 graduate of UIUC’s School of Information Sciences, where he teaches a Slavic Bibliography course each fall, and a 1995 graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He spent seven years as the Central Asian Reference Specialist for (and then Manager of) the federally-funded Slavic Reference Service, and was named an inaugural Ralph T. Fisher Library Scholar in 2017. His research interests revolve around the print and online publications of the peoples of Central Eurasia, especially the North Caucasus.
Larry Miller came to the University of Illinois in 1959 as the Library’s first full-time Slavic specialist after receiving an M.A. in library science at Indiana University. He was named head of the newly formed Slavic Division and Slavic and East European Library at UIUC in 1964, and in 1967 he initiated the Illinois graduate library school course in Slavic Bibliography (currently taught by Kit Condill). He was director of the federally-funded six-week Slavic Library Institute at Illinois in the summer of 1970. In 1975 he started the “Reference Books” column in Slavic Review ( which he still edits). Retiring in 2014 after a 55-year career devoted to building Slavic collections and services at Illinois, he currently serves as Senior Slavic Bibliographer emeritus in the International and Area Studies Library.
Tabitha Cochran is the Slavic Library Institute Coordinator and REEES Collections & Services Assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She received her BA from Macalester College in 2013 and her MS in Library and Information Science and MA in REEES from UIUC in 2022. She was a two-time FLAS Fellow for the study of Ukrainian. In the Fall she will be a PhD student in the History department at UIUC. Her research focuses on the role of Ukrainian women in preserving, modernizing, and proliferating national and folk culture at the turn of the 20th century.
Lecturers
Samantha Abrams – Head of Collections, Center for Research Libraries.
Olha Aleksic is Petro Jacyk Bibliographer for Ukrainian Collections at Harvard University, where she works both at the Ukrainian Research Institute and the Americas, Europe, and Oceania Division (AEOD) of Widener Library. In this role, she is responsible for the management of Ukrainian general and archival collections, as well as reference and instructional services. Olha received a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Lviv National University, an M.T.S. in History of Christianity from Harvard Divinity School, and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College.
Anna Arays is the Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies at Yale University. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and received her MA in Russian and East European Studies and her MLS at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include the history of the printed book in Russia, comparative histories of textile production, the history and development of area studies in the United States, and accessibility of non-Western research collections in anglophone countries.
Lukáš Babka graduated from the Charles University, Prague, the Faculty of Arts, in East-European Countries History and Political Sciences in 2003. Between 2002 and 2004, he worked as a documentarist in the Office for Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. Since 2001, he has worked for the National Library of the Czech Republic, since 2004 as the Director of the Slavonic Library (its independent division). As part of his professional focus, he deals with selected issues of East European studies of the 20th century, the topics of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian interwar emigration and the history of the Slavonic Library.
Megan Browndorf has been working as the University of Chicago’s Slavic & East European Studies Librarian since November 2019. In addition to supporting research and use of the larger collection, she manages the Archive of Czechs and Slovaks Abroad – a repository of materials related to the Czech and Slovak immigrant experience. Before this position, she worked as the Slavic & East European studies librarian at Georgetown University, and as a liaison for multiple social science departments at Towson University in Maryland and North Dakota State University. She graduated from Indiana University in 2012 with a Master of Library Science and a Master of Arts in Russian & East European Studies.
Robert H. Davis, Jr., since 2008, has served as Librarian for Russian, Eurasian and East European Collections at Columbia University, where he is principally responsible for the curatorship of one of North America’s oldest, largest, and most distinguished area studies collections, encompassing more than sixty languages of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Since 2010, he has also served as Slavic & East European Studies Librarian at Cornell University, overseeing another of the largest Russian and East European vernacular collections in North America. He holds degrees from Columbia University, Queens College, and a certificate from the Harriman Institute. For more than two decades, he was a librarian at the Slavic & Baltic Division of The New York Public Library, serving as Assistant Chief from 2003-2008.
Author or compiler of six monographs, and many articles, reviews, and communications, Mr. Davis has presented referred conference papers at numerous regional, national, and international meetings. He has also authored, coauthored, and/or managed ten preservation and access grants funded by various federal and private entities, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education.
Jurij Dobczansky is a Librarian in the East Central Europe Section of the Germanic and Slavic Division of the Library of Congress where he specializes in the cataloging of resources from Ukraine. In addition to Ukrainian he also catalogs in Polish, Belarusian and Russian. Jurij joined the Library of Congress in 1975 after obtaining a BA in Comparative Literature from the College of the Holy Cross. From 1976 to 1982 he assisted in compiling the annual American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies. He received an MLS from The Catholic University of America in 1981 and became a Slavic cataloger of social sciences in the Subject Cataloging Division in 1983. Since then he continues to catalog in a variety of subject fields and has served as Recommending Officer for Ukraine. He has been a mentor for fellow LC staff members. Presently he chairs the Archives and Library Committee of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.
Thomas Douša is the Metadata Analyst Librarian at the University of Chicago Library, where he has worked since October 2014. Born in Prague and raised in Minnesota, he holds a BA in Classical Languages and Literatures and an MA in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (specialization: Egyptology) from the University of Chicago; an MLS from Indiana University Bloomington; and a PhD in Information Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is responsible for original cataloging of monographic materials in Western Slavic, non-Cyrillic South Slavic and non-Slavic Eastern European languages, as well as developing metadata application profiles for digital collections at the University of Chicago Library. He is also one of the editors of the Slavic Cataloging Manual. His research interests include the history of Czech-American print culture and the history and theory of knowledge organization.
Jon Giullian is a Librarian for Slavic and Eurasian Studies and the Head of the International Collections at the University of Kansas Libraries. Giullian earned degrees from Indiana University (MLS 2004), the University of Kansas (MPhil 2002, MA 1997) and Brigham Young University (BA 1993). He has published articles on a broad range of topics in REEE librarianship and recently translated two short Russian memoirs into English. His research interests include bibliography, digital research tools, information literacy, the Russian book trade, and open access publishing. Since 2020 Giullian has served as the Editor of Slavic and East European Information Resources. https://lib.ku.edu/people/jon-giullian
Greg Grazevich is associate director of Bibliographic Information Services at the Modern Language Association of America and editor of the MLA International Bibliography. He earned a bachelor’s degree in politics and a certificate in Russian studies from Princeton University. After receiving a master’s degree in Slavic linguistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, he joined the Bibliography’s Thesaurus staff in 1994. He has served on the board of directors of NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, and is a member of ALA and ACRL.
Edward Kasinec holds graduate degrees and certificates from Columbia University (M.A., 1968, M.Phil., 1979), Simmons College (M.L.S., 1976), and New York University (Appraisal Studies in Fine and Decorative Arts, 2010). In 1971-72 he studied at the Graduate Faculty of Moscow State University. His career includes service as Reference Librarian/Archivist for the Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute Library (1973-80); Librarian for Slavic Collections, University of California, Berkeley, Library (1980-84); and Curator, Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library (1984-2009); and Staff Advisor, Exhibitions and Public Programming Department , NYPL (2009-2011). He presently serves as a Research Associate, Harriman Institute, Columbia University and, since 2014 Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution. Kasinec has published more than two hundred articles and books, has been acknowledged in as many publications, and is the author (or co-author) of twelve successful grant proposals to national funding agencies.
Ksenya Kiebuzinski is Head of the Petro Jacyk Central and East European Resource Centre, and Slavic Resources Coordinator, for the University of Toronto Libraries. She co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from Brandeis University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century French representations of Ukraine, its historical figures, and events, as well as bibliography, the history of the book and library collections, and local history of Austrian Galicia.
Glen Layne-Worthey is Associate Director for Research Support Services in the HathiTrust Research Center, based in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences. Formerly, he was Digital Humanities Librarian at Stanford, 1997-2019, and was founding head of Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR). He’s held many roles in the international digital humanities community, and is currently Chair of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Executive Board. His graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, was focused on Russian children’s literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his current research is in digital libraries, multilingual DH, and poetry translation.
Patricia Polansky is the Russian Bibliographer in Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is in charge of the general Russian collections (primarily history and lang/lit) and the Russian Northeast Asia Collection that deals with the Russian emigration to China, Japan, Korea, South America, Australia, and the West coast of America. She holds a BA in Russian lang/lit, and an MLS, both from the University of Hawaii. Graduate of 1970 Slavic Library Institute, Univ. Illinois (Urbana). Among many grants she was awarded an IREX young faculty grant (1977), Council on Library Resources Fellowship (1979), Title IIC project consultant at UC Berkeley (1983), and Kennan Institute for Advance Russian Studies short term grant (1984). Research interests include the history of Russians in Hawaii, the Russian press in Shanghai, and the history of the publishing connections between Northeast Asia and the Russian Far East. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Sibirica (2002- ). She was awarded the Pushkin Medal in November of 2011 by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
John Randolph is the Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois, where he is also an Associate Professor of History. He is Founder and Editor of the classroom-based digital documentary editing initiative SourceLab. His research interests center on the history of communication and Imperial Russian cultural and intellectual history.
Adrienne Seely is Authorities and Slavic Cataloging Librarian at the Chicago Public Library. She has an M.L.S. from UIUC, a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature (Russian/German), and a Ph.D. in Film Studies, the latter both from the University of Chicago. She has been the recipient of an ACLS Dissertation Fellowship for Research on Eastern Europe and academic-year FLAS fellowships. Her (presently lapsed) scholarship on film addressed film sound studies from a new materialist perspective. She is currently chair of the Slavic Cataloging and Metadata Committee (of ACRL/ESS) and an executive officer of Local 1215 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.
Anatol Shmelev studied history at UCLA (B.A., magna cum laude, 1986) and UC Berkeley (M.A., 1989) and received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, with a dissertation on the foreign policy of the Siberian government during the Russian Civil War. He has worked at the Hoover Institution since 1997, currently as Robert Conquest curator for Russia and Eurasia and project archivist for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty collection. Shmelev has continued his scholarly engagement with Russian history, concentrating on information resources. He has published a collection of essays on archiving the lives of Russian and East European emigrants entitled Tracking a Diaspora (2006); a bibliography of Russian émigré military literature (2007); Vneshniaia politika pravitelstva admirala Kolchaka, 1918–1919 (The Foreign Policy of Admiral Kolchak’s Government, 1918–1919) (2017); and an expanded study of the foreign policy of the Anti-Bolshevik movement as a whole, Wake of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917–1920 (2021). In addition, Shmelev has written articles and reviews on various subjects connected with the Russian Civil War, 1917–1922, and the post-revolutionary emigration.
Lana Soglasnova is the Slavic Cataloging Supervisor Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries, where she is also responsible for South Asian Studies and Linguistics Liaison. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, M.ISt. from the University of Toronto, and a B.A./M.A. in South Asian Studies (Sanskrit) from the University of Saint Petersburg, Russia. She serves on ALA ACRL Slavic Cataloging and Metadata Committee, on the editorial team of the Slavic Cataloging Manual, and has presented and published on linguistic and cultural aspects of cataloging, including Slavic materials.
Gudrun Wirtz has been the Head of the Eastern European Department at the Bavarian State Library since 2006. She received her PhD at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Bonn in 1996. Since 2004 she has taught information literacy at the Universities of Munich, Regensburg, and Salzburg. She is responsible for the DFG (German Research Foundation)-funded “Specialized Information Service East, Central, and Southeastern Europe” and the portal www.osmikon.de. She serves as a member of advisory boards in several academic institutions, and as the spokesperson of the Group of DFG-funded Specialized information service. Currently, Gudrun is building an infrastructure for research data.
Steve Witt holds a Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director of the Center for Global Studies (CGS) and head of the International and Area Studies Library. In the library, he is the subject specialist librarian for Global Studies and Japanese Studies. Witt is also editor of IFLA Journal, the flagship journal of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. His research focuses on the trajectory and impacts of international developments in library and information science, placing global trends in librarianship and knowledge production in the context of wider social and technological developments. He is currently working on a long term project that aims to complete a global history on the public information campaigns of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) to “internationalize” the minds of the world population through library collections, book distribution, and academic networking.