New York-St. Petersburg Institute of Cognitive and Cultural Studies

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2005 NYI Faculty Profiles

Leonard H. Babby is Professor of Slavic Linguistics and Linguistics at Princeton University. His interests are linguistic theory, structure of Russian, comparative morphosyntax and morpholexical theory. He is the author of 3 books and countless articles and a leader in both European and American linguistic circles. He holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Harvard University.
John Frederick Bailyn is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His interests are linguistic theory, cognitive science, Slavic linguistics, musical perception and evolutionary psychology. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University.

Vladimir Borschev is head researcher at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of the Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), Russian Academy of Sciences and Adjunct professor of Linguistics at UMass, Amherst. His interests are in formal linguistics, semantics, computational linguistics and theoretical computer science. He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science from the Russian Academy of Science.

Patrice Brodeur is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at Connecticut College. He recently received a Rockeller Foundation Visiting Fellowship from the Kroc Institute on Religion and Conflict Resolution at Notre-Dame University. Professor Brodeur's main area of interest is the contemporary study of Islam within the broader academic study of religion. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Harvard University.

Joseph Conte is Professor and Chair of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (U of Alabama P, 2002) which examines the relationship of order and disorder in the work of postmodern novelists. His interests also include postmodern theory, chaos and complexity theory, the effect of digital media on fiction and cognition, and language-centered poetics. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University.

Jerry Fodor is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Rutgers University. He is interested in most areas of the philosophy of mind (except theories of consciousness) and in cognitive psychology. His research for the last decade has been largely concerned with the nature of concepts insofar as it is illuminated by the compositionality of human conceptual systems. Since he thinks that the function of language is to express thoughts and that words meanings are (roughly) concepts, he is interested in works in linguistics and the philosophy of language insofar as they bear on topics like analyticity, the character of lexical content, and the arguments pro and con `lexical decomposition' in syntax. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University

Janet Dean Fodor is Professor of Linguistics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is interested in cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and prosody; implicit prosody in silent reading; learnability theory; simulation studies of syntactic parameter setting. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT.

Mary (Polly) Gannon is Visiting Professor of Literature and Translation at St. Petersburg State University. Her interests include translation theory, comparative literature and poetry, women's literature, and film studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Cornell University.

Gregory Garvey is Associate Professor of Literature and American Studies at SUNY, Brockport. His interests include American Literature, History, Politics and Popular Culture. In 2003-4 he is a Visiting Fulbright Scholar and Director of the Center on the United States and Russia at Mosciow State University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin.

Stephanie Harves is Assistant Professor of Slavic Linguistics at Pomona College. Her interests include syntactic theory, Slavic syntax, unaccusativity, and Morphosyntax. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Princeton University

Robert Hoberman is Professor of Linguistics and Middle Eastern and Judaic Studies at SUNY, Stony Brook. He research interests include Phonology and Morphology of the Semitic languages Arabic, Maltese, Aramaic, and Hebrew, in their classical and modern colloquial varieties; Historical Linguistics and Dialectology. The modern Aramaic he has worked on is that spoken by the Christian and Jewish minorities of Iraqi Kurdistan. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

Leah Lowe is Assistant Professor of Theater at Connecticut College. She teaches courses on performance and the representation of gender and race in dramatic literature and other cultural forms. She holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in dramaturgy from The Florida State University School of Theater.

Anna Maslennikova is Professor of Linguistics and American Studies at St. Petersburg State University and Director of the Center for American and British Studies. She is also Senior Lecturer in Russian Studies at the University of Rochester. She teaches courses on American Studies, Linguistics and Comparativbe Cultures. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from St. Petersburg State University.

James McFarland is Assistant Professor of German and Philosophy at Connecticut College. His interests include the philosophy of cultural theory, comparative literature, philosophy and revolution, film theory and modernity and popular culture. He holds a Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University.

Andrew Nevins is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. His interests include phonological and morphological theory, morpho-phonology, comparative syntax, and Iranian film. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Barbara Partee is a Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst and (Honorary) Permanent Guest Professor, Charles University, Prague. (Semantics, Logic). She is a specialist in formal semantics and its connections with syntax, pragmatics, logic. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kathleen Parthe is Professor of Russian and Director of Russian Studies at the University of Rochester. Her publications include RUSSIAN VILLAGE PROSE: THE RADIANT PAST, and RUSSIA'S DANGEROUS TEXTS: POLITICS BETWEEN THE LINES and she teaches a wide range of courses in Russian and European Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic from Cornell University.

Christopher Potts received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2003. He is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research focuses on natural language semantics, especially where it is unavoidably influenced by pragmatics.

Cilene Rodrigues is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Brasilia, and visiting scholar at MIT in 2005. Her interests include Syntactic Theory and its formal instantiations. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland.

Jon Rubin is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at Purchase College at the State University of New York. He is an artist and film-maker with an interest in the exploration of media art as a mode of cross-cultural discourse. He is the winner of numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Fulbright Fellowships, and he is the creator and director of The Floating Cinema which may make an appearance in St. Petersburg this summer.

Wallace Sherlock is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. His interests include educational policy, interdisciplinary curricular design and world literature. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Cornell University.

Yakov Georgievich Testelets is a Professor of the Center for Linguistic Typology, Institute of Linguistics, Russian State University for Humanities (RGGU), Moscow. His fields of research are: the theory of grammar, Russian syntax, linguistic typology, Caucasian languages. The book "Introduction to General Syntax" (Vvedenie v obscij sintaksis, Moskva: RGGU. 2001) is a textbook in grammatical analysis and syntactic theory. Testelets has contributed to the recent revival of interest for formal grammatical theories, especially Chomskyan syntax, in Russian linguistics.

Darcie Vandegrift is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drake University. Her academic interests include social inequality, critical development studies, Latin American political economy and culture, and comparative studies. She has studied economic development and social inequality in Costa Rica with a Fulbright fellowship and a Fulbright-Hayes Dissertation Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Click here for list of 2005 seminars

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