Department of Slavic Studies
The Department of Slavic Studies is one of the oldest at the Faculty of Humanities and the Arts and it is recognised all over the world. The department was the birthplace of the Tartu-Moscow school of philology and semiotics, founded by Professor Yuri Lotman. Several of Lotman’s students still teach at the department that has succeeded in keeping the Lotmanian spirit alive to this day.
The department’s research is rich and diverse. The main areas of research in literary studies are translation and ideology, literary contacts, issues of Russian literary canon. The linguists have worked on the Russian diaspora in Estonia and the culture of Old Believers. All instructors are active scholars who participate in different research projects and publish widely. Students with very different interests will find congenial supervision.
Annual conferences bring recognised international scholars to Tartu and they also give lectures to students. The department has 35 Erasmus agreements, as well as partnership agreements with different universities in Russia and the West. The graduates of the department today work in institutions of higher education all over the world (Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, universities of Helsinki, Haifa, Perugia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc.) but they have also been successful in many other areas of life.
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