Dr. Florian Freitag - DAAD Germanic Academic Exchange / Assistant Professor (2019-2021)

Dr. habil. Florian Freitag is Assistant Professor at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany). Florian is the author of The Farm Novel in North America: Genre and Nation in the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, 1845-1945 (2013), a book manuscript on Popular New Orleans: The Crescent City in Periodicals, Theme Parks, and Opera, 1875-2015, and articles in e.g. The Journal of Popular Culture and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. He has also co-edited a collection on Time and Temporality in Theme Parks (2017).

In recent years, Florian has become particularly interested in theme parks. He has (co-)founded and directed three international, interdisciplinary research groups on theme parks and immersive spaces, which have been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz, and has also been a member of a research group on theme parks at Balliol College (U of Oxford; see themeparks.uni-mainz.de). Florian’s other research focuses on periodicals, especially in a transnational context: He spent the 2015/16 academic year as a Volkswagen Fellow at CityTech – CUNY (New York City) and has been a member of the Advisory Board of the Research Society for American Periodicals as well as a member of a research group on Transnational Periodical Cultures at JGU Mainz (see transnationalperiodicalcultures.net).

Florian is looking forward to joining the faculty of U of Alberta’s Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies as a DAAD Visiting Associate Professor from 2019-2021.

Dr. Iryna Skubii - Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professorship (2019-2020)

Dr. Iryna Skubii is an Associate Professor at the Department for UNESCO “Philosophy of human communication”, Social and Humanitarian Disciplines at Petro Vasylenko Kharkiv National Technical University of Agriculture. She holds a PhD degree from Karazin Kharkiv National University in 2013. In 2019-2020 Dr. Skubii will be Tompkins Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta.

Iryna published her book “Trade in Kharkiv in the years of NEP (1921-1929): economy and everyday life” in 2017 (in Ukrainian). During her stay at the University of Alberta, she will be working on her second book project, which deals with consumption and materiality in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920-1930s through gender, age, and spatial dimensions.

She was a fellow at Petro Jacyk Visiting Scholars Program in the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto (2019), where she undertook the project devoted to the material world of Ukrainian children during the Holodomor. She was also a fellow of German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians at the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich (2016), where she was working on the children’s consumption in early Soviet Ukraine.

She got the research grants from Shevchenko Scientific Society in America, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium. Iryna participated in various conferences, seminars, and summer schools in Ukraine, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Russia.

She is a member of Association for Women in Slavic Studies and International Association for the Humanities.

Her research interests include economic and social history of Soviet Ukraine, consumption and materiality, consumption and famine, history of childhood, gender studies. She is also working on the research project devoted to the development of tourism in Ukraine and its influence on historical memory.

Dr. Wolfgang Stadler - University of Innsbruck (Austria) / Professor (September 2019)

Wolfgang Stadler is a Professor of Russian Linguistics and Subject-Specific Pedagogy as well as Dean of the Faculty of Teacher Education at the University of Innsbruck (Austria).
After his teacher training in English and Russian both in Innsbruck and in Voronezh (Russia) he worked as a teacher at Secondary Schools in Austria (1983–1990). He was a co-founder and is still a member of the Innsbruck Model of Foreign Language Teaching & Testing and has taught courses in various curricular modules. From 2009–2010 he took an MA in Language Testing by Distance at Lancaster University, one of the UK's top ten universities. Currently Stadler is also working as a lecturer in the German as a Foreign/Second Language Program offered by the University of Innsbruck. He was nominated for the Teaching Plus Award in 2016/17.
Stadler has also taught at the University of Salzburg and at the Humboldt-University in Berlin, where he held a professorship for Russian Language Methodology in 2008/09. In winter semester 2010/11 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for the first time.
His research interests lie in Russian Applied Linguistics, Pragma- and Sociolinguistics, Intercultural Communication, Foreign Language Teaching and Testing as well as in the Assessment Literacy of Russian as a Foreign Language. Stadler has supervised more than 50 diploma, bachelor, master and doctoral theses in the above-mentioned areas. For many years he has trained and educated Austrian and German teachers and given lectures both at home and abroad.
Stadler's current research covers various forms of authenticity in the Russian language classroom, the teaching and assessing of sociopragmatics in Russian at the different competence levels according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, as well as the improvement of an examination and assessment culture at both school and university level. Among his publications there are books such as Testing and Assessing Foreign Languages Competences (2018), The Pragmatics of Silence(s) in Russian (2010), Linguistics of Football (2008), The Language of Russian Right-Wing Populist V. Zhirinovsky (1997) as well as numerous articles on Russian pragmalinguistics (language and emotions, language and advertising, language and power) as well as on Russian language teaching and testing (e.g. sociopragmatic awareness, intercultural competence, action-oriented approach, receptive skills).
Wolfgang Stadler is looking forward to being at UoA again and joining the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies.

Dr. Maria Mayerchyk - Visiting Professor (2019- 2020)

Dr. Maria Mayerchyk holds the Candidate of Sciences Degree in History with a specialization in Ethnology from the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Recently Dr. Mayerchyk is affiliated with the Ethnology Institute of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. She is also a founding editor in chief of the “Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies” and a vice-director of the “Centre for Cultural Anthropological Studies” (NGO).

Dr. Mayerchyk has been a recipient of a number of research grants and fellowships at the Harvard University (USA, Shklar Research Fellowship), the Lund University (Sweden, Visby Program), University of Alberta (Canada, Kule Postdoctoral Fellowship), University of South Florida (USA, Fulbright Scholar Program), Center for Advanced Studies Sofia (Bulgaria, Gerda Henkel Fellowship), Central European University (Budapest, Curriculum Program Research grant), and International Association for Humanities (one year stipend).

She has delivered a numerous public talks and conference presentations in Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Russia, the UK, Ukraine, and the USA.

Maria is an author of a number of publications including a monograph Body and Ritual: Structural-Semantic Analysis of Ukrainian Family Rites (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011). She edited a series of special issues of journals including one dedicated to the issue of Ukrainian folklore in Canada (Narodoznavchi Zoshyty, 2010/3-4) and recently published critically annotated collection of folklore Inventing the Obscene: The Hidden Collections of Fedir Vovk (the Ethnography of Sexuality in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries) (Krytyka, 2018) to which she has written an extended introduction.
Her research interests include history/ethnology/anthropology of sexuality, queer theory, feminist epistemologies, genealogies/geopolitics of knowledge, decolonial option, diaspora studies, ethnology, and critical folklore studies.