Housed within the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies promotes the interdisciplinary study of the Russian Federation and its larger historical precursors, the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. Founded in 2022, thanks to the generous bequest of Princess Janet Romanoff, the Center is dedicated to informing both the University of Oklahoma community and the broader public about the history and culture of Russia, current events involving the Russian Federation, and Russia’s actions on the world stage. It sponsors lectures, symposia, and cultural events; engages with scholars and public figures nationally and internationally; and works to support excellence in teaching and research in Russian studies.
Logan Pizzeck, a senior OU Russian major, participated in the 2026 REESNe student conference at the University of Pittsburgh. Their travel to the conference was funded by awards from the University of Pittsburgh, OU DF CAS, and the Romanoff Center. Logan delivered a paper titled "Avengers, Amgels, Martyrs, Mothers: The Roles of Female Partisans in Films about the Great Patriotic War" and benefited from the chance to network with faculty and students in Russian studies from around the country.
Dr. Dustin Condren's 2025 monograph, An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film received the Svetlana Boym prize for the best book in cultural studies from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.
On Wednesday, September 16, 4:30-5:30 p.m. in Kaufman 221B, Dr. Natalia Starostina, Associate Professor of history at Oklahoma State University, will visit OU to deliver a lecture titled "Gendered Memories, Emotional Communities, and Affective Nostalgia in the Autobiographical Writing of Russian Émigré Women." Dr. Starostina is the author of more than twenty-five articles in publications such as Diasporas, Migrance, and Dialectical Anthropology. In her work, she focuses on imperialism, myth, memory, nostalgia, and migration in interwar Western Europe. Her talk at OU will argue that autobiographical writing allowed writers such as Nadezhda Teffi (1872-1952) and Maria Skotsova (1891-1945) to preserve a lost homeland in memory, reinterpret their past, and redefine themsleves within the transnational context of the Russian diaspora in France.
On Wednesday, October 7, 4:30-5:30 p.m. in 221B Kaufman Hall, Dr. Hilde Hoogenboom, Associate Professor of Russian at Arizona State University, will deliver a talk entitled: "The Quest for a Meaningful Life: Russian Noble Service Culture Revealed through Literary Markets, Women Writers, and Sentimentalism." Dr. Hoogenboom is the author of the monograph Noble Sentiments and the Rise of the Russian Novel: A European Literary History (University of Toronto, 2025), a study that uses digital humanities to analyze Russian and European publication data and show how Russia's nineteenth-century sentimental novelists, including women writers, adapted the European conversation about duty and moral education in their quest to understand themsleves and the challenges of their position as hereditary nobles in charge of 50 million serfs.
Attn: Prof. Emily Johnson
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures & Linguistics
University of Oklahoma
780 Van Vleet Oval, Room 206
Norman, OK 73019
Romanoffcenter@ou.edu
