Amanda's Page

I am originally a New Yorker; while I no longer live in New York, I seem to carry my accent wherever I go. After graduating from Northwestern University in 2012, I began graduate school at Yale. I am currently a sixth-year doctoral student at Yale in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. I specialize in science fiction as both a genre and a mode. My dissertation, tentatively titled “In Dialogue with the Future: Time Travel in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Fiction,” focuses on how a traditionally generic device such as time travel can complicate and supercede the generic distinction of “science fiction.” Through the prism of time travel, I explore the creation, and ultimate destruction, of the Soviet identity.

I teach Russian at both Yale University and Yale-NUS, a liberal arts college in Singapore. I teach my Yale-NUS class via teledistance. I have taught both intensive and first-year Russian language, in addition to introductory Russian literature courses. In addition to writing, researching, and cuddling with my dog, I work at the McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, where, as a graduate student life fellow, I coordinate events for the graduate and professional student community at Yale. I am also a graduate peer advisor at the Office of Career Strategy, where I help undergraduate students and recent alumni through the graduate school application process.

I participated in a STARTALK seminar in July 2016, earning a certificate in proficiency-based pedagogy for teachers of Russian in the process.The STARTALK experience has significantly impacted my philosophy of teaching and learning; I have focused my lesson planning on what my students can do, instead of what I want to teach them. By altering my classroom to be student-focused, I have found that my students are both happier and progress much more quickly than when I simply asked them to memorize verb charts!