Interview with Irina Kogel
- You just came to BU two years ago. Tell us a bit about your career before joining BU.
Before joining the World Languages & Literatures Department at BU, I was the Russian language coordinator at Davidson College. Teaching in Massachusetts again has been a kind of professional homecoming, since I began my career teaching in the Mellon-funded Three-College Russian Initiative at Mount Holyoke, UMass Amherst, and Smith. I have also taught intensive summer courses at various proficiency levels both at the Critical Languages Institute at Arizona State University and the Russian Practicum at Columbia University.
- Can you tell us a bit about the American Councils program and what you’ll be doing in Kazakhstan?
The Summer Russian Language Teacher (SRLT) professional development program began as an exchange of Soviet and American teachers in 1985. In the past 40 years, it has become a cornerstone of the Russian teaching field, providing hundreds of US educators with an intensive Russian proficiency maintenance course and the opportunity to share ideas with their Russian teaching colleagues, initially in Russia, and now in Kazakhstan. The program includes individual and group classes, as well as cultural excursions and travel around the Almaty region.
- How does your work in Kazakhstan connect to your goals for the Russian program here at BU?
For language learning to be effective and impactful, students need to have authentic opportunities to communicate in the target language and to learn about the cultures and peoples who use that language first-hand. To that end, I have created partnerships with colleagues at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU) to facilitate a virtual language exchange for students of Russian at BU with their Kazakh counterparts, and I am excited to pilot that program in Spring 2026. In addition, I have expanded on an interview project called Russian Voices that I have been working on since 2015, adding 10 interviews with Russophone individuals in Kazakhstan to the interviews I previously conducted in Russia.
- What are you most looking forward to while on your trip – academically and personally?
The SRLT program has given me the chance to connect with other instructors of Russian, both US colleagues and Russian as a second language faculty at KazNU, who teach in the Russian Flagship capstone year abroad. Being in Kazakhstan has been especially meaningful, because it has allowed me to learn more about a region of the world where my students are likely to study abroad and to experience what it’s like to pursue language study in Kazakhstan, down to living with a host family. On a personal level, I have also really enjoyed exploring some of the many cuisines represented in Kazakhstan, from Uzbek plov (rice pilaf) and Uyghur lagman (hand-pulled noodles), to Korean pickled vegetables and Belarusian draniki (potato pancakes).
- Why do you think it’s important for students to study Russian today?
Today, more than 270 million people worldwide speak Russian as a native language, with nearly a million Russian speakers in the US. Depending on students’ goals, study of Russian can open up new horizons in a wide array of fields including international relations, history, the arts, energy studies, aerospace engineering, and cybersecurity (after all, Russian is the 3rd most commonly used language on the internet). In the Boston area in particular, students of Russian can interact with a rich diasporic community, which includes immigrants from across all of the post-Soviet states. The advanced experiential course Russian in Boston (LR 445) takes the city as its classroom as students complete internships in Russian speaking cultural institutions and businesses and carry out oral history projects capturing the history of Russophone immigration to the area.
- What’s something about the Russian speaking world you wish more people knew?
As a heritage speaker of Russian from Belarus, I want more people to realize that there is a broad range of Russophone experiences and viewpoints. The history of how so many disparate peoples came to use Russian as a lingua franca is complex and contentious. I think that it’s important to understand that there is not really one Russian speaking world, but instead Russophone communities, both within the Russian Federation and in a whole host of other countries, whose relationship to the Russian language is continually in flux.