George Gasyna, a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures and the Department of Comparative & World Literature, has been named the new editor of the Slavic and East European Journal.
The journal is the official publication of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) and is the oldest American Slavic academic journal. It serves the Slavic profession by publishing original research and review essays in the areas of Slavic and East European languages, literatures, cultures, linguistics, and methodology/pedagogy as well as reviews of books published in these areas.
The journal is published quarterly, with 70 volumes since 1957.
Gasyna is a specialist in Polish and Central European languages, literatures, cultures, and cinema. His chief area of scholarship is in 20th century Polish literature, with occasional forays to the literatures of the previous century as well to contemporary prose and film.
Throughout his academic career, he has also been particularly engaged with diasporic and minority cultures, as well as with Jewish cultural history in pre-1939 multiethnic Poland. In the field of literary and cultural criticism, the major problems he works with revolve around themes of migration and exile, the poetics of national belonging in the context of cultural polarization, the problem of writing in one’s second or third language, autobiography and life writing, memory and post-memory studies, and travel literature.