Profiles
Denis Crnković
Born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in a family of Croatian and German origin, Dr. Crnković attended Franklin and Marshall College and the Russian School of Norwich University. He received an A.B. in Russian Language and Literature from F&M in 1974. After working for two years as a free-lance translator, he studied Slavic literatures at Yale University, where he received the PhD in 1985 after defending his dissertation on the “Rhythmical and Syntactical Structures in the Life of Aleksandr Nevskij.” He completed post-doctoral work at Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) State University in Saint Petersburg, Russia. After serving as lector and instructor of Croatian and Russian at Yale and teaching for a year at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) he came to Gustavus in 1984, where he is currently Professor of Russian Language and Literature and Director of the Russian Language and Area Studies program. He also serves as Director of Curriculum II, the College's intensive integrated general education program.
In addition to offering numerous courses in Russian language and literature, Prof. Crnković has also conducted seminars on Central European Literature, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Modern and Contemporary Russian Culture. As part of Gustavus' emphasis on international education Professor Crnković has traveled and taught regularly in Central and Eastern Europe.
With an expertise in medieval Slavic literatures, Dr. Crnković maintains an active research agenda. His article, “Isocolic Structures and Graphemetic Features in the Croatian Church Slavic Regula Sancti Benedicti,“ has appeared in Studi Slavistici and his recently completed book, Ki lipo umije čtiti: Rhythm and Structure in the Croatian Glagolitic Church Books, is scheduled for publication in 2008. He is currently working on an in-depth study of the Glagolitic versions of the Life of St. Wenceslas.
Besides his scholarly and pedagogical interests, Prof. Crnković is an amateur musician who has sung with the Lancaster (Penna.), Musica Sacra, the Yale Russian Chorus, and the Te Deum Gregorian Choir, and is currently a member of the Mankato Gregorian Chant Ensemble.
Karen Rosenflanz
I grew up in Great Falls, Virginia not far from Washington D.C. I originally became interested in learning Russian so that I could understand what my violin teacher, a recent Russian émigré who played in the National Symphony, was saying to his dog, an enormous black Newfoundland. I studied Russian at the University of Virginia, the University of Goettingen in Germany, and at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys before pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. I specialize in Twentieth Century Russian Literature and published a book, Hunter of Themes, about Formalist wordplay in the works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii. I recently taught Russian language and a course on Vladimir Nabokov's literary canon at Macalester College. I am currently translating The Theory of Marginal Utility by Evgenii Slutskii, a Russian economist and mathematician. At Gustavus, I teach first and second-year Russian and Russian literature. In my free time, I bike, run, canoe in the Boundary Waters with my family, and play violin in the Valiant Dust Piano Trio.
