Dr. Olga Pressitch
Position
Contact
Credentials
PhD (Shevchenko Inst. of Lit.)
Area of expertise
Slavic Studies, Ukrainian Literature, Foreign Language Pedagogy, Film
Born and educated in Ukraine, Olga Pressitch is a certified language teacher and a published poet whose work is in the Ukrainian language. She received her MA in Slavic Philology from the National Pedagogical University in Kyiv with a thesis on ecological awareness in Soviet prose of the 1980s, and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine with a thesis on Ukrainian literature in postwar Canada. Her broader research interests include Eastern European cinema and second-language pedagogy. She is the author of two poetry collections in Ukrainian, Impresii (Impressions, 1994) and Don Zhuan ta inshi prymary (Don Juan and Other Ghosts, 2010), as well as articles in Ukrainian and English on Ukrainian diasporic and Soviet culture and film.
Dr. Pressitch joined the Department in 2011 on a limited-term appointment and became a regular faculty member in 2015. Her regular course offerings include SLST 111: Beginner’s Ukrainian I, SLST 303: Russian Popular Culture (in Russian), SLST 364: Eastern Europe through Western Eyes, SLST 460: History and Memory in Eastern European Cultures, and SLST 480: Tolstoy and the Age of Anna Karenina.
“Language, Class, and Nation in a Soviet Ukrainian Blockbuster Comedy: Chasing Two Hares (1961),” Canadian Slavonic Papers 56, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2014): 119–34.
“Civil War as Musical Comedy: The Representation of the Ukrainian Revolution in the Soviet Film Wedding in Malinovka,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies 5, no. 2 (2013): 83–91.
“Konflikt pokolin′ iak strukturoformuiuchyi zasib ukraïns′ko-kanadskoï prozy II polovyny XX st.” [Generational Conflict as a Plot-Forming Device in the Ukrainian Canadian Prose of the Second Half of the 20th Century], Spheres of Culture 4 (2013): 117–24.
Review of Beginner’s Ukrainian with Interactive Online Workbook: A Basic Ukrainian Course, by Yuri Shevchuk, Canadian Slavonic Papers 54, nos. 3–4 (September–December 2012): 555–56.
“Zobrazhennia zhyttia ukraïns′kykh immihrantiv v Kanadi v romani Viry Lysenko ‘Zhovti chobitky’” [The Depiction of the Life of Ukrainian Immigrants in Canada in Vera Lysenko’s Novel Yellow Boots], Vsesvit: Zhurnal inozemnoï literatury, nos. 11–12 (2012): 189–95.
“The Ukrainian Revolution as Musical Comedy: The 1936 Soviet Operetta and the 1967 Film Wedding in Malinovka.” Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (San Antonio, Texas, USA, 20 November 2014).
“Stepmotherland on the Steppes: The Great War and the Internment Operation in Ukrainian-Canadian Fiction.” Workshop on “The First World War: Transnational, Local, and Interdisciplinary Perspectives One Hundred Years Later” (University of Victoria, 2 October 2014).
“‘Life Is a Difficult Journey’: Olha Mak’s Literary Works in the Context of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Literature.” Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada invited public lecture series (Toronto, 7 March 2014, in Ukrainian).
“Teaching the Ukrainian Famine through Film.” Workshop on Teaching the Holodomor: Commemorating Eighty Years since the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932–33 (University of Victoria, 15 November 2013).
Roundtable participant, “Teaching Russian and East European Cinema.” Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists (University of Victoria, 1 June 2013).
“Language, Class, and Nation in a Soviet Ukrainian Blockbuster Comedy: Chasing Two Hares (1961).” International Conference on “Ukraine: Language, Culture, Identity” (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 16 February 2013).