Accordion List

The Department of Russian and East European Studies offers an undergraduate major in Russian and East European Studies (REES), as well as minors in Russian Studies (RUSS) and East Central European Studies (ECES). The major and minor programs are flexible and well suited to students wishing to pursue a double major (or minor) with a complementary field of study, such as Art, Cinema Studies, Comparative Literature, History, and International Relations. Several doctoral students studying the region are affiliated with the REES Department, but are located in other departments, such as Comparative Literature, History, Political Science, and Music. The dual M.A. program, co-sponsored with the European University at St. Petersburg, is on hiatus due to the war.
 

The nucleus of the Slavic and East European collection consists of 2,300 Russian books, published between 1860 and 1901, on a variety of subjects, donated to Penn at the turn of the twentieth century by Ambassador Charlemagne Tower. There is a catalogue of the collection entitled Katalog russkikh knig prinesennykh v dar universitetu v Pennsilvanii. These materials exist now only on microfilm. The collection was gradually enlarged through the efforts of faculty members in history, literature, and Balto-Slavic linguistics. Russian language materials predominate, followed by Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian. The Lithuanian component of the collection is strong. In 1952 the Library acquired the library of Dr. Jurgis Saulys. In the 1980s the Library received a substantial number of older bound Russian journals from the New York Public Library, as well as a collection of several hundred books and journals on microfilm; and in 2005 the Library received the Polish language collection of Holy Family University (Philadelphia) as a gift.

 

Penn did not have a Slavic bibliographer for a few decades, and as a consequence there are inconsistencies and gaps in the collection. A new full-time Slavic bibliographer joined Penn in 2022. Current policy is to bring the collection up to a level high enough to support research in the University's current programs.

The primary language collected is Russian. Areas of focus include history, political science, medieval studies, art, poetry, cultural history, and literary criticism.

Recent changes include the acquisition of more non-Russian materials with an emphasis on certain key areas: Ukrainian works (especially poetry and materials related to the war), works from the Baltic states (especially Latvian poetry), and works by and about indigenous and minority peoples in the Russian Federation, especially works from Siberia and the Far North (including Yakut, Komi, Udmurt, Chuvash, Evenk, Mari, and Kalmyk). Building on Penn's rich holdings of Russian children's books, we are also now acquiring children's books in Russian and Ukrainian, both contemporary and antiquarian. 

1. Chronological

From antiquity to the present; works on prehistory and preliterate peoples are particularly important for the Museum Library.

2. Formats

No format is excluded if the Library can make it available to users. 

3. Geographical

All of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, the Baltic States, the Caucasus, and Central Asia; the countries of Eastern Europe.

4. Language

The Library regularly acquires works in Russian, and to a more limited extent collects works in Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Czech, and indigenous languages of the Russian Federation.

5. Publication Dates

The library only acquires current publications. Publications from Russian and East Europe go out of print very quickly, and consequently the current focus is on the newest works.

The Library purchases Russian books based on a title-by-title selection from Natasha Kozmenko (NK Books) and MIPP International. Books from the Baltic States and Ukraine are purchased from MIPP. Russian dissident and diaspora materials come from a variety of suppliers, primarily Esterum. Rare books are purchased primarily from Bookvica. New access to hundreds of periodicals (from the nineteenth-century to the present) is now available through the East View digital subscription databases. There are no approval plans for foreign-language materials. English-language materials are purchased from GOBI, both with an approval plan and with title-by-title selection.

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