Professor receives Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Michael M. Naydan, Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Penn State, was recently honored by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) with its Outstanding Contribution to the Profession Award.

Naydan received the award on Feb. 16 during the organization’s national convention in Las Vegas.

According to the AATSEEL, the award is given “to individuals at any stage in their career whose scholarly and administrative leadership, collaboration and/or mentoring has had a significant impact on the profession, especially in terms of opening up and sustaining new directions and new opportunities for our scholarship and our teaching and/or bringing the insights of our field to new audiences.”

“The many submissions nominating Michael for this award laud his collegiality, collaborativeness, mentorship of junior scholars, generosity, ‘willingness to take on hard work for a good cause,’ and the ‘low profile, encouraging, mild-mannered’ and consistent support he has given to others,” said AATSEEL President and Stanford University faculty member Gabriella Saffron.

Naydan was particularly pleased to receive the award in the presence of two of his former graduate students, both originally from Ukraine: Olha Tytarenko, a senior lecturer at Yale University; and Olesia Wallo, an associate professor at the University of Kansas.

“The association gives out just one of these awards each year, so it’s a great honor to receive it from my peers as kind of a lifetime achievement award,” Naydan said. “It’s nice to receive the recognition as a validation of the career path I’ve chosen, though I don’t need validation to continue the work I’m doing. Many people are a part of this award for me, including wonderful professors who mentored me, the fantastic students whom I’ve mentored and from whom I’ve also learned so much, and the terrific colleagues who have collaborated with me on my translation work.”

A Penn State faculty member since 1988, Naydan became the Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies in 2007.

Throughout his career, Naydan has distinguished himself as both a translator and scholar. He’s published more than 40 books of translations with critical introductions, as well as 40-plus articles and 80-plus translations in literary journals and anthologies.

Along the way, he’s received numerous awards, including the Translation Prize from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies three times and the 2013 George S.N. Luckyj Prize in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies. He’s been a Fulbright scholar in Lviv, Ukraine, twice, and has served as a designated Senior Fulbright Scholar for the past three years. He’s also hosted more than 40 Fulbright scholars — mostly from Ukraine and Romania — at Penn State.

Naydan recently finished a co-translation with Tytarenko of Alexander Strashny’s “The Ukrainian Mentality,” which will be published by ibidem Press in April, as well as a slightly revised paperback edition of the Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s poetry, “Ecstasies and Elegies: Selected Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych,” which will be released in August by Bucknell University Press.

He’s also working on a complete works edition of Antonych’s poetry during his current sabbatical, as well as translations of a complete works edition of the poetry of Patricia Kylyna — the pen name of Patricia Nell Warrem — with former graduate student Alina Zhurbenko and colleague Alla Perminova. Meanwhile, he and Tytarenko are completing the final revisions of a decolonized translation of the original 1835 edition of Mykola Hohol’s — also known as Nikolai Gogol — famous romantic novel, “Taras Bulba,” and he’s collaborating with Perminova on the first English translation of Ukrainian national bard Taras Shevchenko’s “Diary.”  

“I consider myself in the mold of a scholar-translator, who can both translate complex texts and explicate them in historical and literary contexts,” Naydan said. “I love working collaboratively with others on my translations because two heads are always better than one, and I can get considerably more work done collaboratively than just working alone.”

Naydan’s passion for his field comes autobiographically. His Ukrainian parents were captured by the Nazis in 1942 and forced to work in Germany’s Ostarbeiter labor camps. After World War II, they emigrated to the United States.

“They instilled a great love of Ukrainian culture both in me and my brother,” Naydan said. “I saw a need for many works of Ukrainian literature to be translated into English and started to do that as an undergraduate and MA student at the American University. I continued to hone my translation skills as a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, and never stopped working on my translations since then.”

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has put additional focus on Ukrainian culture, which Naydan said has provided “a great opportunity and need to fill the gaps to make the best of Ukrainian culture available for the English-speaking world.”

“The generosity of the Woskob family in establishing an endowment in Ukrainian studies at Penn State opened up myriad opportunities for me to promote Ukrainian studies and Ukrainian culture,” he said. “I’m driven to make the best of Ukrainian literature available to the Anglophone world and am happy to work with several younger translators who take up the mantle of working in the field of translation.”