The department is immensely proud to congratulate two Slavic students for successfully defending their dissertations and earning their doctoral degrees!
First, William Smeal defended his dissertation Establishing Rates of Latinization in the Slavic Cyrillic Orthographic Zone: A Corpus-Based Analysis on November 21, 2025; he subsequently received his PhD at the end of the Spring, 2026 semester. Congratulations to William and his lead advisor George Fowler. William now lives in Bucharest, Romania, where he is pursuing a professional career in the field of computer technology services. He hopes to pursue further research derived from his dissertation as an independent scholar if time and the demands of his work permit.
And second, Daniel (Dan) Medford defended his dissertation, Ethnic and Linguistic Identity Construction in a Security Cooperation Context: U.S.–Ukraine Military Relations, on April 9, 2026. Now, Lt. Col. Medford will lead Russian language instruction at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Congratulations to Dan and his lead advisor, Maria Shardakova.
We rejoice in the success of our two students, now our junior colleagues, and we wish them every bit of success in pursuing careers in our field, which they both richly deserve.
The College of Arts