{"id":132597,"date":"2020-04-24T14:43:02","date_gmt":"2020-04-24T18:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=132597"},"modified":"2020-05-01T17:28:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-01T21:28:12","slug":"my-last-year-teaching-in-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2020\/04\/24\/my-last-year-teaching-in-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"My Last Year: Teaching in Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI’m being overcome with waves of nostalgia, so I can’t do this for too long,\u201d wrote Jane Costlow in response to a recent request to round up photographs of her 26 years of taking Bates students to Russia. \u201cSo many amazing and wonderful students and adventures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though today she is the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, now in her 34th and final year of teaching at Bates, Costlow\u2019s academic training is in Russian literature and culture, and she first traveled in the then\u2013Soviet Union during graduate school in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

And since joining the Bates faculty, she has led students to Russia on 10 separate occasions, the first in 1988 and the last in 2014.<\/p>\n

\n\t+<\/span>Costlow in Russia<\/a>\n\t<\/h5>
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Short Terms<\/strong>: Costlow has led eight Short Terms, beginning in her second year at Bates in 1988, followed by programs in western Russia\u2019s Orel region in 1990, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2006, and 2014. A shorter (two-week) version of the course in 1993 was based in St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n

Bates Fall Semesters Abroad<\/strong>: Costlow co-led two Bates fall semesters in St. Petersburg, one in 2000 with Professor Emeritus of Music James Parakilas, and the other with Professor of Politics \u00c1slaug \u00c1sgeirsd\u00f3ttir in 2009. She also co-led a Fall Semester Abroad in 1997 in Nantes, France, with Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read.
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\"Costlow<\/a>

Costlow poses with her students in 2006 in front of the “coachman’s cottage” on Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula. The folk ensemble had just performed. (Courtesy Jane Costlow)<\/p><\/div>\n

Fascinated by Russian history, culture, politics, people, and language, Costlow cannot imagine her life as a teacher or scholar without those experiences in Russia. \u201cYou wouldn’t be a marine biologist and not go to the ocean. [Professor of Geology] Dyk Eusden \u201980 does not do geology sitting in his office in Carnegie. If you’re someone who’s interested in another culture that happens to be a living culture, you go there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jane Costlow on why Russia calls to her. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n