Olga Mladenova

Olga Mladenova teaches Russian at the University of Calgary since 1997. Over the years she has taught Russian language courses at all levels as well as courses on Russian civilization (with a focus on multiculturalism and identity), Russian popular culture, key symbols of Russian culture, language and power in Russian society, the language of totalitarianism, twentieth-century standard Russian, Russian syntax and word order and the Russian lexicon.

Olga Mladenova is a Slavist and a Balkanologist with broad interests at the intersection of language and culture. Most recently, as demonstrated by the appearance of a number of articles and a book, written in collaboration with Boryana Velcheva and published in 2013 (Loveshki damaskin: Novobulgarski pametnik ot XVII vek [Lovech damaskin: Modern Bulgarian manuscript from the 17th century]), her attention has focused on the comprehensive study of early modern Orthodox Christian literary production. These interests initially came into being as a sideline growing from the study of such texts as primary sources for the evolution of quantification, definiteness, passive voice and other linguistic phenomena, the outcomes of which were published as a series of articles and a book: Definiteness in Bulgarian: Modelling the Processes of Language Change (2007).

Olga Mladenova started her scholarly career in Bulgaria as an etymologist, working for the Bulgarian Etymological Dictionary team (Bulgarski etimologichen rechnik, vols. 1-7, 1971-2010), and later joined another, Moscow-based, team which proposed a new Russian etymological dictionary that was to never materialize (see however the books co-authored with her Moscow colleagues Iz istorii russkikh slov [On the History of Russian Words], 1993, and Novoe v russkoi etimologii [What is New in Russian Etymology], vol. 1, 2003). Her parallel passion for ethno-linguistics involved a closer acquaintance with the field of social and cultural anthropology and led to the publication of many articles and two books: Grapes and Wine in the Balkans (1998) and Russian Second-Language Textbooks and Identity in the Universe of Discourse (2004). Olga Mladenova coordinates the work on the Transdanubian Electronic Corpus (www.corpusbdr.info).

A list of Olga Mladenova's publications is available in pdf format as part of her attached CV.

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