Ansley Stibbs
Contributing Writer
Ella Madej, a Sewanee freshman, is planning on double majoring in Russian and politics. Though technically undeclared, she said that she has been planning on majoring in Russian “since junior year of high school.”
“I decided to pursue this major because I’ve always had an interest in Eastern European and Slavic studies, and with the recent events with Ukraine and Russia, the study of Russian language and politics is all the more important,” Madej said.
Though Madej has always had a strong passion and affinity for Russian studies, it transmits deeper than simply just the academic realm. Her familial ties to her Eastern-European identity create a personal affiliation to the culture and all that it entails. “My family is Polish-Ukrainian, or a lesser-known ethnic identity known as Russyn,” Madej said.
Yet the Russyn ethnic group is not one that often graces Sewanee. Madej elaborated further on how the Russyn identity is defined: “The Russyns are an ethnic minority that reside in the Carpathian mountains of Eastern Europe, and are often called the “curds of Europe…They are a stateless nation of people.” Here, the intersection of her academic endeavors of Russian and politics is more apparent in terms of the intersection of Eastern-European identities in the modern age.
But for Madej, there is more to the study of Russian than the culture alone. “I really have a passion for the language, and I enjoy learning about the grammatical structure and getting to apply that to understanding a greater world beyond the English-speaking one,” she said. In a country like America so concerned with its own cultural identity, it can be rare to come across somebody who recognizes the value of understanding those who belong to different cultures in a way that is more extensive than a basic conception.
Aside from committing her academic journey to Russian studies, Madej worked at a Russian-speaking summer camp in Minnesota this past summer, and she hopes to continue her involvement with Russian and Eastern-European studies. “I do want to study abroad this summer in some capacity,” she says, in reference to either a study abroad program that students must apply for, or teaching English to Lithuanian school children.