The Spire

Jacob Wu ‘27

Staff Writer

In traveling to your next class at Stein and hurriedly squeezing yourself into the elevator, you may also find Professor Richter in this swift commute before lectures begin. She is a visiting assistant professor of Russian studies at the college, and is just getting settled as a relatively new member of the faculty. A brief conversation with her would reveal a character so amicable and down-to-earth that you could easily overlook that she is an accomplished professor at Brown University, and remain unbeknownst to her long journey from Russia to Worcester.

Professor Richter is a native speaker of Russian and grew up in the Soviet Union. As a young girl in Moscow, she recalls an affinity for children’s picture books; her father was a writer for the satirical magazine Krokodil. She began her studies at the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages before coming to the United States from the Soviet Union as a political refugee, just months before the USSR’s collapse. Professor Richter began pursuing graduate studies at New York University, obtaining a Master of Arts in Slavic studies, and then matriculated at the University of Toronto, where she received her Ph.D. with a dissertation on Russian avant-garde art and poetry. Her doctoral supervisor, Christopher Barnes, was a leading authority on Russian poet Boris Pasternak.

Professor Richter is divided as a part-time professor at Brown and Holy Cross. Ten years ago, she began teaching courses at the college and found it refreshing from that of the Ivy League. Here, she has taught a class on Russian propaganda, a subject in which no formal textbook exists as there does in other subjects. “The class and subject,” she recounts, “I can possibly say it was a 99 percent certainty it had never been taught in the world this way. It was uncharted territory — there were no right readings.” As in that class and others, Professor Richter takes on a similarly maverick teaching style: she goes on a first-name basis with students, shares her phone-number for open questions at all hours of the day, and maintains a workshop in class where both she and her students learn collectively. “I’d like to be part of the community,” she says, “not on top of the community.” To her, the real reward of teaching is seeing that eureka effect strike students: “I love that moment of ‘Thank you! I never thought of it’ and I get it all the time.”