"The Russian Hour" - "Back in the USSR: Rock Music and Russian Culture" with Thomas Jesús Garza.

"The Russian Hour" is happy to welcome Thomas Jesús Garza (Ed.D., Harvard University), Associate Professor and UT Regents’ and University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has served since 2009 as the Director of the Texas Language Center and was Interim Director of the Arabic Flagship Program (2015-18). He teaches, conducts research, and publishes on Russian language and literature, foreign language pedagogy, and comparative cultures. His research has been published in scholarly journals including Foreign Language Annals, Russian Language Journal, Modern Language Journal, and Slavic and East European Journal, and has authored several Russian and ESL textbooks, and contributed chapters to numerous compilations.

Dr. Garza teaches courses at the lower-division level, such as “The Vampire in Slavic Cultures” and “Russian Sci-Fi in Literature and Film,” at the upper-division level, including “Chechnya 360º: Power, Politics, People,” “The Russian Fairy Tale,” “Russian Youth Culture,” and “Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.” He also teaches graduate-level course on pedagogy and language teaching, as well as Russian language courses at all levels. For his teaching, Dr. Garza has received over a dozen awards and notices. He has led, and continues to lead, study abroad programs to Russia since 1981 under the auspices of the American Council of Teachers of Russian, of which he is past president. His current research is on intensive language teaching methods, intercultural competence, and cultural portraits of masculinity in contemporary Russian and Latino cultures. He recently completed a book manuscript: Bandits and Lovers: Marginal Masculinities in Russian and Mexican Popular Cultures and is currently working on a new project on Vladimir Vysotsky’s visits to the Americas (1976-77).

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"The Russian Hour" is a weekly free event for learners of Russian as a foreign language at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UT-Austin. Hosted by Dr. Marina Alexandrova and the Texas Slavic Club, "The Russian Hour" in designed to help improve students' listening and speaking skills while discussing various relevant topics, including politics, culture, history, health, art, education, and business with native speakers of Russian. For inquiries, email [email protected].

**To limit disruptions, UT is requiring that all non-UT participants sign in with (at least) a free account, which will allow the meeting host to let you in one by one, otherwise, it will deny you access outright. You must be signed in to join the meeting.**