Mary Childs

Mary Childs received her PhD in Comparative Literature in 2012, with a dissertation entitled “Classical Allusions and Imperial Desire:  Problems of Identity in Georgian and Russian Literature.”   She is currently a lecturer at the University of Washington, and an adjunct professor at Seattle Pacific University.  Her teaching and research interests include post-Soviet Russian literature, Georgian fiction and cinema, the Black Sea region, and environmental humanities.

Michael Long

Michael Long received his PhD in Slavic Linguistics from Indiana University in 1994. He is currently Professor of Russian at Baylor University in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, where he is also the Division Director for Asian & African Languages and the advisor for Slavic and East European Studies. His book, Making History: Czech Voices of Dissent and the Revolution of 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) is an oral history of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Since 2001, Michael has made several research trips to Georgia, where he is documenting the restoration and rehabilitation of Georgia’s cultural monuments, as well as attempting to learn the Georgian language.