Russian Studies
Overview
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Dr. Frederick H. White is Professor of Russian and Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University. He is also a National Security Studies Fellow. He has published eight books and over fifty academic articles on Russian literature, film and culture. He is one of the leading specialists on the writer Leonid Andreev and has published in the areas of Russian Modernism, psychiatry and literature in the Russian fin de siècle, the economics of culture and post-Soviet cinema, with a specific focus on the filmmaker Aleksei Balabanov.
His latest book, Ernest Hemingway and the Soviet Union, examines both Hemingway’s immense popularity in the USSR and the attempts made by agents to appropriate the American author as a supporter of the Soviet experiment. The book is contracted with Louisiana State University Press and is scheduled for publication in Fall 2027. Dr. White teaches Russian literature, film and culture courses for the UVU Russian Studies program; for the National Security Studies program, most recently, he has taught Russia Under Putin and The Cold War: Culture and Politics.
Olga Jarrell is a Lecturer in Russian in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Utah Valley University, where she teaches beginning, intermediate, and advanced Russian language courses. She specializes in curriculum design, accelerated language instruction, task- and project-based teaching, and the development of comprehensive instructional materials, including original video content for language learning. Professor Jarrell earned her Master’s degree in Foreign Language Education at Karelian State University in Petrozavodsk, Russia, where she specialized in language pedagogy and second language acquisition. With over 17 years of experience teaching Russian at UVU, she is committed to student-centered, proficiency-oriented instruction that promotes measurable progress and sustained engagement. Her pedagogical approach combines structured grammar instruction with interactive, performance-based activities and scaffolded communicative practice. She has extensive experience developing multimedia instructional resources, including grammar and vocabulary video lessons and interpretive listening modules.
Since 2023, Professor Jarrell has developed five university-level Russian language courses, based on her original textbook materials, online modules, and instructional videos, developing and sustaining the Accelerated Russian Language Program at UVU. Through carefully designed, fast-paced, and intensive coursework, this program enables students with no prior knowledge of Russian to advance to a low-intermediate proficiency level within two semesters rather than the traditional four. Professor Jarrell recently contributed to the Presidential Roundtable, “Strategic Change: Adapting Russian Programs within the Present Higher Education Environment,” at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages conference, presenting “Accelerated Russian at UVU: Curricular Changes and Strategies.”
