Anastasia Kayiatos joins the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures with a B.A. from Reed College and is the recipient of the Lankford Humanities Award for Outstanding Thesis in 2001– 2002. She hopes to expand her thesis—on Evgenii Kharitonov, the most important gay writer of the Soviet period—into more general work on representations of marginality in Russian literature, theorizing the distinctiveness of the Russian situation and the degree of its susceptibility to intellectual methodologies developed for Western culture. Her mentor will be Merrill Kaplan, a Ph.D. candidate in Scandinavian and a Townsend Fellow for 2004–2005.