Image: At the end of the fall semester, the Department of Comparative Literature presented Chuan-Haur Liu and Irina Kruchininia with a Certificate of Excellence Award for their outstanding dedication to teaching and helping the department to fulfill its mission by providing students with instruction of the highest quality. As one of the Comparative Literature department's longest serving graduate teaching assistants, Irina Kruchinina has distinguished herself over the past six years both for the number and variety of courses she has taught. In addition to teaching world literature courses in the department and Russian language courses in Germanic and Slavic Studies, she has taught the very popular interdisciplinary and interdepartmental “Myth and Culture” course (CMLT/ANTH 3190). In this challenging course, Irina succeeded in holding the interest of nearly seventy students for seventy-five minutes in an auditorium-sized classroom. Combining lecture and discussion, and using multimedia technology to illustrate topics central to the course, Irina enabled her students to experience the intensely personal interaction between artists and their world, and to appreciate the humanistic and aesthetic “validity” of creative forms of expression. For her achievements in teaching and her dedication to instruction, Irina was chosen as the first literature TA to receive the Comparative Literature Department's Certificate of Excellence Award._Dr. Joel Black
