Olha Tytarenko

Olha Tytarenko is Senior Lector I and Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale. She previously served as an Associate Professor of Practice of Russian, Russian language coordinator, and Russian program head at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 2016. Tytarenko’s research interests span across second language pedagogy, nineteenth-century Russian literature, Russian religious thought, cultural history, and political mythology. Her current book project examines nineteenth-century Russian authors’ engagement with folk mysticism and its reflection of historical ideologies and political perspectives. In her teaching, Tytarenko blends traditional courses on Russian language, literature, folklore, and culture with an innovative approach to pedagogy. She has designed online and blended learning courses, focusing on immersive, hands-on experiences for her students. Her ongoing research in pedagogy explores the use of Virtual Reality (VR) and project-based instruction to align immersive activities with curricular objectives. Beyond academia, Tytarenko is a creative writer and translator. She crafts poetry and short prose in Ukrainian and contributes to various literary projects as a co-translator and editor, translating from Ukrainian and Russian into English.