Oscar E. Swan

  • Professor and Advisor for Polish Studies minor

Swan's Polish language Web site and online dictionary are cutting-edge, and his language textbooks and bicycle guides are his claim to fame.

Recent Publications.pdf

CV

Education & Training

  • PhD, University of California-Berkeley

Courses Taught

  • Polish -- all levels
  • The Polish Short Story
  • Polish Literature and Culture
  • Old Church Slavic
  • Structure of Russian
  • Russian Morphology 
  • Polish Through Film
  • Polish over the World Wide Web
  • Modern Polish Literature
  • The "Dekalog" by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
  • Topics in Slavic Linguistics
  • Historical Russian Grammar

Representative Publications

Books since 2004:

The Short Story in a Polish Context: Classic Short Fiction from the Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries. Edited, partially translated, and with cultural and critical commentary by Oscar E. Swan (New York, PIASA Books, 2024).

Rescued From the Ashes: The Warsaw Ghetto Diary of Leokadia Schmidt. Translated and with introduction and historical notes by Oscar E. Swan. (Oegstgeest, The Netherlands: Amsterdam Publishers, 2019).

Polish Customs and Culture in the Reign of the Last Saxon King by Jędrzej Kitowicz, translated and with an introduction and commentary by Oscar E. Swan. Central Eastern European University Press, 2019.

Kaleidoscope of Poland. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.

A Reader in Contemporary Polish, London: Routledge Publishers, 2014.

Concise Dictionary of Old Russian by Horace G. Lunt, Liberally edited and updated by Oscar E. Swan. Bloomington: Slavica. EDP 2012.

Russian Sounds and Inflections. Columbus, Ohio: Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica, 2011.

Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar. McGraw-Hill Publishers, September 2008.

Old Church Slavic 1: Inflectional Morphology. Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, July, 2008.

Old Church Slavic 2: Reader. Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2008.

Old Church Slavic 3: Glossary. Oakland, CA: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 2008.

Holy Week by Jerzy Andrzejewski. A translation from the Polish, Ohio University Press, 2006.

Tales of My Wife. A Polish glossed reader. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2006.

Grammar of Contemporary Polish. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 2002. Awarded best work in Slavic Linguistics by AATSEEL, 2004.

A Student’s Online Polish-English, English-Polish Dictionary

Journal Articles since 2005:

"Sketching the Russian Tense-Aspect System” The Slavic and East European Journal 64/4, winter 2018, 825-843.

“Jędrzej Kitowicz and his Description of Eighteenth-Century Polish Culture: an Introduction and Three Excerpts” The Polish Review, 62/2, 2017, 24-53.

“Why it May Not Be Important Whether Aspectual Prefixes are Empty or Not.” review article on Janda et al. Why Russian Aspectual Prefixes Are Not Empty: Prefixes as Verb Classifiers. Russian Language Journal. 2015.

“Aspect and the Russian Verbal Base.” Russian Language Journal, 2015.

“Polish ‘Partner Nouns’,” Slavic and East European Journal. 59/3. 2015.

“Oboje ‘both-collective’: Normative Grammar, the Polish National Corpus, Google, and Contemporary Standard Polish.” Polish Review. 60/3. 2015.

"Polish Gender, Subgender, and Quasi-Gender." Journal of Slavic Linguistics 23.1, 2015.

How Important is Explanation? A Response." Slavic and East European Journal. 58.2, 307-321, 2014.

"Sarah Palin byl duzy blad: Anne Applebaum and the in situ Learning of Polish" Slavic and East European Journal vol. 58.1, 2014.

"The Polish Duel and its Last Apologia: Wladyslaw Boziewicz's Polski kodeks onorowy (The Polish Code of Honor)," The Polish Review 48/1, 2013.

"Why budu?" Russian Linguistics, bol.36, No. 3, 2012.

"Symbolic Play in K. Kieslowski's DekalogIII" The Polish Review, vol LV, No. 4, 2010: 403-441.

“Andrzej Wajda’s Film Holy Week: What is its Problem?” The Polish Review, vol L, no. 3, 2005, 343-353.

Research Interests

  • Polish and Russian linguistics
  • Polish Cinema
  • Slavic Linguistics and Lexicography
  • Old Church Slavic
  • Russian Linguistics
  • Computer-­‐Aided Instruction