Many new and exciting faculty join the Montrose community each fall, and among them is Dr. Anna Ivanov. Dr. Ivanov recently received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literature from Harvard University, and will be teaching both 10th grade British Literature and 11th grade American Literature this year, as well as advising the Student Creative Writing club, the Walrus. She brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to Montrose, from computer science to poetry, and will be sure to give so much to all of her students during her time here.
Dr. Ivanov first learned Russian when she was young as a heritage speaker, but really picked it up as a “side quest” in high school. She started college studying data science and linguistics, but during her four years, discovered that Russian literature was what she was drawn to the most and wanted to pursue. “Every time I was in a bookstore,” she shared, “the section I would go to was Russian literature. Or when I was learning new things in computer science class, I’d be like, ‘Oh, this will help me understand this poem.’ It was always a little bit of a pull, and so in a way, I always knew, but I didn’t realize it would be such a part of my life. And then throughout college, I kind of figured out this is what I love.”
When I asked Dr. Ivanov what it is like to get a Ph.D., her response was: “It’s hard! It was 7 years of my life and I think the first few years were amazing. It’s just like college part two, I had a great time. And then it becomes a real question of self-motivation. My dissertation was 301 pages and sort of unstructured writing… And I think that’s when the impostor syndrome really strikes, like, ‘how am I going to be able to write something with this many chapters?’ And so that was difficult for sure. But I can’t think of a better way to spend my 20s. I love learning and I love being around people who love learning and I love teaching. And so, in a way, it was just a way to kind of keep taking classes, keep talking about literature and being in a community with people who care a lot about that. So I would always recommend it, but it was certainly difficult sometimes.”
For her Ph.D. dissertation, Dr. Ivanov was able to incorporate her interests in both literature and data science, writing her dissertation about connection in Russian poetry from the 1820s and the 2020s through the lens of network theory. ‘Network theory’ (as I learned) essentially maps connections between ‘nodes,’ or the poems in this case, to see which of the points have the greatest effect on the others. By applying this framework to poetry, Dr. Ivanov described that she “was drawn to… the idea of poetry as not this isolated, fancy art by one guy in his room, but rather, it’s this representation of community. And so… I am thinking about literature as conversation, and I think that kind of comes from the Ph.D.”
While completing her Ph.D. work, Dr. Ivanov served as a Fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning researching Artificial Intelligence, using her knowledge of computer programming and literature to help the academic community to use the new technology well. For example, Dr. Ivanov was able to use AI in her own coding to create ‘time capsule’ videos of Russian language students to commemorate their growth by the end of the year. She also spoke to the equalizing effect of the technology, by letting “people in Ukraine plug into something they usually wouldn’t be able to because it’s only in Russian.” However, Dr. Ivanov also used her expertise to support students in developing their own thinking skills, without the help of AI. She shared that students in her past would most often use AI when they felt that their own skills were lacking, so instead she chose to give extra support to them when they reached an uncertain stage in their work. The most rewarding part of her work with AI? “I do like being able to be a resource… It’s been fun having students already come and be like, ‘My dad said that AI is doing this. What do you think I should be worried about?’ And I like being able to have enough technical knowledge to be able to chat about it without it turning into coding classes.”
As she neared the end of her graduate degree, Dr. Ivanov cites her dissertation advisor’s advice as being really influential in her decision to teach. “As I was struggling with the dissertation, my advisor was like, ‘What are the things…what do you want to be doing instead?’ And I was like, ‘Anytime if a student emails me, I want to get back to them before, that’s the thing I can’t not put first.’ And she’s like, ‘That’s what you need to pay attention to, the things that you just can’t say no to, because you’re pulled to them.’” As the 10th grade British Literature teacher this year, she is most excited to teach Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice—both of which she has taught to Harvard freshmen—and especially to see how Montrose sophomores will tackle each text compared to her past students.
One of the most striking of Dr. Ivanov’s insights was her belief that every student deserves to be in and do well in her class. Inspired by her dissertation advisor’s confidence in her own abilities without any question, she knew “when students come into [her] classroom, [she needed] to be really explicit about the fact that there’s no reason that [they] shouldn’t be here.’”
Outside of work, Dr. Ivanov likes to do crosswords (her streak is almost 1,800 days!), listen to audiobooks, and take walks. Her favorite books are Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as well as the work of 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Also, she loves drinking coffee and has worked as a barista both during college and at Harvard.
My final question for Dr. Ivanov was: if you had a quote that you could put on a paperweight on your desk and see it every day, what would the paperweight quote be? Instead of one quick answer, she gave me three quotes which all revolved around the same theme. The first was a short poem by Emily Dickinson, which reads as follows: “If I can stop one heart from breaking,/ I shall not live in vain;/ If I can ease one life the aching,/ Or cool one pain,/ Or help one fainting robin/ Unto his nest again,/ I shall not live in vain.” The next was a line of Vladimir Nabokov about his mother: “To love with all one’s soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded.” The last quote was from an ancient Greek poet, Sappho: “Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,/ others call a fleet the most beautiful of/ sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-/ ever you love best.” The message Dr. Ivanov saw in these quotations was the “combination of doing things for love, for love of others, and that you don’t need to have any doubt. As long as it is for love and for stopping one heart from breaking, it looks like that’s worth it. I think it’s something that when I was younger, I would have really benefited from.” These are the lessons that Dr. Ivanov works so hard to share with her students, and we are so blessed to welcome her to Montrose!
