Assistant Professor of Russian José Vergara has brought a number of renowned authors to campus in recent years.
Vergara is also a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, and when 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, author of Voices from Chernobyl and other works, recently visited his class on ecological displacement in Russophone literature, his students became contributors too.
The discussion that took place among Alexievich and the students can be found in this post on the LARB website. The student interviewers were Leila Bagenstos '22, Sophia Cunningham '25, Cassy Fantini '24, Isolde Gerosa '23, and Swarthmore students Jae Tak Kim, and Grace Sewell.
Last semester, students in one of Vergara's courses took part in a similar project, contributing to this piece in World Literature Today when poet Julia Nemirovskaya and translator Boris Dralyuk visited; an interview with Darya Tsymbalyuk in Public Books; and this article, featuring author Elizabeth Rush, on Terrain.org.