Benjamin Rifkin

I earned my bachelor's and first master's degrees at Yale University and my second master's and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. The former director of the School of Russian at Middlebury College, I study abroad at Leningrad State University and worked in Moscow for two years between college and graduate school to gain fluency in Russian. I am an active participant in professional organizations dedicated to the learning and teaching of world languages and the study of the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, including the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and the American Council of Teachers of Russian. I have won awards for teaching (college level), service (to the field and to the community), and scholarship. My research, published in journals such as Foreign Language Annals, Modern Language Journal, and Slavic and East European Journal, focuses on the learning and teaching of foreign languages, often informed by ACTFL's proficiency guidelines as a research framework. I'm proud to have authored or coauthored textbooks for the study of Russian, the most recent of which are START: An Introduction to the Sound and Writing of Russian (a web-based introduction to the Russian alphabet and sound system for beginners and heritage learners), Advanced Russian through History, and Panorama. And I love golden retrievers.