Jakobsen Fills New Chair in Slavic Studies

Appointment of Professor Roman Jakobsen as first Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and expansion of the Slavic Department's research and printing activities were announced last night by Provost Buck.

This announcement is part of a plan to expand the Slavic Department so that studies in this field will be available to students in General Education courses, and those who may be called upon to use such knowledge in government and diplomacy.

About the appointment of Professor Jacobsen, Provost Buck said, "It enables the University to contribute substantially to an understanding of Slavic cultures and languages on both academic and practical level."

A Prolific Author

Professor Jacobsen, a native of Russia, was Thomas G. Masaryk Professor of Czechoslovak Studies at Columbia University until last spring. He is an authority on Slavic linguistics, comparative literature, and folklore, and is the author of more than 200 books and articles.

The new chair is named in honor of Samuel Hazzard Cross '12, chairman of the Slavic Department at Harvard for many years, who died in 1925. The money for the chair was contributed in two gifts of $150,000 each by Mr. Curt Reisinger of New York City, and in other contributions from Cross's friends.

Courses in the Slavic area train students in the fields of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Serbrcroatian, Bulgarian, and Old Church Slavonic.

Among the members of the Department's teaching staff are Professor Michael Karpovich, Associate Professor Renato Poggioli, Assistant Professor Horace G. Lunt, Dr. Dmitry Cizevsky, and Dr. Svatava Pirkova-Jakobsen.