Dr. Stefan Pugh
Professor of Modern Languages
- Ph.D. Slavic Languages (1984), University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
- M.A. Slavic Languages (1979), Yale University
- B.A. Russian (1978), Duke University
Office: 331 Millett
Phone Number: (937) 775-2641
E-mail: stefan.pugh@wright.edu
Dr. Pugh began his academic career at Duke University, where he taught for fourteen years in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. The next fourteen were spent as Reader in Russian at the University of St. Andrews, in the home of golf – St. Andrews, Scotland (he does not play golf). From a very early age he was exposed to languages other than English, as his father was a career diplomat in the US Foreign Service; he has been learning to speak (and love) the tongues of others ever since. He came to Wright State University in 2008 as Professor of Modern Languages. Dr. Pugh’s research interests are wide and varied, but can perhaps be described in global terms as historical linguistics (Slavic), contact linguistics (Slavic and non-Slavic), and sociolinguistics. The most important languages with which he has worked or currently works in his publications are the East Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Rusyn), Polish, and Finnic (Finnish, Karelian). In the field of East Slavic, he is working on a multi-volume historical grammar – encompassing phonology and morphology – of the branch as a whole. In 2009, he completed a descriptive grammar of Rusyn, a newly codified language (closely related to Ukrainian) that is spoken primarily in Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine, with linguistic islands also existing in Rumania, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia.
Dr. PUgh has recently been named the Brage Golding Dinstinguished Professor of Research as well as being the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Research grant recipient for 2013.
Outside of the university world, Dr. Pugh’s interests include music (he has been a classical guitarist), painting, cooking, good TV and movies (ok, even bad ones), and archaeology.
Major publications
The Rusyn Language. A Grammar of the Literary Standard of Slovakia, with Reference to Lemko and Subcarpathian Rusyn. Languages of the World/Materials, Vol. 476. (2009).
A New Historical Grammar of the East Slavic Languages, Vol. 1: Introduction and Phonology. LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 27. Munich: Lincom, 2007.
Ukrainian: a Comprehensive Grammar. With J.I. Press. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Systems in Contact, System in Motion: the Assimilation of Russian Verbs in the Baltic Finnic Languages of Russia. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1999.
Testament to Ruthenian: A Linguistic Analysis of the Smotryc’kyj Variant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996.