In many ways Kevin Moss is the very picture of a Middlebury scholar. As professor of Russian and chair of the Russian department, he is by no means limited to russkiy yazyk. (It isn’t only Pushkin, Tolstoy and Bulgakov who haunt his office.) A polyglot true to the Middlebury spirit, he proudly commands a colorful palette of languages, from the aforementioned Russian to French, Hungarian to Serbo-Croatian.
Moss attributes his knack for languages to a bilingual upbringing of sorts.
“I grew up in New Orleans, where there are lots of dialects,” he said. “At home we spoke a southern dialect of English, and at school, where people came from all over, we would speak ‘television English.’”
Growing up in New Orleans, which boasts a rich fusion of Créole and American traditions, Moss naturally gravitated to French, his first foreign language of study. But it was Russian that would ultimately prevail. Armed with a rebellious streak, as well as a fascination with the exotic, the Louisiana native embarked on his study of Slavic languages at Amherst College.
“I started Russian because it was the 70s, the Soviet Union was the ‘evil empire,’ our enemy, it was harder to get people to go and I wanted to be rebellious,” said Moss. “Russian also seemed more exotic to me.”
It was at Amherst that he “went crazy” with Slavic languages, including Russian, Old Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croatian and Polish. There he crafted his own interdisciplinary major — much in the vein of Middlebury’s Independent Scholar Program — combining his language studies with history and history of art.
Afterwards he went on to pursue his Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Cornell University, and began teaching at Middlebury in 1983 after graduation. Following a brief stint as a lecturer at the University of Virginia, he returned to Middlebury in 1985, where he has been teaching since.
For Moss, teaching is both a job and a source of pleasure.
“I love teaching, because I can do what I really like doing,” he said. “I enjoy the research side, I enjoy being able to continually read books and investigate things and having that as part of my job. Once I started teaching, I discovered that I really liked it.
“The first time I realized I loved teaching was when I was studying abroad in (the former) Yugoslavia, helping students alongside me with the Croatian language and enjoying it,” he continued. “It just felt right and interesting.”
But how exactly did Moss end up at Middlebury, a small town astronomically distant from the likes of New Orleans, Zagreb and Moscow?
“I had almost finished my Ph.D., when the job turned up,” he replied. “I went to a small liberal arts college, and knew I wanted to continue working at a small liberal arts college.”
His favorite part about teaching?
“The students,” he answered enthusiastically. “When you see people making progress from the beginning — when you first get them into your hands — to when they leave and come back from Russia, catch the Russian bug … They are immediately talking about, ‘how can I get back?’ They really do get excited about all kinds of Russian things. They come back knowing things I don’t know anything about, which is what should happen.”
As chair of a department that is shrinking in size, Moss cannot emphasize enough Russia’s important presence on the international scene and the value of knowing its language.
“The unfortunate thing about Russia is that people do not realize to what extent it is an extremely important country on the world stage,” he said. “It’s the largest country in the world, hugely wealthy right now … It has more weapons than anybody else,” he added on a facetious note.
The sweep of the Russian language is quite impressive, too. “It isn’t only in Russia, but countries in the former Eastern bloc where a lot of people speak Russian,” he continued. “There are 125 million people who speak Russian as a non-native language, more than those who speak German, Italian or Japanese.”
His favorite courses to teach?
“Second-year Russian; I love grammar,” he said. “It’s a toss up, just because my mind works that way, and it is always interesting to think about.”
Moss also teaches the occasional women and gender studies course, which allows him to work with a very different pool of students.
“First-year seminars around diversity of different kinds get a totally different group of students,” he said. “When you’re talking about race, sexuality and nationality and how all those things interact, I get some really interesting students, not just from the Russian pool.”
Aside from teaching and research, Moss has also advised the Middlebury Open Queer Alliance and served as an active member of Gay and Lesbian Employees at Middlebury (GLEAM), the gay and lesbian organization for employees. In 1990, Moss stood up on the faculty floor to introduce a change in the college’s non-discrimination clause, which culminated in the addition of “sexual orientation” in 1991; he later spearheaded the addition of “gender identity and expression,” which was adopted in 2003.
“In terms of these political things, my goal is to make Middlebury a more comfortable place for everybody,” said Moss. “The thing you realize working in this area, talking to students, is they all go hand in hand. If it’s good for African-American students, it’s going to be good for gay students. If it’s good for gay students, it’s going to be good for students with disabilities.”
Moss has noted a positive development in student body diversity over the years, but sees room for even more representation on campus.
“When I first came in 1983, it was amazingly more uniform,” he said. “Coming from grad school, it all looked very white, preppy … That’s all changed a lot for the better.
“Middlebury is getting better,” he continued. “It’s a little bit slow, but it is getting better. How can you continue … to try to make Midd more diverse? … You have to keep doing it, somebody’s got to do it.”
Staff Spotlight: Kevin Moss
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