Melissa Azari (PhD, Slavic Languages and Literature, UW-Madison) is the Interim Russian Flagship Program Manager. While a graduate student in the UW-Madison Slavic doctoral program, she taught first-year Russian in both academic-year and summer intensive settings and both in-person and online, as well as intensive second-year Russian in the summer. Azari also served as Resident Director of UW-Madison’s Pushkin Summer Institute Abroad in Daugavpils, Latvia in 2016. Her dissertation studied the role of sound and music in the pre-emigration poetry of Natalya Gorbanevskaya.