The Ohio State University is pleased to announce that the
17th Meeting of the Balkan and South Slavic
Linguistics, Literature, and Folklore Conference
will take place April 15-18, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Special events at the conference

The centerpiece of the conference will be the annual Kenneth E. Naylor Memorial Lecture in South Slavic Linguistics, an event organized since 1998 by the Naylor Professorship at OSU, which has brought a leading scholar to campus for a public lecture and meetings over a several-day stretch. The Naylor Lecturer for 2010 will be Eric Hamp, Professor Emeritus from the University of Chicago, and the 'dean' of Balkan linguistics for over a half-century. Professor Hamp's plenary lecture will be embedded into the conference as the main event of our Friday afternoon session.  The second Balkan and South Slavic conference, held in 1980, was a celebration of Professor Hamp in his 60th year, so making this event a celebration of him in his 90th year will be particularly meaningful.

The conference will also meet in coordination with the Midwest Slavic Conference, an annual event at OSU that brings together scholars, primarily from midwestern universities, who have a wide variety of areal interests in Eastern and Central Europe. Both conferences will be held at the Blackwell Hotel on campus, allowing participants of this conference to attend MSC events as desired.

Following the tradition of past BSS conferences, we plan to organize a conference dinner catered by a local restaurant on Saturday night.

About this conference series 

The Balkan and South Slavic series of conferences was initiated in 1978 by a small group of Balkan linguists at the University of Chicago. A conference has been held every two years since then: University of Chicago (1978, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996), Indiana University, Bloomington (1982, 1986, 1994), University of Toronto (1990), University of Arizona, Tucson (1998), University of Kansas (2000), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2002), The University of Mississippi (2004), University of California, Berkeley (2006), and Banff, Canada (2008).

Although most papers are in linguistics, there has been consistent representation from other fields of interdisciplinary humanities research, particularly in literary, film, folklore and cultural studies. The conference showcases research in Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene, Ukrainian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian), Romance (Dacoromanian, Aromanian, Meglenoromanian, Judezmo), Greek, Albanian, Romani, and Turkic (Turkish and Gagauz) languages, literature, and cultures.