Iepuri Valentina
Main achievement
Associate Professor of Russian and Director of the Russian Language Program, University of Mississippi
About
Dr. Valentina Iepuri is a remarkable university professor of modern languages, specializing in Russian, originally from the Republic of Moldova, who has been working for over two decades as an Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi, United States of America. A graduate of Moldova State University, where she obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees in TEFL/Translation in 1980, and of Minsk State Linguistic University, where she earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1989, she leads the Russian language program within the Department of Modern Languages. Among her notable achievements are numerous awards, such as the Excellence in Teaching Russian Award granted by the Central Association of Russian Teachers of America in 2008, Fulbright and Swedish Institute scholarships, as well as distinctions from the Mississippi Foreign Language Association. Her academic career is marked by intense teaching activity, coordinating Russian courses from elementary to advanced levels, including Political Russian and Contemporary Russian, and an active presence in professional organizations such as CARTA, MFLA – where she served as vice-president from 2008-2010 –, ACTR, and Dobro Slovo National Slavic Honor Society. She coordinated programs like STARTALK at East Central University in Oklahoma and was involved in university committees, including the Faculty Senate and the Curriculum and Policy Committee. Her publications, appearing in prestigious journals such as Southern Journal of Linguistics, Balkanistica, or Russian Language Journal, explore themes such as languages in contact, linguistic pedagogy, sociolinguistics, and the evolution of the Russian language in the post-Soviet period, with a focus on the Republic of Moldova. Although information about Valentina Iepuri's personal life remains private, her contribution to promoting linguistic education and understanding Moldovan linguistic dynamics places her among the remarkable women in the Moldovan diaspora. Through her work in the USA, she not only trains generations of American students in the Russian language and culture but also keeps alive the connections with her Moldovan roots, illustrating the academic excellence of specialists from the Republic of Moldova in an international context.
