STEP Team 

Olesya Kisselev

Project Lead, USA

Olesya Kisselev is Associate Professor of Russian and Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina and the US project lead for Hybrid STEP. An applied linguist, she specializes in second and heritage language acquisition, language pedagogy, and corpus linguistics, with particular expertise in the teaching and assessment of Russian. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University and co-directs the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER), a federally funded national Language Resource Center. Her publications include Advances in Research and Pedagogy of Russian as a Heritage Language (Routledge, 2024) and the award-winning heritage textbook Родная Речь. As US project lead, she directs the virtual exchange between USC and UiT, develops and analyzes measures of students’ language gains, and leads the Tromsø immersion and the concluding workshop at USC.