In Memoriam: Professor Olga E. Kagan (December 25, 1946 – April 6, 2018)

Olga Kagan is a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, director of the Title VI National Heritage Language Resource Center and the Center for World languages, UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from the Pushkin Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia. Her main research interests are in the field of applied linguistics and include language loss and maintenance by heritage language learners. In the past several years, she has been working on developing curricula that would allow heritage learners to regain and improve their language competencies. She is the co-author of twelve textbooks, both for heritage speakers of Russian and learners of Russian as a foreign language. Kagan is the founding editor of the Heritage Language Journal. She is co-editor of Teaching and Learning of Slavic Languages and Cultures (Slavica Publishers, 2000) that received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy from AATSEEL and the volume Heritage language Education: A New Field Emerging (Routledge, 2008). She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education: From Innovation to Program Building (2017).

Since 2009 Professor Kagan has been conducting research on Russian heritage language learners in Israel, which is home to a very large Russian-speaking immigrant population. She is the co-author of Russkij bez granic (Russian Without Borders), editions I and II (2009 and 2011, Jaffa, Israel, Israeli Association for Immigrant Children).

In 2003 she received an award for Excellence in Teaching at the Postsecondary Level from American Association of Teachers of Russian and East European Languages. In 2015 she received an MLA Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession.