Authors
Mariya Melentyeva
A native speaker of Russian, Mariya has been a scholar of history and a teacher of English language. Born in Ukraine, she has moved to Hungary and then to Canada, pursuing her passion for historical research and learning languages. Starting her education at an aviation institute, Mariya eventually earned her doctorate in Russian history from the University of Alberta, Canada. She has worked as a school teacher, an administrator at a software company, a university instructor, a translator, and an independent researcher. Mariya loves reading, travelling, and hiking in the Rocky Mountains in Canada, which are very close to her home in Edmonton. She plays the guitar and sings Russian songs. She speaks English, Russian, and Ukrainian and she studies French. She raises a trilingual daughter, who is now Mariya’s mentor in French.
Victor Taki
Victor is a native speaker of Russian and a historian. Born in Moldova, he earned his doctorate in Hungary and has been living in Canada since 2008. He has taught at Carleton, U of Alberta, Dalhousie, the King’s University and Concordia University of Edmonton. Victor is the author of several books about Imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements that were published both in Russian and in English. Apart from English, Victor also speaks French and Romanian. He loves reading, listening to baroque music, and weightlifting. He also plays chess, follows French politics, and raises two bilingual children. Since the beginning of this podcast Victor has also been assembling a model of a seventeenth-century sailing ship.
