Krystyna Golovakova
Office: K209 Klarman Hall
kg463@cornell.edu
kg463@cornell.edu
Current classes and office hours: see Ukrainian at Cornell
and Rooms and Times at this website.
Krystyna Golovakova is a Lecturer of Ukrainian and Russian in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Originally from Zhytomyr, Ukraine, she has more than twenty years of teaching experience in Ukraine, the Philippines, and the United States.
She received her master’s degree in Russian Language, Literature, and Pedagogy in Zhytomyr in 1997. She began her career teaching at a secondary school and later at Zhytomyr Pharmaceutical College. She also holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from the National Academy for Public Administration under the President of Ukraine in Kyiv (2008).
In 2009, she moved with her family to Manila, Philippines, where she lived for eleven years. There, she taught Russian and Ukrainian to students of different ages and language levels, including at International School Manila and Enderun College. Her years abroad deepened her interest in the ways language and culture are connected to migration.
She returned to Ukraine in 2020 and moved to Ithaca with her two younger children in March 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Golovakova has taught at Cornell since November 2022. She teaches Ukrainian and Russian language courses as well as an interdisciplinary course on Ukrainian culture, literature, history, and contemporary society.
Krystyna's teaching interests include Ukrainian and Russian language, Ukrainian literature, and the ways history, language and symbols shape our understanding of a country and its people. She integrates Ukrainian folk songs into her Elementary Ukrainian courses as a tool for teaching pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural context.
She aims to help students see language as more than grammar and vocabulary. For her, learning a language is also a way of entering another culture—its history, literature, humor, traditions, and ways of seeing the world.