Linda Lucia Lubrano

It is with deep sadness -- and much gratitude for 45 years of pathbreaking research, teaching and service at American University’s School of International Service -- that we write to share the news of Professor Emerita Linda Lucia Lubrano’s passing on August 27, 2024. Dr. Lubrano began her career at American University in the momentous year of 1968, having received her doctorate from Indiana University and her baccalaureate degree, cum laude, from Hunter College of CUNY.

Professor Lubrano was one of the first women faculty at the School of International Service. As one senior faculty notes, “she succeeded in the [then] overwhelmingly male environment in SIS.” Another added that Prof. Lubrano worked “to ensure that women faculty members were being treated equally to the men in terms of salary and promotions.” Yet another senior faculty member recalls, “through most of my early years at SIS, Linda was the only female full professor. She went out of her way to create a sense of community for female professors – from individual peptalks, to organizing gatherings for female professors, to even creating a Full “Professor Sisterhood” pendant in the days when one could count the number of female full professors on one hand. While too many female professors left given the difficult environment, those who persevered at SIS have Prof. Linda Lubrano to thank”.

Early in her career, she was also one of the few women faculty in the field of Russian Studies. The program for the 1977 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Annual Conference held in Washington, D.C. indicates there were 11 distinguished scholars on the Local Arrangements Committee, only one of whom happened to be a woman. That was Prof. Linda Lubrano, who also presented a paper at that meeting.

Recognized during her career with numerous, awards, honors, fellowships, and external funding, Professor Lubrano was the recipient of awards related to outstanding teaching including the SIS William Cromwell Award for Outstanding Teaching and the American University Award for Outstanding Teaching by a full-time faculty member; two awards for outstanding research and professional contributions from the American University College of Public & International Affairs and SIS; and five awards for outstanding contributions to academic development.

Professor Lubrano also received prestigious residential fellowships from Stanford’s Hoover Institution and from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in acknowledgement of her innovative research. Her work was clearly pathbreaking.

Ahead of her time, she brought her cross-disciplinary lens to the School of International Service, integrating ideas from the humanities and natural sciences with those from political science, international politics, and comparative and regional studies. She designed and taught a wide range of courses including an honors course on engineering the human condition, undergraduate courses on political theory, and graduate courses on theories of comparative and international studies. Bringing her research into her teaching, she documented the social roots of political change before Gorbachev came to power through her rigorous scholarship on informal networks in the Russian scientific community.

Professor Lubrano was a champion of cross-national collaboration and academic exchange, both with Russian scholars and (later in her career) Italian scholars. She wrote eloquently of how “the pioneering work of this generation of [Russian] scholars who were not afraid to think independently was critical to document the history of social change in science and other sectors of Soviet life. Without their efforts, there would be an irreparable gap in our knowledge of Russia’s past.” In studying such work, Professor Lubrano formed her own informal network of scholars with the Russian scholar Samuil Kugel, exchanging documents needed for their respective research projects in a pre-Internet era and with an unreliable Russian postal system at that time. She was also adamant that our students on study abroad programs in Russia gain expertise from Russian scholars rather than only US scholars teaching abroad. Focusing on such cross-national collaborations, Lubrano highlighted them in an article entitled “The Endurance of Professional Ties.” Professor Linda Lucia Lubrano’s ties with our SIS community of faculty, staff, students, and alumni as well as with Russian and European scholars will be long remembered.

Professor Lubrano was also a determined and effective institution builder, often inspired by her commitment to collaboration and mentoring. She designed and implemented almost singlehandedly an innovative exchange between SIS and the University of Trento in Italy. The exchange involved not only SIS and Trento Faculty but included Trento Fellows studying at SIS and SIS students at Trento. Assisted by her dedicated husband Randy Slate, she brought this SIS/Trento partnership to life and nurtured it.

Turning to our own campus, she provided creative and effective leadership from 1994-1999 for the then SIS Department/Division of Comparative and Regional Studies. Here she was not only a highly effective academic administrator but also an extraordinary mentor and role model for students and faculty alike.

Additionally, when she and others decided that American University should have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, she took a lead role in working with colleagues across AU to ensure the fledgling “Zeta” chapter would pass the extensive accreditation process and could elect qualified students with liberal arts majors no matter in which college or school they resided.

Overall, as attested to by the contributions detailed above, SIS faculty recall her inspired mentoring of students as well as junior faculty, her meals with women faculty, and her unfailing dedication to SIS and AU. Celebrating each faculty colleague’s milestones, as another senior faculty member recounts, Prof. Lubrano made it a point “to see and celebrate each and every one of us”. In turn, we now in the SIS community celebrate Prof. Lubrano’s significant contributions and her 45-year legacy at SIS/AU. We honor her; we remember her; we miss her. And we send our deep condolences to her beloved husband Randy Slate.