Todd Armstrong did his undergraduate work at the Universities of Montana and Oregon, and then studied in an ACTR program at the Pushkin Institute. After Moscow, he completed a year of study in Poland at the Universities of Warsaw and Wroclaw, and then entered the graduate program in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University, where he earned the Ph.D. in Russian literature, with a secondary specialization in Polish literature in 1993. His current research interests focus on Polish literary and cultural responses to the Holocaust. In 2001 he published an edited volume of essays, Perspectives in Modern Central and East European Literature: Quests for Identity. His most recent publication is "The Image of the Prisoner of the Caucasus in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: from Pushkin to Makanin" (with Anatoly Vishevsky), Przeglad Rusycystyczny 3/107 (2004): 33-50. He presented "Andrzej Szczypiorski's Poczatek: Reconstructing Warsaw and the Aesthetics of Reckoning" at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, December 27-30, 2003.

Todd has been at Grinnell since 1993, and has taught a wide range of courses, including all four levels of our Russian language sequence, linguistics, Dostoevsky, and Central and Eastern European Literature and four tutorials. He is active on the Russian and Central and Eastern European Studies Committee, and was Acting Director of the Rosenfield Program in Spring 2001. He taught Russian at the Middlebury College Summer Russian School in 1998 and 1999, and was the Resident Director of the ACM/GLCA Central European Studies Program at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic in Fall 1999. He has returned several times to the Czech Republic and Poland in the past years, as the facilitator for the ACM Global Partner's Project Faculty Development Seminar, "The Human and Physical Enironment in Central and Eastern Europe" in 2001, and in 2003 and 2005 on personal research and in conjunction with a Mentored Advanced Project with C. Cain Elliott '06, and most recently in 2007 as a leader of a faculty development seminar on Holocaust and genocide studies that traveled from Berlin to Warsaw and then Krakow, Poland.

Todd served as Director of the Center for International Studies 2001-2007.

In the picture: Todd visited Grinnellians Meghan Redd '06, John Bowers '06, Elizabeth Kruger '06 and Leigh Ahlgren '06 at the Moscow International University in Spring 2005.