Associate Professor Emerita of Russian
As a teacher of Russian and as associate dean of the College, Helen Scott has dedicated countless hours to fostering internationalism at Grinnell.
She joined the Russian Department in 1981 and was tenured in 1988. In addition to teaching Russian at Grinnell and for many summers at the Beloit Center for Language Study, she helped develop general linguistics at the College by teaching the introductory course and working to create a linguistics concentration. She was active in adding Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic to the curriculum and in developing area studies programs.
She also took Grinnell and Grinnellians into the wider world. She arranged and led travel for Grinnell alumni and students, and for Stanford University, the University of New Hampshire, and the Smithsonian Institution. She co-founded and directed the Associated Colleges of the Midwest’s semester abroad in Krasnodar, Russia. She also worked closely with Donna Vinter, resident site director of Grinnell-in-London, to find new and more suitable space for the London program.
From 1992 to 2004 she served as associate dean of the College and was indefatigable in promoting it, especially to several prominent national foundations whose grants continue to add to the College’s vitality. She was the first chair of what eventually became the Instructional Support Committee, which supports innovations in pedagogy across the curriculum. She served on the committee that oversaw renovations to ARH. She was an active participant in a national conversation about how best to create supportive communities of teachers and scholars, presenting frequently at national conferences and meetings about a range of
innovations at Grinnell.
