Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Verkholantsev is a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, linguistic culture, religion, and intellectual history. Her publications and research focus on the cultural space of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe. She is the author of The Slavic Letters of St. Jerome: The History of the Legend and its Legacy or, How the Translator of the Vulgate Became an Apostle of the Slavs (Cornell UP, Northern Illinois UP imprint, 2014) and Ruthenica Bohemica: Ruthenian Translations from Czech in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland (Lit-Verlag, 2008), which received the Best Book Award from the Early Slavic Studies Association (2015) and the Zora Kipel Book Prize from the North American Association for Belarusian Studies (2009), respectively. She is currently completing a book on the role of etymological commentary and storytelling in historical discourse, provisionally titled The Etymological Method and Historical Writing in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. She also founded and serves as editor of two book series, Medieval Textual Cultures of Central and Southeast Europe with MIP, Kalamazoo, and Medieval Library of Rus, Ruthenia, and Muscovy with NIUP-Cornell, both dedicated to making primary sources on the early history of these regions available in English translation for teaching and research.

At Penn, she founded and directed the interdisciplinary program in Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2017–2024) and served as Director of the Undergraduate Humanities Forum at the Wolf Humanities Center in 2022–2023 and 2024–2025. She is honored to serve as the Wolf Humanities Center's Topic Director for 2025–2026, leading the exploration of the theme Truth.