SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE UNITED KINGDOM Muireann Maguire, University of Exeter Introduction: The Decline of Slavic? In his lucid and wide-ranging 2013 review of Slavic studies in the UK, J. A. Dunn reflects that “there can be no subject area in the UK higher education system that has been subject to more reviews since the end of the Second World War than Slavonic and East European Studies” (Dunn 13). He offers three reasons for this abundance of surveys: first, the strategic significance of the field (especially during the Cold War); second, an unfortunate short- termism on the part of the Higher Education authorities who commissioned these reports but failed to act consistently on their recommendations; and third, Slavic studies’ chronic failure to thrive without substantial state invest- ment. Perhaps the most significant of the five state-commissioned reports listed by Dunn was the 1961 Hayter report, with its recommendation for the establishment of five centers of excellence: [I]n 1961, Sir William Hayter (former British ambassador to the USSR, 1953–57) produced a government report on Area Studies in the Oriental, African, Eastern European and Slavonic regions, which recommended the establishment or consolidation of five centres of excellence in Soviet and East European area studies at the universities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Oxford, Swansea and London (at SSEES). These centres were to be truly interdisciplinary. Rather than merely combining scholars from different fields, individual scholars were expected to partici- pate in a spectrum of disciplines. Anglo-Soviet cultural agreements took aspiring scholars for year-long study trips beyond the iron curtain, facilitating “deep immersion” in the culture, poli- tics, economics and languages of the countries in the region (Pallot, March 2018 1). Today, however, one of those five centers of excellence has closed (Swansea no longer offers Russian), while the others are negotiating issues such as falling student recruitment, depleted academic posts, and a relative lack of state investment in Modern Languages departments over the last four decades. While recent threats by individual university management to shrink or close entire ML departments at universities such as Manchester, Hull, Keele, and Nottingham have affected teaching staff across the Humanities at those insti- tutions, the gradual and ongoing attrition of Slavic studies teaching in British universities has made this subject very much the canary in the Modern Lan- guages coal mine. Russian and other Slavic languages (where they are offered) SEEJ, Vol. 63, No. 3 (2019): p. 349–p. 360 349