Oscar E. Swan, whose Ph.D. is from UC Berkeley, is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. Over the course of a forty-year-long career in Pittsburgh, Professor Swan has published reference grammars of Russian, Old Church Slavic, and Slovak. His Grammar of Contemporary Polish won the 2004 award by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Among various other awards have been the Amicus Poloniae award by Poland Magazine (1986), the Polonicum Award for outstanding international contributions to the promulgation of Polish language, literature, and culture by Warsaw University (2007), and the Thesaurus Poloniae Award from the Center of International Culture in Kraków (2010). A recent publication is the Kaleidoscope of Poland: A Cultural Encyclopedia (2015, University of Pittsburgh Press). His current project is a translation of the eighteenth-century author Jędrzej Kitowicz’s Description of Polish Customs under the Reign of August III.