Maria currently works as a researcher in the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. Her academic CV is available for download here.

As a linguist, Maria has been mainly studying prosody — specifically the melody of tone and intonation — in multilingual societies in West Africa. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she is interested in how multilingual repertoires and diverse social environments shape the process of songwriting. Inspired by her experience performing classical Russian art songs, Maria conducted an original quantitative study of vowel reduction in Russian academic singing.

Maria enjoys teaching and sharing her linguistic knowledge with wider audiences offline and online, e.g. here and here. She has composed linguistic problems for high schoolers’ contests, including for International Linguistics Olympiad. Her native language is Russian, and she speaks English and French fluently, and has basic knowledge of German, Finnish, Serbian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Maria has been working on Kpelle, a West African language, since 2008. In 2014, she composed and recorded the song ‘Kwii nɛɛnu’ (‘White woman’) in Kpelle together with local musicians Joel La Joie Gbanamou and Fassou Bienvenu Loua in Nzérékoré, Guinea, where she conducted linguistic fieldwork. In 2020, she published and promoted a Kpelle-French dictionary.