Dissertation: “Traditional and Individualistic Aspects of the Petitions of the Archpriest Avvakum”
From 1984-1989 while at Berkeley Mary Peabody Richards served as research assistant to Professor Emeritus Czeslaw Milosz organizing an archive of his correspondence, later part of his archive at Yale. She spent 1989-1990 as an Exchange Scholar at Harvard where she published “The rise and fall of protocol in the petitions of the Archpriest Avvakum,” Harvard Studies in Slavic Linguistics, ed. by Olga T. Yokoyama, vol. 1 (1990), 263-273 and completed her dissertation.
Her professional work has included research, writing, and teaching: as a dictionary coder for an English to Japanese translation system then under development by Professor Susumu Kuno; a technical writer (Houghton Mifflin, Co.); a job counselor to Bosnian and Russian refugees (Jewish Family Service of the North Shore), and a school administrator (North Bennet Street School). After the birth of her daughters, she earned licensure in the teaching of Latin and Classical Humanities. She has been teaching Latin in the Boston area since. In 2018 she participated in the STARTALK Program for Teachers of Russian at Middlebury College and developed a two-semester sequence in Russian language and history for high school students using Между нами, the online textbook written by former Berkeley colleague Bill Comer (and co-authored by Lynne DeBenedette, Alla Smyslova, and Jonathan Perkins).