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Irina Walsh received her PhD in Russian and Second Language Acquisition from É«É«Ñо¿Ëù. She joined É«É«Ñо¿Ëù's Russian Department as lecturer and co-director of the Russian Language Flagship Program in 2014. Prior to working at É«É«Ñо¿Ëù, she taught Russian language at É«É«Ñо¿Ëù's summer Russian Language Institute and at Temple University, and taught Russian language, film, and culture at the College of New Jersey. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2023 and became Russian Language Program Coordinator in 2025. 

At É«É«Ñо¿Ëù, Irina teaches all levels of Russian language (Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Russian sequences) and content courses, including Russian through Art (RUSS240), Seminar in Russian Studies: Bulgakov (RUSS380, topics), The Soviet Thaw and its Culture (RUSS216), Perestroika (RUSS226), Language Policy and the Russophone World (RUSS222), and Russian through Current Events (RUSS319). She also occasionally teaches courses in translation, such as Russian Culture and Civilization (RUSS217) and Russian Narratives of Displacement and Acculturation (RUSS228). 

Irina has co-led two 360° clusters at É«É«Ñо¿Ëù: Eurasia in Flux (spring 2017, with Dr. Tim Harte (Russian) and Dr. Yonglin Jiang (East Asian Languages and Cultures)) and Eurasia in the Anthropocene (spring 2019, with Dr. Tim Harte (Russian) and Dr. Sydne Record (Biology)). 

Irina's academic interests center on foreign language pedagogy, technology integration in language teaching, place-based, history-based, and film-based pedagogy, and Slavic morphology and etymology. She is co-author of two textbooks: Russian through Film (Routledge, 2023) and Russian through Oral Histories (Routledge, forthcoming), both with Anna Kudyma (UCLA) and Irina Six (University of Kansas). 

Her current research explores Berlin as a multilingual and multicultural urban space, with particular focus on the city's linguistic and cultural dynamics during the occupation period (1945-1989) and in contemporary Berlin.