Kristina Kallas was elected new director of UT Narva College

The senate of the University of Tartu at its meeting on 25 November 2016 elected Kristina Kallas the new director of UT Narva College. Since 1 September 2015, Kristina Kallas was the acting director of the college. 

UT Narva College has the important tasks to advance the integration of two nationalities and act as a partner not only to Estonian and European universities, but also to Russian study and research institutions. Kristina Kallas sees Narva College not only as an education facility, but also an initiator of ideas and the developer of cooperation both in Ida-Viru county and across the eastern border. One of the major goals Kallas has set to herself and to Narva College concerns internationalisation. “We have to consider bringing more international students and teaching staff to Narva,” said Kallas. The new director also wants to establish a research and development competence centre at the college, “I see Narva College as a strong regional centre of competence, which could also lead the future for Russian-language education,” said Kallas.

In the academic sphere, Kallas’s goal is to develop the college’s curricula and offer the best teacher training in Estonia for work in a multilingual school. One of the goals she set is the consistent implementation of activities that promote graduation within the standard period of study. “As the main difficulty lies in passing the Estonian language proficiency exam, we need to focus on making language studies more efficient,” thinks Kallas.

Since the year 2007, Kallas has been a member of the board of the Institute of Baltic Studies. She has worked as the contact person for the Archimedes Foundation’s European Union Research Cooperation Programme, been a senior consultant for public sector communication at the public relations agency Hill & Knowlton and special research fellow at the UT Institute of Government and Politics. From 2011 to 2015 she was chair of the board of the Estonian Refugee Council.

Kristina Kallas studied history at the University of Tartu. In 2002 she defended her master’s thesis “The formation of interethnic relations in Estonian SSR” in Hungary at the Central European University. On 26 September this year Kristina Kallas defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Tartu. Her thesis discussed the changes in the ethnopolitical paradigm in multinational countries, with the focus on Estonia, Germany and Macedonia.

Additional information:
Kristina Kallas
director of UT Narva College
5118311
kristina.kallas@ut.ee