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Maria Konstantinovna Golovanivskaya (born 20 February 1963, Moscow) is a Russian scholar, writer, translator, Doctor of Philology, professor at the Department of Regional Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies at Moscow State University.

She was born into the family of the scientist-physicist Konstantin Savvich Golovanivsky and the philologist and editor Emma Nikolaevna Golovanivskaya (both are graduates of Moscow State University). On her father’s side, Maria Golovanivskaya’s grandfather was the famous writer and translator in Ukraine, Savva Evseevich Golovanivsky, whose house in Koncha-Zaspa, near Kyiv, was where she spent her childhood years.

In 1985, after graduating with a red diploma from the philology faculty of Moscow State University, she could not remain in graduate school at the Department of Romano-Germanic Philology, where she defended her thesis, because of her “unreliability”—which manifested in her friendship with the daughter of an disgraced academic, Vladimir Nikolaevich Toporov. However, she was noticed by Professor Vladimir Andreevich Zvegintsev and became a candidate for research at the OSiPP L Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics he established. At the same time, Maria worked for two years as a senior editor in the exhibition department of the Fundamental Library named after Shuvalov at Moscow State University, where she was sent by assignment.

In 1989, she defended her candidate dissertation under the supervision of the head of the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics, Alexander Evgenyevich Kibrik. The dissertation topic was “Component Analysis of a Communication Situation.” After defending her dissertation, she began working at the Department of the French Language (now—French Linguistics), first as a lab assistant, and later as a senior lecturer.

In 1996, she defended her doctoral dissertation at the Department of Romano-Germanic Philology on the topic “French Mentality from the Perspective of a Native Russian Speaker” (the basis of the dissertation was the monograph of the same title published a year earlier).

In 1998, she received the I. I. Shuvalov research prize, 2nd degree.

Laureate of the Moscow State University named after I. I. Shuvalov Prize (1998) for the monograph “French Mentality from the Perspective of a Native Russian Speaker”Contents:

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