Slavic Studies

History of Russian literature from 20th c. to present.

The course introduces students to three or more works of pre-20th-century literature and culture to be read in Russian, while improving reading and comprehension skills. It includes a combination of canonical and non-canonical texts by women and men, and explores the cultural and institutional contexts in which texts were produced, published, read, or viewed. Students share impressions through class and online discussions, and informal presentations. Students must have passed 1st year Russian, or equivalent for visiting students.

This course explores this question in the context of the languages and peoples of the Danube region, focusing on German, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and Croatian, and Yiddish. These languages belong to two genealogically different groups (Indo-European and Uralic) and one (Yiddish) bears traces of a third group (Semitic); within Indo-European, three different sub-groups are represented (Germanic, Romance, Slavonic). The course uses data from these languages (texts in the original, idioms, proverbs, jokes, etc.) to explore language and cultural contact from both a purely linguistic perspective (language relatedness v. typological features of languages, script v. sounds, areal connections, borrowing of words, idioms, and figures of speech) and a sociolinguistic point of view (intercultural exchange, multilingualism, standardization, purism, and the relation between language and identity). It explores how Danubian languages both converge and differ, how Danubian culture is both intercultural friction and intercultural flow.

The course demonstrates the reasons for the collapse of the communist system in the Soviet Union and its consequences, with a specific focus on Russia and the Baltic states; the geopolitical consequences of the demise of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent reordering of global economic and geopolitical space; the nature of socio-economic changes in the region in the 1990s, and how different social groups responded to them; cultural change, with a focus on identity politics, gender and ethnicity; the political management of ethno-culturally diverse territories, and the renegotiation of national and ethnic identities; and the importance of the region for Europe as a whole, including a focus on Russia and the Baltic states' relations with the new enlarged Europe.

This course focuses on the sociology of the State and its relations with society in contemporary Russia. Historical and political sociologists have focused on the state in the form it has taken in the West since the Middle Ages. These essential and fundamental analyses form the starting point for study of the sociological reality of the state in post-Soviet Russia. Using the tools of the historical sociology of politics and comparative politics, the course studies the political transition following the collapse of the USSR, the reform of public action, the trajectories of elites and state agents, and the reform of the state and its authoritarian modernization. Ultimately, the course considers what makes the recent transformations of the Russian state so singular on the one hand and so banal on the other, in the context of the global neoliberal modernization of the state and public action.

This course provides an introduction to European fairytales within a historical, geographical, and cultural context including European folk genres such as myth or legends and a close focus on Czech fairytales. The course describes and surveys the changes in the approach to European fairytales within the development of scholarship about them. It presents sociohistorical, psychological, or anthropological interpretations, as well as biologically based and gender or feminist methods of their interpretation. The course topics include ethical or moral principles in fairytales, gender and social roles, and historical and political influences on fairytale adaptation.

This course examines various elements of Czech non-mainstream culture, such as graffiti and street-art, political art collectives, the underground, new social movements, psychedelia, D.I.Y. music scenes, LGBTA, and social theatre. The instructor, an anthropologist with hands-on experience in local subcultures, assists in the application of critical theory to discuss the practices of “alternative” urban lives in postindustrial society and certain trends of artistic production. The course focuses on the political interpretation of youth subversion and disclosures of power mechanisms. Visuals and field trips to graffiti and other subcultural sites are a part of this course.

This course introduces the area of Czech fairytales as a genre within its broader historical, geographical, and cultural context. Furthermore, it describes and surveys the changes in the approach to fairytales within the development of scholarship about them. The course presents historical, psychoanalytical, and philosophical interpretations, as well as anthropological and religious types of theories, and biological and gender or feminist methods of their interpretation. The course respects the connection of the fairytale to other folklore narrative forms like legends, fables, and myths; however, it defines the fairytale as a specific genre. It includes topics such as ethical and moral principles in fairytales, gender and social roles, and historical and political influences on fairytale adaptations.