2026-2027 Course Offerings
Autumn
REES 20001/30001: War and Peace
Tolstoy's novel is at once a national epic, a treatise on history, a spiritual meditation, and a masterpiece of realism. This course presents a close reading of one of the world's great novels, and of the criticism that has been devoted to it, including landmark works by Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Isaiah Berlin, and George Steiner. For this iteration of the course, we will also include material on the writing of the novel and consider its place in the field of genetic criticism, so that we could perhaps rename the course, Reading and Writing War and Peace. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC).
This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26 or later.
(CMLT 22301 / CMLT 32301 / ENGL 289120 / ENGL 32302 / FNDL 27103 / HIST 23704)
REES 20004: Lolita
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita.” Nabokov’s “great American novel" is often misread. Vanity Fair, for example, made the grand pronouncement that it was the 'most convincing love story' of the 20th century. And in the 21st century, the name Lolita is invoked, with a calculated slyness, as shorthand for a cunning debauchery, the sexual tutelage of prepubescents and adolescents, the girl as seducer. In this text-centered and discussion-based course, we look into the psychosexual profile of the ostensible first person narrator in order to overrule his graphomania and to better contemplate the work of the novel as art beyond his grasp, concerning ourselves with the novel’s language in all its complexities: as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.
(ENGL 28916 / FNDL 25300 / GNSE 24900 / SIGN 26027)
REES 26072/36072: The Roots of War: Historical and Cultural Causes of Russian Aggression in Ukraine
Since the beginning of Russia's war on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and his entourage have created false historical constructions that serve as the basis for their aggressive policy. The main question of this course is: to what extent is Putin's retro-policy historically grounded, traditional and natural? An analysis of the rhetoric and historiosophy of the modern Russian elite will reveal the sources they been drawn upon. Is there a connection between Muscovite Russia, the Russian Empire and modern Russian neo-imperialism? What role does the legacy of the USSR play in the political system, state structure and foreign policy of the modern Russian Federation? Where do historical trends, national interests and the new imperial ideology coincide and contradict each other? We will also discuss the modern history of opposition to Putin's authoritarianism and trace the history and cultural significance of democratic institutions in Russia. Finally, we will use the history of Ukrainian statehood and the processes of formation of the Ukrainian nation to shed alternative perspective on recent Russian views of Ukraine.
(HIST 23808)
REES 29013/39013: The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise--CANCELLED
How and why do national identities provoke the deep emotional attachments that they do? In this course we try to understand these emotional attachments by examining the narrative of loss and redemption through which most nations in the Balkans narrate their Ottoman past. We begin by grounding our inquiry in some competing theories and histories of national identities. We then attempt to imagine the parameters that govern national identities for the populations that would eventually emerge from the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire as the interpellated members of modern nation states. Finally, we turn to the mythic temporality of the Romantic national narrative where the national past is retold through the formula of original wholeness, foreign invasion, Passion, and Salvation. With the help of Žižek’s theory of the subject as constituted by trauma, we think about the national fixation on the trauma of loss, and the role of trauma in the formation of national consciousness. Specific theme inquiries involve the figure of the Janissary as self and other, brotherhood and fratricide, and the writing of the national trauma on the individual physical body. Special attention is given to the general aesthetic of violence, victimhood, the casting of the victimized national self as the object of the “other’s perverse desire.” The main primary texts include Petar Njegoš’ Mountain Wreath (Serbia and Montenegro), Ismail Kadare’s The Castle (Albania), Anton Donchev’s Time of Parting (Bulgaria).
(CMLT 23401 / CMLT 33401 / HIST 24005 / HIST 34005 / NEHC 20573 / NEHC 30573)
REES 35605/25605: Media and Revolution: CEERES Signature Course
Through guest lectures and case studies, this course will explore the relationship between contemporary media practices in Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia and the histories of communication and information technology in the USSR. One of the primary goals of the course will be to survey the current scholarship on tactics of disinformation and censorship coming out of the region and assess ways of understanding its origins and methods. The course is aimed at giving emerging scholars in different disciplines the means to engage critically with contemporary media practices. Enrollment by instructor consent only. Priority to graduate students with a focus on the CEERES region and reading competency in one of the languages of the region, but REES majors or minors in the Slavic department are also invited to contact the instructor for consent.
This course is supported by the Center for Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia Studies and a development grant from the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.
(MAPH 35605 / MAPS 25605 / MAPS 35605)
Winter
REES 23154/33154: The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities
In this course we start by building a communal classroom, deciding together what materials and experiences to use, how to organize class meetings, whether or not to use hierarchies or leadership, and what goals we share. A menu of readings, experiences, and assignments is offered, to which members can suggest alternatives. In theory and practice, we look at what works, but also ask the hard questions that communal societies have continually faced, considering how shared space transforms shared beliefs and aspirations and why intentional communities have proven so hard to sustain.
(GNSE 29975)
REES 26085/36085: Tarkovsky: Cinema as Philosophy
The Soviet cinema auteur Andrei Tarkovsky, director of two of the greatest philosophical sci fi films of all time, Solaris and Stalker, had a profound influence on modern art cinema and film theory. His films track their heroes’ journeys through mysterious worlds in pursuit of philosophical aims: truth, self-knowledge, what it means to be human, and the meaning of evil, beauty, home, and love. Our course will approach the films as puzzles to be unraveled through the tools of close analysis of narrative and cinematography. We will consider what philosophical questions the films pose, how they pose them, and why, assessing all the while the contexts and philosophical capacity of cinema in his time and place: the height of the Cold War.
Companion texts include Tarkovsky’s cinematic manifesto Sculpting in Time (Zapechatlennoe vremia) and some of the films’ source texts as well as excerpts from philosophers and filmmakers who inspired Tarkovsky. Short lectures will provide context to the films, the filmmaker and their making. Group discussions will allow students to practice skills of film analysis and philosophical inquiry. Assignments will include short essays, peer review and a final video essay. Russian language knowledge not required.
(CMST 26085 / CMST 36085)
REES 26500/36500: Language and Identity
This course is a general introduction to the external histories of the Slavic literary languages. It outlines their rise and development with special reference to the contemporary cultural and ideological contexts, such as the processes of ethnic identity formation in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The essential linguistic information is also provided and patterns of emergence of a standard language are discussed.
No prerequisites.
(HIST 24011 / LING 26501 / LING 36501)
REES 29021/39021: Master & Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita is a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love; a hilarious satire of state surveillance, and a somber reimagining of the Gospels, all rolled into one.
Bulgakov worked on his masterpiece for most of his writing career – he destroyed his manuscript; re-created it from memory; reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. He wrote while Joseph Stalin consolidated his power in the Soviet Union, while potential critics were tried at government-orchestrated show trials, while friends and neighbors vanished in the meatgrinder of the Great Terror.
The result is one of the most powerful triumphs of artistic freedom in the face of terror. Wildly imaginative, irresistibly funny, the novel is, above all, an intense contemplation on human embodiment of power, guilt and forgiveness. Brief excursions to other texts will help us better understand these themes.
All readings in translation, with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a separate Russian-language section through the Languages across the Curriculum (LxC) program.
(FNDL 29020)
REES 29024/39024: States of Surveillance
What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time when one wrong move can cost one’s career or even one's life? How do the ever-present gaze and ear restructure the self? What does it reveal about our relations to sites of (political) power? Literary and cinematic works from the former Eastern Bloc explore the human effects of living under- and participating in- political surveillance: self-censorship, fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, and testing the limits of what it means to be human.
A disclaimer: while we are living in an era of unprecedented possibilities for surveillance and are grappling with the trade-offs of surrendering some privacy for the sake of ease and convenience, public health or safety, the material for this class is entirely grounded in a different era and a different kind of experience - the East European Socialist State. This means that the surveillance we will be considering is always political, linked to a large cadre of informers, prisons and a labor camp system. We will be considering the effects of this type of surveillance on those caught in it from both sides of the gaze - the surveilled and the surveillants.
Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz), former Yugoslavia (Slavenka Drakulić, Danilo Kiš), Romania (Herta Müller, Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu, Katherine Verdery), East Germany (von Donnersmarck, Hilbig), Albania (Ismail Kadare). All readings in translation.
(CMLT 29024 / CMLT 39024)
Spring
REES 20205/30205: Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
A murder mystery where the riddle is not “Who?” but “Why?”–––Why did the expelled student murder a pawnbroker? Why were innocents punished and exploiters vindicated? Why is justice out of reach, compassion rare, and even communication difficult? And, given these disappointments, why have readers and writers around the world been obsessed with Crime and Punishment since its publication over 150 years ago? Dostoevsky’s novels “claw their way into us” (Iser), “we are drawn in, whirled around, suffocated…” (Woolf). Although he was “a messenger” to James Baldwin, “more human, better than human” in Akira Kurosawa’s estimation, and “the only psychologist” worth learning from according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the real-life Dostoevsky was a desperate gambler, cheater, and chauvinist, not unlike some of the worst characters in his novels. He was recently heralded as both an example of Russian humanism (by Pope Francis) and the “father of Russian fascism” (by a Russian intellectual). Reading Crime and Punishment, we will endeavor to make sense of Dostoevsky’s––and the novel’s––failures and triumphs. Topics we explore will include historical events and the reception of the novel; religion, race, class and gender; and questions of politics and ethics.
This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26 or later.
(ENGL 20306 / ENGL 30306 / FNDL 20201)
REES 21500: Spaces of Hope: The City and Its Immigrants
“The city is the site where people of all origins and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life.” (David Harvey) This course will use the urban studies lens to explore the complex history of immigration to Chicago, with close attention to communities of East European origin. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic materials, we will study the ways in which the city and its new citizens transform one another.
(CHST 21500 / HIST 27713 / PBPL 27330)
REES 22000/32000: Kafka in Prague
The goal of this course is a thorough treatment of Kafka's literary work in its Central European, more specifically Czech, context. In critical scholarship, Kafka and his work are often alienated from his Prague milieu. The course revisits the Prague of Kafka's time, with particular reference to Josefov (the Jewish ghetto), Das Prager Deutsch, and Czech/German/Jewish relations of the prewar and interwar years. We discuss most of Kafka's major prose works within this context and beyond (including The Castle, The Trial, and the stories published during his lifetime), as well as selected critical approaches to his work.
(GRMN 29600 / GRMN 39600)
REES 23118/33118 : Word, Image, Ritual: Early Russian Culture in Its Historical Context
The course examines elements of Pre-Modern Russian material and non-material culture through a selection of Old Russian (early East Slavic) texts and church buildings. Topics will include hesychasm, iconography and fresco painting, church architecture, epic songs, chronicles, lives of saints, and Novgorodian birch bark documents, explored in their historical and social contexts. All readings are in English.
(HIST 24010 / HIST 34010)
REES 24417: Where We Come From: Methods & Materials in the Study of Immigration
This course provides an interactive survey of methodologies that engage the experiences of immigrants in Chicago. Exploring practices ranging from history to fiction, activism to memorialization, this course will introduce students to a variety of the ways that immigrants and scholars have approached the Second City.
(CHST 24417 / HIST 27712 / PBPL 27210)
REES 25800/35800: Language, Empire, and Power
What does it mean to write in the language of empire? And what possibilities, aesthetic and ethical, emerge from the refusal, remaking, and reclaiming of the imperial language? This course examines how writers from different post-imperial contexts negotiate identity and literary belonging through the choice of language. It brings together four authors who made this question central to their work: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o from Kenya, Arundthati Roy from India, Yuri Andrykhovych from Ukraine, and Dubravka Ugrešić from Croatia. Through close reading and engagement with critical theory, we situate their works within their specific historical, social, and political conditions. By placing postcolonial, post-Soviet, and post-dependence critical frameworks in dialogue, we ask what these imperial aftermaths share and where comparisons break down.
Ola Sidorkiewicz
REES 27500/37500: Marginal Modernists
This course introduces twentieth-century modernist Polish literature through figures, identities, and perspectives that have so far been marginalised in literary and cultural narratives of the period. Organised in three parts - gender, ethnicity, and language - it moves from lesser-known authors (Irena Krzywicka, Maria Kuncewicz, Debora Vogel, Zuzanna Ginczanka, Stanisława Przybyszewska, and Eleonora Kalkowska) to more canonical figures (Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz), making visible the processes through which the Polish modernist canon has been formed. Combining close reading and theoretical approaches, the course examines how questions of identity shape literary form and how Polish modernism looks different when read from its margins.
Ola Sidorkiewicz
REES 29005/39005: East European Folklore
Folklore is the expressive culture communities make for themselves. In Eastern Europe, a region home to many different ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities, folklore offers a window onto histories of coexistence, difference, and adaptation. This interdisciplinary course explores oral and material traditions among the Slavic, Romanian, Albanian, and other East European groups. We will encounter magical beasts and heroes in oral tales that have fascinated writers from the Brothers Grimm and Goethe to Bram Stoker. We will analyze how folklore genres—from vampire tales and heroic epics to wedding rituals—imagine the individual’s place in the community and in relation to the sacred. Texts and practices will be studied through the lenses of anthropology, history, and folklore theory, drawing on thinkers such as Mary Douglas, Arnold van Gennep, Vladimir Propp, and Albert Lord. But folklore is also a participatory culture, so experiential learning is central to the course: students will explore folklore through storytelling, cooking, and hands-on projects, to illuminate how living traditions help build group coherence while making space for individuality and creativity. Local musicians will lead us in the dazzling dance rhythms of the circle dance known by many names in the region.
This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26 or later.
(CMLT 29005 / CMLT 39005)
REES 29025: The Voices of Immigration
This course investigates the individual experience of immigration: How do immigrants recreate themselves in this alien world in which they seem to lose part of themselves? How do they find their voices and make a place for themselves in their adoptive homes? If in the new world the immigrant becomes a new person, what meanings are still carried in traditional values and culture? How do they remember their origins and record new experiences?
(CHST 29025 / CMLT 27125 / ENGL 27125 / HIST 27710 / PBPL 27125)