2025-2026 Course Offerings
Autumn
REES 20030/30030: Short Russian Novels
A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the “spiteful man,” the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the “accursed questions” at the heart of the works themselves. 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.
(CMLT 20030 / CMLT 30030 / FNDL 20030)
REES 24220/34220: Anxious Spaces
This course explores built (architectural), filmic, and narrative spaces that disturb our bearings, un-situate us, and defy neurotypical cognition. In the sense that "angst" is a mode that can be understood as both stalling and generative, we analyze spaces and representations of spaces such as corridors, attics, basements, canals, viaducts, labyrinths, forests, ruins, etc., spaces that are 'felt' as estranging, foreboding, in short, anxiety-provoking, in order to understand why-despite or because these topoi are hostile-they are produced, reproduced, and craved. We will pay special attention to abject spaces of racial and sexual exclusivity, sites of spoliation, and of memory and erasure. Among our primary texts are films by Kubrick, Tarkovksy, and Antonioni, and Chytilová, short fiction by Borges, Kafka, Nabokov, and selections from the philosophical/theoretical writings of Bachelard, Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Foucault, Kracauer, and the edited volume, Mapping Desire, Geographies of Sexuality.
(ARCH 24220 / GNSE 24220 / GNSE 34220)
REES 25603/35603: Narratives of Power
For the past four years we've been transfixed by the news—but also by the way the news has been reported. Longstanding practices have been questioned or abandoned as our media have grappled with how to cover a changing political landscape. A similar situation unfolded in late and post-Soviet Russia, where it seemed that newspapers and TVs were not only reporting, but also carrying out, a regime change. This course will examine media regimes in both the U.S. and Russia (and the U.S.S.R.), with careful attention to historical and theoretical frameworks that will help us better understand current media events. On the Russian side we will explore how political and cultural regimes have systematically exploited the gap between experience and representation to create their own mediated worlds—from the tight censorship of the imperial and Soviet periods to the propaganda of the Soviet period and the recent use of media simulacra for strategic geopolitical advantage. We will compare this tradition with that of the United States, where freedom of expression has been privileged, but has also been shaped and distorted by the economic and cultural markets that constitute our media.
(SIGN 26029)
REES 29013/39013: The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise
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 retell their Ottoman past. We begin by considering the mythic temporality of the Romantic national narrative while focusing on specific national literary texts where the national past is retold through the formula of original wholeness, foreign invasion, Passion, and Salvation. We then proceed to unpack the structural role of the different elements of that narrative. 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 victimhood, the casting of the victimized national self as the object of the “other’s perverse desire.” With the help of Freud, Žižek and Kant we consider the transformation of national victimhood into the sublimity of the national self. 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 29903: REES Proseminar
The proseminar, offered annually, is required of all REES Majors, may be taken at any time, and is open by request to those who have not declared the major. Tailored to Majors’ interests, the REES Proseminar introduces students to debates and problems in the field through a theme (Empire and Nation in 2025). It offers a space for students to hone their research, writing and presentation skills as they engage critically with multiple internal and external perspectives on the region. It also exposes them to professional opportunities related to their college studies.
REES 43900: A Field on Fire in a World on Fire: Future(s) of REES and the Broader Region
Russia’s escalation of its war on Ukraine to a full-scale invasion in February 2022 amplified the critique of scholars, who have been vocal about imperialist assumptions that had long underpinned Russian, East European and Eurasian studies. It caused a major re-thinking of the field and our role as academics and students, and the relation of knowledge to the lives of communities on the ground and globally. At the same time war and authoritarianism have made research access to the region increasingly difficult. This class will critically examine the state of the field, as well as its potential future(s), even as the future of the region(s) we study and the broader world appear increasingly hopeless. We will devote special attention to land regimes and the environment; feminist and queer epistemologies and critical politics; questions of indigeneity and racialization; inter-regional and global connections, dependencies and resistance; and defining imperial and colonial legacies and avenues for decolonial and anti-imperial approaches in engaging with the region(s). There will also be space for students to define and explore their own interests.
(HIST 43900)
Darya Tsymbalyuk and Faith Hillis
Winter
REES 28900/38900: Czech New Wave Cinema
The insurgent film movement known as the Czech New Wave spawned such directors as the internationally acclaimed Milos Forman (The Fireman’s Ball, Loves of a Blonde), Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains), JanKadar (The Shop on Main Street), and Vera Chytilova (Daisies), and the lesser known but nationally inspirational Evald Schorm, Jarmir Jires, Odlrich Lipsky,and Jan Nemec. The serendipitous life of the Czech New Wave is as much a subject of the course’s inquiry as close technical and semantic research of the films themselves.
(CMST 24401 / CMST 34401 / FNDL 26900)
REES 29021/39021: The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov
“What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. . . . Do you want to strip the earth of all the trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?” asks the Devil. Mikhail Bulgakov worked on his novel The Master and Margarita throughout most of his writing career, in Stalin’s Moscow. Bulgakov destroyed his manuscript, re-created it from memory, and reworked it feverishly even as his body was failing him in his battle with death. The result is an intense contemplation on the nature of good and evil, on the role of art, and the ethical duty of the artist, but also a dazzling world of magic, witches, and romantic love, and an irresistible seduction into the comedic. Laughter, as shadow and light, as the subversive weapon but also as power’s whip, grounds human relation to both good and evil. Brief excursions to other texts that help us better understand The Master and Margarita.
(FNDL 29020)
REES 31500: Teaching Slavic Languages
Teaching Slavic Languages is a course meant to prepare graduate students as effective instructors of Slavic Languages in Academia. REES 31500 will introduce students to fundamental principles of foreign language pedagogy, an array of methodologies and approaches, as well as essential and practical tools for the development of foreign language teaching strategies. Particular emphasis is placed on language structure for more effective instruction in a proficiency-oriented classroom. Since this is very much a “hands-on” course, students are expected to participate in discussions, design relevant pedagogical and professional materials, and lead instruction in preparation for teaching Slavic Languages.
Spring
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.