Graduate

A look at contemporary Russian culture through Russia’s invasions, from Afghanistan in 1979 to Ukraine in 2022. Broadly, this course explores the extent to which war and other types of state violence determine cultural life. How do the policies and tactics of war, and the art and literature of wartime, convey ideas about power and the state, traditional vs. modern values, civilizational mission vs. cultural pluralism? Beyond Russian literature and film, we consider voices from Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Chechnya, Syria, Belarus, and Ukraine, asking, What is the cultural impact of Russia’s invasions?

The process of learning in all three quarters of Third-Year Polish is framed by three themes, which most succinctly but aptly characterize Polish life, culture, and history: in the Autumn Quarter--the noble democracy in the Commonwealth of Both Nations, in the Winter Quarter--the fight for independence, and in the Spring Quarter--the newly independent Poland. During the course of the year, students also improve their knowledge of advanced grammar and stylistics. All work in Polish.

Any class is an intentional community of sorts: people gathered together with a sense of collective purpose. But often the hopes of students are not met by the content or the methods in the classroom. Can we do better by making the process more intentional—clarifying and developing a collective sense of purpose at the outset? We will start by forming a collective plan on topics to be explored—anything from iconic American communities and Russian communes to memoir studies and economics. Possible projects include creating an intentional community in an off-campus location, designing a communal space, rewriting manifestos, or creating a new communal charter. We can cover anything from economics, space, and gender to the problem of leadership and secular belief systems. We may also want to utilize alternative modes of learning, besides reading and discussing texts, such as roleplaying. A few students in the class have some experience in intentional communities, and we will welcome their input and suggestions

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.

This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

Class meets for 2 hours each week. We'll work with several topics, all of them are relevant to the general theme of "Geography and Worldview: Russian Perspective". There will be maps, reading materials, several documentaries, clips from TV programs and other media, and feature films. Class meetings will be a combination of group discussions, short presentations, and lectures. Final - one term paper at the end (in English) based on Russian materials.

This course, which is designed for fifth-year students of Russian, covers various aspects of Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in culturally authentic context. Clips from Russian/Soviet films and television news reports are shown and discussed in class. Classes conducted in Russian. Conversation practice is held twice a week.

This course foregrounds different periods in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav art and architecture. Situated between the capitalist West and the socialist East, Yugoslavia’s architects responded to contradictory demands and influences, developing a postwar architecture both in line with and distinct from the design approaches seen elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Drawing on the country’s own idiosyncrasies, diverse heritage and influences, the course surveys examples of architectural styles from classical to Baroque, through Art Nouveau and Modernism, all the way to full-blown Brutalism with its heft and material honesty. Given that Yugoslav architecture also expressed one of the great political experiments of the modern era, the course entertains many questions on related topics. While exploring major cities, their infrastructure, houses, buildings, monuments, churches and more, the course delves into advanced grammatical topics with the goal of increasing proficiency in both aural and reading comprehension, in addition to honing writing and speaking styles. Classes are conducted in the target language and may be taken for pass/fail. The prerequisite is two years of formal study of the target language or the equivalent.

The course uses an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, infrastructure and transformations of cities, mainly the capitals of today’s Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Croatia. There is a particular need to survey this region and feed the newfound interest in it, mainly because Yugoslav architecture embodied one of the great political experiments of the modern era. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, urban life as praxis, art and design movements, film, music, food, architectural histories and styles, metropolitan citizenship, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. One of them is a tour through the 2018 show at MoMA “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980” a project curated with the goal to find a place for Yugoslav Modernism in the architectural canon. Classes are held in English. No knowledge of South Slavic languages is required.