El Lissitzky (1890–1941). Proun (Project for Progress), before 1924. Watercolor. Collection: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands). Photo credit: Erich Lessing.
Welcome to the Program in Russian and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers. We offer a major and three minors in Russian language and literature, as well as a minor in Slavic and East European Studies.
Our program offers a broad introduction to East European literatures and cultures in their historical, social, and global contexts. We offer a wide variety of courses taught in English: courses dedicated to major writers (such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Nabokov); thematic courses on topics like selfhood, empire, gender and sexuality, and science fiction; and courses that illuminate important cultural moments or media (radical thought, revolution, war, television, film). We foster a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, and we cross-list courses with Comparative Literature, English, History, Women’s and Gender Studies, Cinema Studies, and Art History, while also encouraging our students to take advantage of relevant offerings in other departments. We also teach upper-level content courses in Russian and offer a special honors track, in which students may write a senior thesis under the close advisement of our award-winning faculty.
Our language courses help students, including those who have learned some Russian or Polish at home, to achieve a degree of fluency that will enable them to enter into dialogue with eastern Europe, past and present. We offer generous scholarship funding to support summer or semester- or year-long study abroad in Russia and Poland. We also regularly organize special program and cultural events, such as film series, scholarly workshops and speakers, a fall "Slavic Slam," a spring carnival celebration, an annual Translate-a-thon, and a tea for current and prospective majors, minors, and language students.
