Spring 2025

Agnieszka Makles

Open to students with NO prior knowledge of Polish. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.

In Elementary Polish II, the continuation of the introductory course, students further develop proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing with a focus on conversational language. The basics of grammar and core vocabulary are expanded. The course emphasizes Polish culture, including geography, history, literature, and customs, through authentic texts, songs, videos, maps, websites, and other supplementary materials.

Agnieszka Makles

Prerequisite: 787:201 or placement or permission.

Intermediate Polish II is intended for students who have completed Intermediate Polish I or have been placed into the course. Students continue developing their proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing, with an emphasis on conversational language. The course provides opportunities to apply grammatical knowledge in practice. Students engage with authentic literary texts, discuss current events in Poland, and watch Polish films, further deepening their understanding of Polish language, history, and culture. Fulfills SAS core goal AHq. 

Prerequisite: 860:101 or placement.

Elementary Russian is an intensive introductory course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students with no prior experience in the language. It develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing, as well as the basics of Russian grammar. It also introduces students to Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, various media, and other supplementary materials. 

It is strongly recommended that students also take Russian Conversation II: Novice to Intermediate (860:112/212)

This one-credit course supplements work in Elementary Russian I (01:860:102), providing extra practice with the pronunciation, phonetics, intonation, and grammar of Russian, while also introducing students to additional products and practices of Russian culture as well as history. Students will navigate the Russian internet, watch excerpts of Russian film and television, listen to Russian music, etc. as a means of enhancing the material of language courses. Students will frequently work in groups based on their proficiency levels to focus on specific topics and grammatical constructions.

This course may be taken multiple times for credit, as the content changes every semester. 

Prerequisite: 01:860:201 or placement. Not for students who have taken 01:860:107.

Intermediate Russian is an intensive intermediate course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students who have completed Russian 102 or placed into the course by exam. This course is not for students who have completed Russian 107 or those who speak Russian at home with their family. The course develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing. It includes a review and expansion of Russian grammar and vocabulary. It deepens students’ understanding of Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other supplementary materials. 

It is strongly recommended that students also take Russian Conversation II: Novice to Intermediate (860:112/212). Fulfills SAS core goal AHq.

Taught by Mi E Li

Prerequisite: 860:207 or placement. Not for students who have taken 860:102.

Intermediate Russian for Russian Speakers is designed for students who learned Russian at home or from family members, and have had some formal study, including Russian 207. This course focuses on improving grammatical control, and expanding active vocabulary for discussing abstract topics. Students will improve their reading skills, through literary and non-literary texts of increasing length and difficulty, and their writing skills, working towards the goal of creating cohesive and organized paragraph-lengthy texts. Students will also increase their knowledge of Russian history, culture, geography and traditions through authentic materials, such as texts, films, music and other supplementary materials. 

Fulfills SAS core goal AHq.

This one-credit course supplements work in Intermediate Russian I (01:860:202), providing extra practice with the pronunciation, phonetics, intonation, and grammar of Russian, while also introducing students to additional products and practices of Russian culture as well as history. Students will navigate the Russian internet, watch excerpts of Russian film and television, listen to Russian music, etc. as a means of enhancing the material of language courses. Students will frequently work in groups based on their proficiency levels to focus on specific topics and grammatical constructions.

This course may be taken multiple times for credit, as the content changes every semester. 

Professor Cori Anderson

Fulfills Honors College Global Competence requirement

In English. No prerequisites.  

Language can be used to exert power, as well as to subvert power. What is the role of language in imperialism and decolonization throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia? How do language choice and usage shape identity and social status in newly independent nations, such as Ukraine, Latvia, and Kazakhstan? How are national language policies established, and how do these policies impact speakers of minority languages? In this course we examine the changing social and political status of languages and we analyze the role of language in individual identity and social status. 

All readings in English. No prerequisites. Satisfies Core Requirement CCD-1. Fulfills Honors College Global Competence requirement.

Prerequisite: 01:860:301 or placement

This is an advanced course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students who have completed the equivalent of four semesters of college-level Russian, or have placed into the course by exam. The course strengthens grammatical control and develops proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing. Students will learn to summarize, develop narration, and create connected paragraphs in speech and writing. They will also study complex grammatical structures, such as participles and gerunds, and syntactic constructions, such as subordination. They will broaden their vocabulary through the study of word-formation. This course covers many elements of modern Russian life, such as education, employment, leisure and youth culture, through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other materials.

Instructor: Dr. Laura Matthews [to be confirmed]

In English. No prerequisites.

Love and death push at the edges of the human experience, and writers of every era take up the challenge of depicting these ideas afresh. Our class will trace the evolution of love and death within the Russian-language short story form over almost two centuries, produced by writers like Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Zinaida Gippius, Andrei Platonov, Yuri Trifonov, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Lyudmila Ulitsakaya, among others. We will consider how together, “love” and “death” drive storytelling and forge bonds between stories and readers. Why do we ‘believe’ in love or death in a given story? Do we seek to be inspired by stories of ‘ideal love’ or ‘beautiful death’? Do we prefer to follow realistic depictions of human desire, violence, and tragedy? Or might we be drawn to grotesque or surreal renderings of these existential forces? And what cultural-historical situations might lead writers and readers towards preferring one form over another? 

All readings and discussion in English. No prerequisites. Fulfills SAS core goals AH o, p; WC d.

 Professor Chloë Kitzinger

In English. No prerequisites.

cross-listed with Comparative Literature 01:195:311:01

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) invented some of the most vivid and tenacious characters in world literature: murderers, madmen and -women, terrorists, prostitutes, gamblers, saints. Many of his eerily modern insights stemmed from his fear of a world without God—a condition that he rejected on moral grounds, but which he compellingly represented in his fiction. This course traces Dostoevsky’s career as a literary celebrity, political prisoner, traveler, journalist, and religious and nationalist thinker. Most of all, we will consider him as a novelist who pushed the genre to its outermost formal and philosophical bounds. We’ll read works including Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), and Demons (1871–72).

All readings and discussions in English. No prerequisites. Fulfills SAS Core goals AHo, AHp.

Instructor: Dr. Kamil Zapásnik [to be confirmed] 

This course introduces students to the most significant works and cinematic traditions of Soviet and Eastern European cinema from the last 100 years. We will focus our attention on various cinematic trends and techniques (the Soviet montage, early documentary filmmaking, the Polish Film School, the Cinema of Moral Unrest), and some of the most captivating socio-political themes explored by Eastern-European filmmakers (the emergence of the totalitarian regime in Russia and other Eastern European countries, nationalism, gender and sexuality, the post-communist aftermath). We will explore the works of many of the best-known and most influential Soviet and Eastern European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Roman Polański, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Andrzej Wajda, Małgorzata Szumowska and Jirí Menzel. By the end of the semester, students will demonstrate a strong understanding of key cinematic terms and the socio-political and cultural contexts of the analyzed films. 

All readings and discussions in English; no prerequisites.

Svetlana Bogomolny

Prerequisite: 01:860:302, or 01:860:306, or placement. May be taken out of sequence with 860:401, 860:403, 860:404, or 860:407.

Taught in Russian. This course examines contemporary Russian culture through a variety of media—books, films, television, music and the internet—and the people who have become household names for their contributions—Dontsova, Litvinova, Posner, Zemfira and Kuvaev. The course fosters advanced language skills of conversational fluency, listening comprehension, writing and composition, expanded vocabulary, recognition of stylistic registers, and advanced syntax.

Professor Emily Van Buskirk

cross-listed with Comparative Literature 01:195:480:03 and Women’s & Gender Studies 01:988:435:01

In English. No prerequisites.

In this course we study questions of gender and sexuality in modern Russian literature and culture through close readings of novellas, short stories, poems, films, essays, and memoirs. How have gender and sexuality been constructed in different periods of Russian history? What erotic utopias did radical thinkers propose? How did Soviet ideology build on traditional myths and images of femininity and masculinity? How have gay and lesbian love been represented, given the enduring presence of cultural taboos? The course will move from key (pre-)19th-century predecessors (fairy tales, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy), through the turbulent decades surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution (symbolism and decadence, various avant-garde movements), and on to contemporary literature with its flowering of feminist writing and performance. We will broaden our study through encounters with influential theoretical and critical texts, and with artistic works from other Slavic cultures (specifically Czech, Ukrainian). All readings and discussions in English; no prerequisites.