Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

BCSN 31102. Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction and Media II. 100 Units.

The three-quarter sequence advanced course in BCS is designed for both students who have completed two years of language training at the University of Chicago or equivalent formal study elsewhere, and heritage learners. While the pedagogical needs of heritage learners differ from those of second-language learners, they collectively inform central tenets of the course. The objective is to accelerate the process of language acquisition through reciprocal exchange of knowledge, skills, and cultural information. The course curriculum combines selected pieces of fiction with media-film adaptations of literary works featured in the textbook, or films addressing the weekly topic. Other materials, such as interviews with writers, directors, and humanities scholars also complement the course. Both reading passages and cinematic works, representing various subjects and styles, engage the language structure on every page and in every piece of footage. Issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course as they arise in the textbook.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 31102, BCSN 21102, REES 21102

BCSN 31104. Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction and Media I. 100 Units.

The three-quarter sequence advanced course in BCS is designed for both students who have completed two years of language training at the University of Chicago or equivalent formal study elsewhere, and heritage learners. While the pedagogical needs of heritage learners differ from those of second-language learners, they collectively inform central tenets of the course. The objective is to accelerate the process of language acquisition through reciprocal exchange of knowledge, skills, and cultural information. The course curriculum combines selected pieces of fiction with media-film adaptations of literary works featured in the textbook, or films addressing the weekly topic. Other materials, such as interviews with writers, directors, and humanities scholars also complement the course. Both reading passages and cinematic works, representing various subjects and styles, engage the language structure on every page and in every piece of footage. Issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course as they arise in the textbook.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): BCSN 21101, REES 21101, REES 31104

BCSN 31105. Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction and Media III. 100 Units.

The three-quarter sequence advanced course in BCS is designed for both students who have completed two years of language training at the University of Chicago or equivalent formal study elsewhere, and heritage learners. While the pedagogical needs of heritage learners differ from those of second-language learners, they collectively inform central tenets of the course. The objective is to accelerate the process of language acquisition through reciprocal exchange of knowledge, skills, and cultural information. The course curriculum combines selected pieces of fiction with media-film adaptations of literary works featured in the textbook, or films addressing the weekly topic. Other materials, such as interviews with writers, directors, and humanities scholars also complement the course. Both reading passages and cinematic works, representing various subjects and styles, engage the language structure on every page and in every piece of footage. Issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course as they arise in the textbook.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 21103, BCSN 21103, REES 31105

BCSN 31303. (Re)Branding the Balkan City: Comtemp. Belgrade/Sarajevo/Zagreb. 100 Units.

The freedom to make and remake our cities (and ourselves) is one of the most precious yet most neglected of the human rights," argues David Harvey. In this course, we use an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, social fabric, architecture, infrastructure, and cultural transformation of the former Yugoslav capitals. Since their inception, these cities have relied on multifaceted exchanges of peoples and political projects, forms of knowledge, financial and cultural capital, means of production, and innovative ideas. Among others, these exchanges produced two phenomena, Yugoslav architecture, embodying one of the great political experiments of the modern era, and the Non-Aligned Movement, as explored in recent documentary films (Turajlić 2023), museum exhibits (MoMA 2018, "Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980"), and monographs (Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity). Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, metropolitan citizenship, arts and design, architectural histories and styles, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. Classes are conducted in English.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21333, ARCH 21300, BCSN 21300, ARTH 31333, REES 21300, GLST 21301, REES 31303, HIST 24008

SLAV 70000. Advanced Study: Slavic Languages & Literatures. 300.00 Units.

Advanced Study: Slavic Languages & Literatures

POLI 30403. Third-Year Polish I. 100 Units.

In this course, students will continue their language journey by developing advanced skills in Polish through engagement with a wide range of texts, discourses, and modes of communication. Drawing on excerpts from Polish literature, film, news media, podcasts, and other authentic sources, students will strengthen their reading and listening comprehension. In-class discussions will support the development of speaking skills, while regular writing assignments will reinforce grammatical accuracy and written expression. As they build linguistic proficiency, students will also deepen their understanding of contemporary life and culture in Poland, preparing them to engage thoughtfully in discussions on a variety of relevant topics.

Instructor(s): Izolda Wolski-Moskoff     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): POLI 20303 or equivalent.
Equivalent Course(s): POLI 20403

POLI 30503. Third-Year Polish II. 100 Units.

In this course, students will continue their language journey by developing advanced skills in Polish through engagement with a wide range of texts, discourses, and modes of communication. Drawing on excerpts from Polish literature, film, news media, podcasts, and other authentic sources, students will strengthen their reading and listening comprehension. In-class discussions will support the development of speaking skills, while regular writing assignments will reinforce grammatical accuracy and written expression. As they build linguistic proficiency, students will also deepen their understanding of contemporary life and culture in Poland, preparing them to engage thoughtfully in discussions on a variety of relevant topics.

Instructor(s): Izolda Wolski-Moskoff     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): POLI 20503

POLI 30603. Third-Year Polish III. 100 Units.

In this course, students will continue their language journey by developing advanced skills in Polish through engagement with a wide range of texts, discourses, and modes of communication. Drawing on excerpts from Polish literature, film, news media, podcasts, and other authentic sources, students will strengthen their reading and listening comprehension. In-class discussions will support the development of speaking skills, while regular writing assignments will reinforce grammatical accuracy and written expression. As they build linguistic proficiency, students will also deepen their understanding of contemporary life and culture in Poland, preparing them to engage thoughtfully in discussions on a variety of relevant topics.

Instructor(s): Izolda Wolski-Moskoff     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): POLI 20603

POLI 39700. Reading and Research Course. 100 Units.

This is an independent study course which is arranged, planned, and managed by a supervising professor in conjunction with the goals that are proposed by the student, and then refined and approved by the supervising professor. This course involves more student self-discipline and a greater sense of direction than do most courses - the student must be willing to plan and execute his/her activities with much less monitoring and without prompting by fellow classmates. The student and the professor discuss and propose goals, topics, and projects.

Instructor(s): Izolda Wolski-Moskoff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter

POLI 39900. Rdg Course: Polish Lit I. 100 Units.

POLI 39901. Reading Course: Polish Lit I. 100 Units.

POLI 39902. Reading Course: Polish Lit II. 100 Units.

POLI 39903. Reading Course: Polish Lit III. 100 Units.

Advanced Polish studies.

POLI 45027. Between 'New Woman' and 'Sex Worker': Polish Women's Writings in the 1930s. 100 Units.

During the interwar period a constellation of Polish women writers defined through their novels politically and socially progressive positions; although not deeply influenced by Marxism, they were critical of the class society, state, ruling elite, and Catholic mentality. The seminar will investigate these writers' attempts to represent the unrepresented such as the proletariat, the jobless, the disabled, as well as other socially marginalized members of the society including sex workers. The course will discuss an emergence of the "new woman" against the backdrop of a deeply ingrained patriarchalism, and as an epitome of creative, sexual, and social independence. We will view these phenomena with its roots in 19th century Polish and French naturalism in context of the visual art of Neue Sachlichkeit and the emergence of reportage. Inspired by the social critique offered by writings of Boguszewska, Krzywicka, Melcer, Nałkowska, and others, the seminar will consider the way in which genres such as a novel, short story, and reportage can become tools for reform. All readings in this seminar are in Polish.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 45027, GNSE 45027

RUSS 30102-30202-30302. Advanced Russian through Media I-II-III.

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.

RUSS 30902. Third-Year Russian through Culture III. 100 Units.

This course is intended for third-year students of Russian and covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Grammar sessions are held twice a week.

Instructor(s): Valentina Pichugin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Russian 20802 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Drill sessions to be arranged.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20902, RUSS 20902, REES 30902

RUSS 31600. Russian For Heritage Learners. 100 Units.

This course examines the major aspects of Russian grammar and stylistics essential for heritage learners. Students engage in close readings and discussions of short stories by classic and contemporary Russian authors (e.g., Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Platonov, Bulgakov, Erofeev, Tolstaya), with special emphasis on their linguistic and stylistic differences. All work in Russian.

Instructor(s): Maria Iakubovich     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Ability to speak Russian fluently required; formal training in Russian not required
Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 21600

RUSS 36208. Literatures of Russian and African-American Soul. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26208, ENGL 28917, RUSS 26208

RUSS 39900. Rdg Course: Russian Literature. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Valentina Pichugin     Terms Offered: Spring

REES 30000. Tolstoy's Late Works. 100 Units.

This course examines the works written by Tolstoy after Anna Karenina, when he abandoned the novel as a form and gave up his copyright. Readings include his influential writings on non-violence and vegetarianism, his challenges to church and state authority, as well as later literary works, which some believe surpass the famous novels he had renounced. We will also explore the particularities of Tolstoy's charisma in these years, when he came to be viewed as a second Tsar in Russia and as a moral authority throughout the world.

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20000, FNDL 22850, RLST 28501, RLIT 32900

REES 30002. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 27102, REES 20002

REES 30018. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 27101, CMLT 39300, ENGL 28902, REES 20018, ENGL 48902, CMLT 29300

REES 30020. Pale Fire. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): M. Sternstein      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20020, GNSE 29610, GNSE 39610, ENGL 22817, FNDL 25311

REES 30027. Dostoevsky's Demons. 100 Units.

Mikhail Bakhtin's description of Dostoevsky's novels as polyphonic works, in which characters are free of ideological subordination to the author and thus more fully embody radically different points of view, has been highly compelling as a model for novelistic discourse particularly in the West. There are other views of Dostoevsky, however. In Russia, more attention has been paid to his faith in Orthodox Christianity, which he believed could resolve the intense conflicts that dominate his novels, and to his view that the Russian national character might have the power to unite humanity under universal values. In this course we will read the novel Demons against the backdrop of these ideas, but also in the context of contemporary Russia, where notions of national destiny and sovereign ideals have been used to justify repression and invasion. Our method of reading will be straight out of Dostoevsky and Bakhtin, as students will be invited to adopt the most diverse perspectives and to argue their ideas as if possessed.

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 20027, REES 20027

REES 30030. Short Russian Novels. 100 Units.

In 19th century Russia, the printed book was an emergent technology offering a new form of shared intelligence, challenging the Bible (which at that time was still primarily experienced liturgically) as the authoritative Book of life. In this course we begin by thinking about the book as a new medium and read some of the best examples of the short novel in 19th and 20th century Russia, considering how they create explanatory and moral authority by reflecting reality and imagining new ways of being. We will observe traditions established at that time, reading books printed on paper and discussing them in a public forum, the classroom, as they were discussed then in coffeehouses, intellectual circles, and salons. We will consider the functions of literature and the roles played by authors, printers, critics, and readers. And we will read some of the best works in the Russian tradition, finding throughlines from the golden age of Russian literature (Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) to 20th century socialist realist and science fiction dystopias (Platonov, Solzhenitsyn, Strugatsky Brothers), and considering how Panaeva and Chukovskaya chart a distinct path for women writers and express alternative perspectives on Russian realities and potentials. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC).

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20030, FNDL 20030, CMLT 20030, CMLT 30030, ENGL 30030, ENGL 20030

REES 30102. Advanced Russian I. 100 Units.

This is the first part of the three-quarter sequence course designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. This course is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. It covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. This course emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in culturally authentic context. It builds trans-cultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history and daily lives of the Russian speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning; to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian; we also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions.

Instructor(s): Valentina Pichugin     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent/consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 21302, REES 21302, RUSS 30102

REES 30202. Advanced Russian II. 100 Units.

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions.

Instructor(s): Valentina Pichugin     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent/consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 30202, RUSS 21402, REES 21402

REES 30205. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 20205, ENGL 20306, ENGL 30306, FNDL 20201

REES 30210. Narrative Doubles. 100 Units.

Dostoevsky's early novel "The Double" leads the readers on a descent into the madness of the main character as his double takes over his life. From uncanny usurpers to empathic gateways into alternative identities, in this course doubles teach us about our selves. We will consider how narratives conceptualize the human self and its reality, and how they conjure alternatives. We also ask about the political power of these alternative selves and doubling temporalities - from subversive possibilities to dystopian political nostalgias.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 20210, REES 20210, CMLT 30210

REES 30302. Advanced Russian III. 100 Units.

This is a three-quarter sequence designed for fourth- and fifth-year students of Russian. It is also suitable for native speakers of Russian. This sequence covers various aspects of advanced Russian stylistics and discourse grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing in a culturally authentic context. It builds transcultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the language, culture, history, and daily lives of the Russian-speaking people. Vocabulary building is strongly emphasized. We add to the existing skills and develop our abilities to analyze increasingly complex texts for their meaning: to identify various styles and registers of the Russian language and to provide their neutral equivalents in standard Russian. We also work on developing our abilities to paraphrase, narrate, describe, support opinions, hypothesize, discuss abstract topics, and handle linguistically unfamiliar situations (in spoken and written format). Classes conducted in Russian. Course-specific grammar issues are covered during drill sessions.

Instructor(s): Valentina Pichugin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Four years of Russian, or equivalent/consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 30302, REES 21502, RUSS 21502

REES 30902. Third-Year Russian through Culture III. 100 Units.

This course is intended for third-year students of Russian and covers various aspects of Russian grammar in context. It emphasizes the four communicative skills (i.e., reading, writing, listening comprehension, speaking) in a culturally authentic context. Classes conducted in Russian; some aspects of grammar explained in English. Grammar sessions are held twice a week.

Instructor(s): Valentina Pichugin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Russian 20802 or consent of instructor.
Note(s): Drill sessions to be arranged.
Equivalent Course(s): RUSS 30902, REES 20902, RUSS 20902

REES 31000. Gombrowicz: The Writer as Philosopher. 100 Units.

In this course, we dwell on Witold Gombrowicz the philosopher, exploring the components of his authorial style and concepts that substantiate his claim to both the literary and the philosophical spheres. Entangled in an ongoing battle with basic philosophical tenets and, indeed, with existence itself, this erudite Polish author is a prime example of a 20th century modernist whose philosophical novels explode with uncanny laughter. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who established their reputations as writers/philosophers, Gombrowicz applied distinctly literary models to the same questions that they explored. We investigate these models in depth, as we focus on Gombrowicz's novels, philosophical lectures, and some of his autobiographical writings. With an insight from recent criticism of these primary texts, we seek answers to the more general question: What makes this author a philosopher?

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): All readings in English.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 21000, ISHU 29405, FNDL 26903

REES 31002. Kieslowski's French Cinema. 100 Units.

Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique catapulted the Polish director to the international scene. His subsequent French triptych Blue, White, Red turned out to be his last works that altered his image and legacy to affirm his status as an auteur and a representative of the transnational cinema. We discuss how in his virtual universe of parallel histories and repeated chances, captured with visually and aurally dazzling artistry, the possibility of reconstituting one's identity, triggered by tragic loss and betrayal, reveals an ever-ambiguous reality. By focusing on the filmmaker's dissolution of the thing-world, often portrayed on the verge of vague abstraction of (in)audibility or (un)transparency, this course bridges his cinema with the larger concepts of postmodern subjectivity and possibility of metaphysics. The course concludes with the filmmaker's contribution to world cinema. All along, we read selections from Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screen scripts, Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, as well as from the abundant criticism of his French movies. All materials are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 24405, CMST 34405, FNDL 25312, CMST 24405, REES 21002

REES 31005. Bruno Schulz: An Unfinished Project. 100 Units.

This course examines the prose (fiction and non-fiction) and visual oeuvre of "the hidden genius" of Polish-Jewish modernism--Bruno Schulz--who perished in the Holocaust. 2022 marks the 130th anniversary of his birth and the 80th anniversary of his death, both of which occurred in the town of Drohobycz on the southeastern border of interwar Poland. During the course, we will focus on Schulz's concept of creation through his use of an aesthetics of trash and debased form, the kabbalistic origins of the fragment as a form, de-narrativized temporality and its moments, and myths of the provincial and of childhood. We will seek critical perspectives on his artistic predilection for parochial places, conspiratorial viewpoints, and fetishistic masochism--in sum, for those components of his writings which made his brilliant response to the world like no other in his time. In turn, generations of writers (John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, etc.) responded to him in their own writings, which will be engaged in the class, seeking a dialogic continuation of his tragically interrupted work. All readings are in English translation.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): JWSC 26360

REES 31102. Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction and Media II. 100 Units.

The three-quarter sequence advanced course in BCS is designed for both students who have completed two years of language training at the University of Chicago or equivalent formal study elsewhere, and heritage learners. While the pedagogical needs of heritage learners differ from those of second-language learners, they collectively inform central tenets of the course. The objective is to accelerate the process of language acquisition through reciprocal exchange of knowledge, skills, and cultural information. The course curriculum combines selected pieces of fiction with media-film adaptations of literary works featured in the textbook, or films addressing the weekly topic. Other materials, such as interviews with writers, directors, and humanities scholars also complement the course. Both reading passages and cinematic works, representing various subjects and styles, engage the language structure on every page and in every piece of footage. Issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course as they arise in the textbook.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): BCSN 21102, REES 21102, BCSN 31102

REES 31104. Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction and Media I. 100 Units.

The three-quarter sequence advanced course in BCS is designed for both students who have completed two years of language training at the University of Chicago or equivalent formal study elsewhere, and heritage learners. While the pedagogical needs of heritage learners differ from those of second-language learners, they collectively inform central tenets of the course. The objective is to accelerate the process of language acquisition through reciprocal exchange of knowledge, skills, and cultural information. The course curriculum combines selected pieces of fiction with media-film adaptations of literary works featured in the textbook, or films addressing the weekly topic. Other materials, such as interviews with writers, directors, and humanities scholars also complement the course. Both reading passages and cinematic works, representing various subjects and styles, engage the language structure on every page and in every piece of footage. Issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course as they arise in the textbook.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): BCSN 31104, BCSN 21101, REES 21101

REES 31105. Advanced BCS: Language through Fiction and Media III. 100 Units.

The three-quarter sequence advanced course in BCS is designed for both students who have completed two years of language training at the University of Chicago or equivalent formal study elsewhere, and heritage learners. While the pedagogical needs of heritage learners differ from those of second-language learners, they collectively inform central tenets of the course. The objective is to accelerate the process of language acquisition through reciprocal exchange of knowledge, skills, and cultural information. The course curriculum combines selected pieces of fiction with media-film adaptations of literary works featured in the textbook, or films addressing the weekly topic. Other materials, such as interviews with writers, directors, and humanities scholars also complement the course. Both reading passages and cinematic works, representing various subjects and styles, engage the language structure on every page and in every piece of footage. Issues of language structure and grammar are reinforced throughout the course as they arise in the textbook.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): BCSN 20303 or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 21103, BCSN 21103, BCSN 31105

REES 31303. (Re)Branding the Balkan City: Comtemp. Belgrade/Sarajevo/Zagreb. 100 Units.

The freedom to make and remake our cities (and ourselves) is one of the most precious yet most neglected of the human rights," argues David Harvey. In this course, we use an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, social fabric, architecture, infrastructure, and cultural transformation of the former Yugoslav capitals. Since their inception, these cities have relied on multifaceted exchanges of peoples and political projects, forms of knowledge, financial and cultural capital, means of production, and innovative ideas. Among others, these exchanges produced two phenomena, Yugoslav architecture, embodying one of the great political experiments of the modern era, and the Non-Aligned Movement, as explored in recent documentary films (Turajlić 2023), museum exhibits (MoMA 2018, "Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980"), and monographs (Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity). Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, metropolitan citizenship, arts and design, architectural histories and styles, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. Classes are conducted in English.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21333, ARCH 21300, BCSN 21300, ARTH 31333, REES 21300, GLST 21301, BCSN 31303, HIST 24008

REES 31500. Teaching Slavic Languages. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Erik Houle     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter

REES 32010. The Cinema of Miloš Forman. 100 Units.

The films of Miloš Forman (1932-2018) reflect the turbulence of the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s, and 2000s by focusing on the underdog, the pariah, the eccentric. The subject matter to which Forman was drawn translated into his cinema with a signature bittersweet tone, emphatic narrative cogency, and lush spontaneity. This course is an intensive study of Forman's work from his "New Wave" work in Czechoslovakia (Loves of a Blonde, The Fireman's Ball) to his U.S. studio successes (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus), to his idiosyncratic and parabolic last films (Man on the Moon, Goya's Ghosts). Among other topics, the course contemplate the value of a dark sense of humor, cinematic gorgeousness, and artistic dissidence.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 36603, CMST 26603, REES 22010, FNDL 22010

REES 32011. Nabokov: Three Novels. 100 Units.

In this course, three novels by Vladimir Nabokov-Invitation to a Beheading (1935-6), The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and Pnin (1957)-are studied in depth with an eye toward their use of language, metanarrative, and the relationship between the author and reader relationship. The first novel is Nabokov's penultimate Russophone work, the second his first Anglophone work, and the third a work written at a time when Nabokov's concern with translation, from language to language, past to present, and cruelty to compassion are at their height.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 22011, FNDL 22011

REES 32100. Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 100 Units.

This course is designed to be a discussion-rich seminar in which we carefully read through Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The original mode of the work was as lectures over the university (École Normale Supérieure) spring term of 1964; it was published in book form nine years later in French and translated into English in 1978. It continues to be the best resource for thinking through Lacan's interpretations of the pillar concepts of psychoanalytic theory: the Unconscious, Repetition, Transference, and the Drive. Work required: close textual analysis and six response essays of 300-750 words each.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): None
Note(s): Fundamentals majors only: all others must petition instructor
Equivalent Course(s): REES 22100, FNDL 22610

REES 33017. Wild" Easts. 100 Units.

Imaginaries of the "wild" have long been employed as part of colonial projects, from the conquest of lands of the Great Eurasian Steppe to modern conservation initiatives. In this course, we examine ideas about the "wild" with a focus on the easts of "Europe" and easts of Russia, whether Ukraine, Qazaqstan, or Bulgaria, and ways in which these lands have been constructed as "wild" territories. We discuss ecologies and cultures of the steppe, nuclear and (post)industrial wastelands, and contemporary practices of re-wilding to study the violence of being framed as "wild", as well subversive and liberatory potentials of (re)claiming all things "wild". The course takes on an interdisciplinary approach, examining works of fiction alongside history books, and films alongside memoirs; additionally, a possibility of a field trip to Site A/Plot M Disposal Site, where the world's first nuclear reactor is buried, is to be confirmed.

Instructor(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 23017, CEGU 33017, REES 23017, CEGU 23017

REES 33118. Word, Image, Ritual: Early Russian Culture in Its Historical Context. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Yaroslav Gorbachov     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 23118, HIST 24010, HIST 34010

REES 33154. XCAP: The Commune: The Making and Breaking of Intentional Communities. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): William Nickell      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 23154, GNSE 29975, KNOW 29975

REES 33300. Introduction to Contemporary Ukrainian Culture. 100 Units.

This course examines contemporary Ukrainian culture and society with attention to anticolonial resistance in the past and after the start of the Russian war on Ukraine in 2014. It focuses on diverse literary texts (poems, novels, memoirs), films (feature, short, documentary), and other forms of cultural production (visual artwork, music videos, multimodal digital projects). It is structured in three parts. The first part examines the CULTURAL MEMORY of events in Ukraine' history which are re-examined today and continue to resonate in contemporary Ukrainian contexts. Among examined events are persecutions of Ukrainian intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Holodomor or Stalin's human-made famine, Chornobyl nuclear explosion, and others. The second part focuses on the dynamics of DISSENT AND CIVIC SOCIETY, addressing three contemporary Ukrainian revolutions, feminist movements and gender dissent, debates surrounding public space and the place of Soviet heritage in contemporary Ukraine, and the process of decolonization. The third part examines RUSSIA'S WAR ON UKRAINE, which has been ongoing for more than a decade and 1/3 of Ukraine's history of independence. This part focuses on places affected by the war, such as Crimea, Mariupol, and the east of Ukraine, but also addresses the dynamics of volunteering in Ukrainian society and artmaking in times of war. No knowledge of Ukrainian language is required for this course.

Instructor(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 23300

REES 33310. Modern Ukraine Through Culture. 100 Units.

The 2022 escalation of Russia's war on Ukraine to a full-scale invasion was a wakeup call which exposed how little had been known about Ukraine globally. While for many in the world Ukraine's ongoing resistance has been a surprise, for those familiar with Ukraine's history in the 20th and 21st century, the resistance is rooted in Ukraine's longer culture of civic mobilization and Ukraine's complex relationship with Russia. In this course, we revisit major political and cultural events of the 20th and 21st centuries that have shaped today's Ukraine: the revolutionary period of 1917-1921 to the Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe, to the Orange and Maidan revolutions. One third of the course focuses on Russia's war on Ukraine starting with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. While addressing major historical turning points, the course engages literary texts (poems, novels, memoirs), films (feature, short, documentary), and other forms of cultural production (visual artwork, music, multimodal digital projects), testimonies and historical debates. No prior knowledge of Ukraine or knowledge of Ukrainian language is required. The assignments include a choice between a traditional paper or a critical-creative project (video essay, poster, other creative forms).

Instructor(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 23310

REES 33325. Ukrainian Art, Literature and Film in the Wake of the Russian Invasion (2014-present) 100 Units.

How does war affect art? Over the past decade, Ukrainian artists have been raising this question in their work, alongside questions about personal and collective identity, authority and authenticity, language and imperial violence, epistemic injustice and decolonization. In this course, we will examine art, literature, and film arising out of the war-triggered crises, whether political, aesthetic, ethical, or existential, focusing on the artists' creative engagement with different kinds of documentary and source material, experiments with form, and intermodal and inter-genre dialogue. Readings may include work by Stanislav Aseyev, Yevgenia Belorusets, Artem Chekh, Andrey Kurkov, Olena Stiazhkina, Natalya Vorozhbit, and Serhiy Zhadan. We will also consider films, cartoons, and a range of audiovisual sources. Students can expect to engage with the newest cutting-edge work from Ukraine; to develop individual research projects in collaboration with their peers; and to write a final paper.

Instructor(s): Max Rosochinsky     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 23325, CMST 23325

REES 33701. Soviet-Era Architecture in Ukraine. 100 Units.

This course discusses architecture in Ukraine during the 20th century with a focus on Architecture of Ukraine in Soviet Era. The course explores various influences that shaped Soviet Ukrainian architecture. The course highlights foreign expertise and the flow of technologies from the US and Europe during early Soviet industrialization in eastern Ukraine. Soviet politics and economy shaped the conceptualization of planning, standardization, and the urban environment. The course will analyze the architecture of the 1930s in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Dnipro that marked the development of constructivism in the region. The course covers the architecture of eastern and western Ukraine from constructivism and Ukrainian modern to Stalinist architecture to post-modernism and post-Soviet architecture. We will emphasize the value of architectural monuments in Ukraine as UNESCO heritage sites. This study of architecture in Soviet Ukraine will convey an understanding of the current situation in architecture in this region. The course comprises the workshops History of Architecture Beyond the Classroom: Archival materials study; Special Collections materials study; Talks with invited speakers - mainly online with Ukrainian historians and architects.

Instructor(s): O. Chabanyuk     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course requires students to plan three Fridays for museum/library visits: Ukrainian National Museum of Chicago, Newberry Library and UChicago Library.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 33701, HIST 23701, REES 23701, ARCH 23701

REES 33709. The New Socialist Realism. 100 Units.

Taking the astonishing fiction of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) as a starting point this course asks: how have realist fictions in general and socialist realism in particular been used to transform material and ideological realities? Can realism be revolutionary? Can it be dictated by the state? Grounded in historical context, our reading will venture into the afterlife and future of socialist realism. As philosophers across the world reinterpreted Platonov and other Soviet and socialist authors, what appeared to be gaps in intellectual and literary history now seem to be continuities of influence across borders. Reading Shklovsky, Lukács, Jameson, Timofeeva, Malabou and others, this course traces the new and transnational socialist realism. Topics include ideology, gender, community, colonialism and decolonization.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This is a new graduate and upper-level undergraduate seminar
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 33709

REES 34010. Ecocide: Reckoning with Environmental Destruction. 100 Units.

Ecocide is defined as a crime against the environment, originating from legal debate in the context of the Vietnam War. Taking Vietnam as our starting point, this course engages with a wide range of materials (from novels to poetry to ethnographic studies) and different places (Ukraine, Vanuatu, Iraq, Palestine, and many others) in order to examine the broader context in which the campaign to criminalize environmental destruction emerged. We discuss what forms of environmental justice we can envision and pursue today, and debate possibilities and limitations of legal accountability. The readings are inter- and multidisciplinary, drawing from environmental humanities, anthropology, legal studies, history, and other fields. The assignments include a possibility to develop one's own research topic, which could take the form of a traditional paper or a critical-creative project (video essay, poster, other creative forms).

Instructor(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 24010

REES 34220. Anxious Spaces. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Spring Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 34220, ARCH 24220, REES 24220, GNSE 24220

REES 34404. Theater in East and Central Europe: Between Power and Powerlessness. 100 Units.

National independence movements, revolutions, authoritarian regimes, and the decline of empire: playwrights in East and Central Europe wrote major works of world literature in response to these events - and sometimes in prescient anticipation of them. This seminar introduces students to the plays that, from Chekhov to Havel, shaped the fates of nations. Topics include: the avant-garde, theater of the absurd, acting methods, performance art, and documentary theater.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26040, REES 24404, TAPS 35214, TAPS 25214

REES 34425. Invasion Culture: Russia through its Wars. 100 Units.

This course looks at contemporary culture through Russia's invasions, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Broadly, this course explores how war shapes cultural life. How do the policies and strategies 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, How are Russia's wars fought and resisted in the domain of culture?

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 34009, GLST 24424, MAPH 34425, REES 24425, CMLT 24425, HIST 24009

REES 34426. The Witch Craze in 17th-Century Europe: Scotland, Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and Moravia. 100 Units.

In this course, we look carefully at the reasons for and repercussions of the "witch craze" in the long 17th-century, focussing on primary texts such as trial reports, legal literature, pamphlets, woodcuts, scholarly dissent, and other paraphernalia. The course follows a sweep of the craze from Lancashire in Scotland, where trials began in the 1590s, to Poznań in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the Russian village of Lukh on the outskirts of Moscow, where between 1656 and 1660 over twenty-five individuals, most of them male, were tried and several executed, and finally to Northern Moravia under Habsburg rule where inquisitor Hetman Boblig presided over the burning of almost 100 "witches." In each region, trials followed different customs-Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic-and answered to different legislative discourse-ecclesiastical, laic, secular-yet all can be said to be the product of a common desire and collective fear. To supplement our understanding of the multifaceted anxieties that are expressed in works such as King James' Daemonologie (1597), and to ask more questions of the intersectional phobias around gender, sexuality, religion, and class (rural-urban; colony-metropole), we take up theory from Foucault, Federici, and Mbembe, and others.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 34426, GNSE 24426, REES 24426, HIST 22315, HIST 32315

REES 35001. Introduction to the Musical Folklore of Central Asia. 100 Units.

This course explores the musical traditions of the peoples of Central Asia, both in terms of historical development and cultural significance. Topics include the music of the epic tradition, the use of music for healing, instrumental genres, and Central Asian folk and classical traditions. Basic field methods for ethnomusicology are also covered. Extensive use is made of recordings of musical performances and of live performances in the area.

Instructor(s): Kagan Arik     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 33503, REES 25001, NEHC 30765, NEHC 20765, ANTH 25905, MUSI 23503

REES 35010. Immersive Poetics and Permeable Screens. 100 Units.

What does it mean to call a book, a film, or an artwork "immersive"? What do we gain when we lose ourselves in a work of art, and what is it that we lose? Whereas Diderot lauded the feeling of "delicious repose" elicited from pastoral paintings, literary theorist Victor Shklovsky claimed that art exists "to return sensation to life, to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony." Are these reactions opposed or related? What are the dangers of this kind of attraction in the age of mass spectacle or of its use for the ends of an autocratic or fascist ideology? In this seminar, we will examine literary, film and media theories of immersion in international perspective. Case studies in world cinema and literature, from 19th century second-person narratives to recent VR experiences. Students will introduce works from their own area of specialization over the course of the term. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with permission of instructor.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Undergraduates by consent only
Equivalent Course(s): REES 25010

REES 35030. The Writing I. 100 Units.

How do personal and lived experiences shape our understanding of social and cultural phenomena? What is the role of the self in the practice of academic writing? In this course we will examine the self as a method through which we interpret the world and as a repository of knowledge. We will study different academic genres in which personal and lived experiences constitute an integral component of knowledge-making, such as autoethnography and autotheory, discussing their relation to feminist thought. We will also practice and share academic writing that engages the self as a method to understand, interpret and theorize the world around us. The readings will include Lauren Fournier, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Shushan Avagyan, Stephanie D. Clare, Donna Haraway, among many others. There will also be workshops/talks by practitioners of autoethnography and autotheory.

Instructor(s): Darya Tsymbalyuk     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 35031, REES 25030, GNSE 25031

REES 35603. Narratives of Power. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: TBD
Note(s): A companion to Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump, this course covers different material and does not require the former as a prerequisite. Together the courses consider how form and content shape the spread of information.
Equivalent Course(s): PARR 25600, CMLT 25603, CMLT 35603, MAPH 35603, REES 25603, SIGN 26029

REES 35604. Russian Media at War. 100 Units.

In this course we will form a collective to follow and respond to Russian media coverage of the war in Ukraine and its larger context. We will consider the impact of tightened control over journalistic free speech and the increasingly top-down control of representations of Russia's role in the region, with a primary focus on Ukraine. We will analyze the main narratives that have been used to justify the actions of the Russian state, and the methods that have been used to undermine counternarratives. While we will find tools of analysis through background reading in theory, we will spend most of our time looking at current media content coming out of Russia, Ukraine, and their neighboring countries, with some attention also to American and other western sources. Russian, Ukrainian, and other language skills will be highly useful, but are not required.

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 25604, KNOW 35604, REES 25604

REES 36005. Anth/Lit: Pushkin and Eugene Onegen. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 34816

REES 36034. Russian Poetry. 100 Units.

What should poetry do-should it have any tasks (personal, literary, political)? In this course, we read short texts that stun, adore, inspire, grieve, mobilize, berate, forgive or forget their addressees and subjects, that reach (or fail to reach) us, their almost-certainly unintended, contemporary readers. Meeting both canonical and forgotten authors across three centuries and many countries of Russophone writing, this course *has* a task: to find what the poems conceal and reveal about their worlds--and ours. If you love poetry, or you have some knowledge of Russian, or you have taken the Russia and Eurasia Civ Core sequence, this class is a good fit for you. The syllabus is finalized with students' preferences and curiosities in mind. Assignment options include creative projects, independent research, journaling or essays. Discussion of texts will focus on gender, religion, race, imperial subjectivity, and dissent.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 26034, GNSE 36034, REES 26034

REES 36038. Russophonia: Contemporary Poetry Beyond Borders. 100 Units.

Like anglophone and francophone literatures, russophone culture has long been produced beyond Russia's borders. The collapse of the Soviet Union both shrunk and scattered Russia's cultural influence, transforming the contours of "russophonia-land." Studying the development of poetry written in Russian both within and outside of Russia, we read anthologies of Russian poems from Kyiv, Minsk, Petersburg, Fergana, Alma-Aty, Tel Aviv, and New York. We consider: revolutionary exchange networks, colonization, immigration, translation, and other dynamics that drive linguistic spread. Students undertake presentations and research on writers of their choice.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: TBD
Prerequisite(s): Knowledge of Russian for reading.
Equivalent Course(s): REES 26038

REES 36072. The Roots of War: Historical and Cultural Causes of Russian Aggression in Ukraine. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): Sergei Shokarev      Terms Offered: Spring Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 26072

REES 36073. Post-Soviet Ukraine. 100 Units.

This course focuses on the cultural life of Ukraine after the Soviet collapse. In a guided process, students will co-facilitate this syllabus, deciding on topics and readings in (translated) Ukrainian literature and film as well as the history of Ukraine. Possible topics include: memory of Soviet wars, the capitalist transition, Chornobyl, artistic movements, subcultures, the Maidan Revolution, Russia's war, language politics, ethnicities, and gender relations. Reading options include Andryukhovich, Zabuzhko, Plokhy, Zhadan. No prior knowledge required.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 26070, HIST 33615, HIST 23615

REES 36074. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. 100 Units.

Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is widely considered to be one of Soviet cinema's great auteurs, a fiercely independent creative artist and thinker. Known for his long takes, visual imagery, intertextuality, and philosophical self-reflectiveness, Tarkovsky has profoundly shaped the evolution of modern art cinema over the past fifty years and his legacy is still very much alive in both the Slavic world and the west. In this course, we will study Tarkovsky's major films focusing particularly on their aesthetic characteristics, spiritual and philosophical dimensions, and cultural and political context.

Instructor(s): David Molina     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 36074, CMST 26074, REES 26074

REES 36077. Russian Modernist Theater. 100 Units.

Russian Modernist Theater explores the theory and practice of the new stage forms developed in Russia from 1900 to 1940. The course begins with the Stanislavsky school, and then delves deeply into the more experimental work of Meyerhold and his generation and the first attempts to create a revolutionary Soviet theater in the 1920s. The course will include a production, which will be scaled to the number and ambitions of the enrolled students. Course requirements can be met through the writing of a conventional paper, or through the production, via set or costume design, dramaturgy, performance, or staging. Each of these production assignments will require a write-up relating the work to the course materials and discussions.

Instructor(s): William Nickell     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): REES 26077

REES 36600. Materiality and Socialist Cinema. 100 Units.

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the "material turn" in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss and Paola Iovene     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 26611, REES 26600, EALC 36611, CMLT 26602, CMST 36611, CMST 26611, CMLT 36602

REES 36603. Soviet Cinema and the Avant-Garde. 100 Units.

This course examines some of the most ambitious claims about what cinema as a medium can do by early Soviet filmmakers. We look at the extraordinary flourishing of cinema in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s including films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Shub, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, their theoretical writings, their collaborations with avant-garde artists and theater designers, and their far-reaching influence on film and film theory. We will also consider the political and historical context of the films and their creators.

Instructor(s): Anne E. Moss     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 26603, CMST 24507

REES 37007. Mapping Our Selves: Identity and Subjectivity. 100 Units.

This course examines how different collective and individual selves develop, change, and get mobilized in modern Eastern and Central Europe. As Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment, and national ideas spread across Europe, the understanding of self and subjectivity was fundamentally transformed. In Eastern and Central Europe, themselves terms that have their roots in these changes, this occurred at a tumultuous time of changes of borders, countries, and forms of government. This course focuses primarily on cultures and literatures in Poland's different forms of existence and non-existence, a locus central to these dynamics. We will ask such questions as: What does it mean to develop a sense of a nation without a territorial state or within an empire? What kind of subject do different works of art elicit and why? Under what circumstances does identity become a more engaging understanding of the self? What are its borders and porousness? We will be reading a variety of literary, artistic, and theoretical works from the 18th to 21st centuries, among them Immanuel Kant on Enlightenment subjectivity, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the form and future of Poland, Karl Marx on base and superstructure, and Louis Althusser on the dynamics of getting drawn into a society and economic system (interpellation); as well as Polish authors probing these issues and tensions, such as Witkacy, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Andrzej Stasiuk, Debora Vogel, and Stanisław Brzozowski.

Instructor(s): Sasha Lindskog     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 27007

REES 37019. Holocaust Object. 100 Units.

In this course, we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented during World War II. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos and extermination and concentration camps. These sites which-once the locations of genocide-are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preservation, which we view through a prism of authenticity. In order to study representation, we critically engage a textual and visual reading of museum narrations and fiction writings; to tackle the demands of preservation, we apply a neo-materialist approach. Of special interest are survivors' testimonies as appended to the artifacts they donated. The course will also equip you with salient critical tools for future creative research in Holocaust studies.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): ARCH 27019, ANTH 35035, HIST 33413, ANTH 23910, REES 27019, HIST 23413, JWSC 29500

REES 37025. The Cracks of Being: Polish Modernist Literature. 100 Units.

The Cracks of Being: Polish Modernist Literature. The 19th and early 20th centuries were characterized by radical changes: trains, cameras, telephones, industrialization, democracy. Moreover, objectivity appeared to be undermined by our unconscious, making for an increased doubt and suspicion toward being. "All that is solid melts into air," Karl Marx wrote, and many would-be truths seemed to unmoor. On the other hand, modern life came with a sense of alienation and disenchantment in our increasingly mediated experience. Straddling this chasm, modernist literature has used many different strategies to make literary modern existence; and these are the focus of this course. Some authors try to salvage form, others attempt to mimic this instability, or represent the impossibility of representation. Our authors look for liminalities, epiphanies, cracks and nooks of being and language, in order to sound out, defamiliarize and re-present reality. The authors we will read include Bolesław Leśmian, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zofia Nałkowska, Bruno Schulz, Czesław Miłosz, and Witold Gombrowicz.

Instructor(s): Sasha Lindskog     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 27025

REES 37026. Kieslowski: The Decalogue. 100 Units.

In this class, we study the monumental series "The Decalogue" by one of the most influential filmmakers from Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski. Without mechanically relating the films to the Ten Commandments, Kieślowski explores the relevance of the biblical moral rules to the state of modern man forced to make ethical choices. Each part of the series contests the absolutism of moral axioms through narrative twists and reversals in a wide, universalized sphere. An analysis of the films will be accompanied by readings from Kieślowski's own writings and interviews, including criticism by Zizek, Insdorf, and others.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 27026, CMST 26705, FNDL 24003, CMST 36705

REES 37031. Between Phenomenology and Formalism: A Seminar in Literary Theory and Philosophy. 100 Units.

The course opens with a discussion of the distant origins of phenomenology and formalism as dominant approaches in East Central European literary criticism during the interwar period. In the case of phenomenology, the course discussion harks back to the 19th century Franz Brentano's work on intentionality at Charles University in Prague; the conceptualization of the Russian Formalists also gets an originary treatment beginning in the Opojaz and Moscow Linguistic Circle etc. Moving chronologically, the course includes Edmund Husserl's basic notions of phenomenology paralleled by readings from Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp and Boris Eikhenbaum. The introduction of Roman Ingarden's monumental conceptualization of literature in his The Literary Work of Art leads to exploration of his pioneering work on reader response theory in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Our overview of literary phenomenology concludes with readings from Jan Patočka. Finally, we explore Kazimierz Wóycicki's work to help us understand how the Polish version of formalism reached its peak in the 1960s and 70s in the guise of structuralism. All readings are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): All readings are in English.

REES 37032. Bodies, Objects, Cognition. 100 Units.

This course explores the differences between objects and embodiment as examined in varied historical periods and artistic genres. We will probe the ontological indeterminacy of embodied beings versus machines in terms of agency, autonomy, subjectivity, and artificiality. Our main operative mode is a visual-verbal comparison and its perception. Through discussions of such visual strategies as pareidolia, abstraction, bodyscape, as well as the scientific phenomena of cloning and humanoid robotics, the course will destabilize once fundamental epistemologies to present a cognitive moment when the traditionally stable object-body dichotomy is understood anew as a dynamic site of affective, biological, representational, and mechanical relations. Visual artists, writers and critics studied will include Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Tadeusz Borowski, Stanislaw Lem, Allan Teger, Magdalena Abakanowicz, W.T.J. Mitchell and others. All readings are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 37032, ARTH 37032, ARTH 27032, ANTH 27032, REES 27032, KNOW 37032, KNOW 27032

REES 37035. Gender, Agency, and Power in 19th C Russian Literature. 100 Units.

This course focuses on scandalous provocations and quieter acts of resistance against normative gender expectations in 19th-century Russian literature. We read narratives of rebellion by individuals and collective actions by groups of women, and consider the surprising agency attributed to women's cooperative work in Russian literature as well as the heavy burdens placed on women by family, state, and church. Readings include primarily short fiction in a variety of genres (sentimental, romantic, realist, and gothic) by canonized male writers and by women writers of the 19th Century who are less often taught and translated, but were widely read in their own day. These works expand our understanding of the narrative possibilities for sexuality and gendered subjectivity in the Russian literary sphere, and of the ways in which possibility itself was made and remade by literary expression. The course also introduces students to methods of literary analysis informed by critical theories of gender, and asks how Russian literary and cultural history may offer new ways of thinking about gendered bodies, performance, and interrelations in the 19th Century and today.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20118, REES 27035

REES 38800. Politics and Cinema under Authority. 100 Units.

Why do authoritarian regimes take interest in art and culture? How do citizens respond to these efforts? Between authoritarian propaganda and outright contestation of authoritarianism is a wide niche of art and media production that is just independent enough to capture the attention of the citizens and yet subtle enough to not alarm authoritarian rulers. This is relevant for film and television in particular, which cannot function under authoritarian regimes without official approval. In this course, we explore the compromises filmmakers make to continue their creative practice and the concessions state actors grant to accommodate artistic work using the 10-episode television series, Dekalog (1988), by the acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. To answer our questions, we draw on literature and methodology from political science and film and media studies. We investigate what is to be gained by combining approaches from two disciplines that are rarely in conversation with each other.

Instructor(s): Maria Belodubrovskaya and Monika Nalepa     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Enrollment limit: 18
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28805, CDIN 38800, CDIN 28801, PLSC 38801, PLSC 28805, CMST 38800, REES 28800

REES 38914. New Directions in Slavic Studies. 100 Units.

This seminar examines the recent major works of scholarship in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, taking stock of the current state of the field. It introduces the interdisciplinary research methods (e.g. historical, anthropological, digital studies, etc.) that have driven new developments in SEES.

Instructor(s): Ania Aizman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 28914

REES 39009. Balkan Folklore. 100 Units.

Vampires, fire-breathing dragons, vengeful mountain nymphs. 7/8 and other uneven dance beats, heart-rending laments, and a living epic tradition. This course is an overview of Balkan folklore from historical, political, and anthropological perspectives. We seek to understand folk tradition as a dynamic process and consider the function of different folklore genres in the imagining and maintenance of community and the socialization of the individual. We also experience this living tradition firsthand through visits of a Chicago-based folk dance ensemble, "Balkan Dance."

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 30568, REES 29009, CMLT 23301, ANTH 25908, ANTH 35908, CMLT 33301, NEHC 20568

REES 39010. Strangers to Ourselves: Emigre Literature and Film from Russia and Southeast Europe. 100 Units.

Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking," writes Julia Kristeva in "Strangers to Ourselves," the book from which this course takes its title. The authors whose works we are going to examine often alternate between nostalgia and the exhilaration of being set free into the breathless possibilities of new lives. Leaving home does not simply mean movement in space. Separated from the sensory boundaries that defined their old selves, immigrants inhabit a warped, fragmentary, disjointed time. Immigrant writers struggle for breath-speech, language, voice, the very stuff of their craft resounds somewhere else. Join us as we explore the pain, the struggle, the failure, and the triumph of emigration and exile. Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nina Berberova, Julia Kristeva, Alexander Hemon, Dubravka Ugrešić, Norman Manea, Miroslav Penkov, Ilija Trojanow, Tea Obreht.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 26912, CMLT 36912, REES 29010

REES 39013. The Burden of History: The Nation and Its Lost Paradise. 100 Units.

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).

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 33401, REES 29013, HIST 34005, HIST 24005, NEHC 30573, CMLT 23401, NEHC 20573

REES 39021. The Shadows of Living Things: The Writings of Mikhail Bulgakov. 100 Units.

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 Master and Margarita.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29020, REES 29021

REES 39023. Returning the Gaze: The West and the Rest. 100 Units.

Aware of being observed. And judged. Inferior... Abject… Angry... Proud… This course provides insight into identity dynamics between the "West," as the center of economic power and self-proclaimed normative humanity, and the "Rest," as the poor, backward, volatile periphery. We investigate the relationship between South East European self-representations and the imagined Western gaze. Inherent in the act of looking at oneself through the eyes of another is the privileging of that other's standard. We will contemplate the responses to this existential position of identifying symbolically with a normative site outside of oneself-self-consciousness, defiance, arrogance, self-exoticization-and consider how these responses have been incorporated in the texture of the national, gender, and social identities in the region. Orhan Pamuk, Ivo Andrić, Nikos Kazantzakis, Aleko Konstantinov, Emir Kusturica, Milcho Manchevski.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 39023, HIST 23609, NEHC 29023, HIST 33609, NEHC 39023, CMLT 29023, REES 29023

REES 39024. States of Surveillance. 100 Units.

What does it feel to be watched and listened to all the time? Literary and cinematic works give us a glimpse into the experience of living under surveillance and explore the human effects of surveillance - the fraying of intimacy, fracturing sense of self, testing the limits of what it means to be human. Works from the former Soviet Union (Solzhenitsyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Zvyagintsev), former Yugoslavia (Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Dušan Kovačević), Romania (Norman Manea, Cristian Mungiu), Bulgaria (Valeri Petrov), and Albania (Ismail Kadare).

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29024, CMLT 29024, CMLT 39024

REES 39026. Loyalties, Friendships, Loves. 100 Units.

The Eastern European experience of surveillance under the police state is most often associated with the sense of betrayal, the invasion of the innermost spaces of intimacy and individual consciousness by the secret all-seeing eye. What is often overlooked, however, is the obverse side of fear - the fierce code of loyalty, the tenacity of friendship and love nurtured in the interstices of surveillance and resistance. How are love and friendship understood in such circumstances? Are they experienced in the same way as we understand them? This class will explore these emotional cultural scripts through an array of East, Central, South-East European literary and cinematic works.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29026, CMLT 29026

REES 39035. Empathetic Sorrows: Recent Bulgarian Literature. 100 Units.

What does it feel to write from "the saddest place in the world"? In 2010, The Economist published an article entitled "The Rich, the Poor, and Bulgaria," in which Bulgaria bucked the paradigm of predicted correlation between income and happiness. "The saddest place in the world, relative to its income per person," the Economist reported, "is Bulgaria." Storytelling invites us to step outside ourselves and inhabit someone else's way of relating to the world. This course will explore the gentle, melancholic empathy with which Bulgarian post-socialist literature seeks otherness in the (no longer heroic) past and the (even less heroic) present.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29035

REES 39045. Dostoevsky and Critical Theory. 100 Units.

The tormented, obsessed, and sadistic characters of Dostoevsky's novels posed a challenge to positivism and reason too scandalous and compelling to be ignored. The novels inspired some of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the fields of religion, philosophy, psychology and literary theory. We will read two of Dostoevsky's philosophically challenging novels alongside works by these critics and philosophers, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud, Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Levinas. While exploring their ideas about faith and unbelief, madness and reason, violence and torture, society and history, we will also inquire into the relationships among literature, philosophy and biography and examine the processes of influence and adaptation.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28207, CMLT 39045, CMLT 29045, REES 29045

REES 39071. Magic Nations. 100 Units.

As part of the post-colonial turn, magic realism is a hybrid mode of narration rejects, overcomes, and offers an alternative to the colonial, Enlightenment episteme. It mobilizes the imaginations and narrative modes of pre-colonial pasts in the articulation of new, post-colonial, often national, selves. In this course, we will unpack some captivating narratives from Southeast Europe in which the visions of the pre-modern mythic worlds emerge as the magic, transcendent core of the modern nations. We will indulge in the sheer enjoyment of the brilliance of these text while focusing on the paradoxes they embody - for example, the simultaneous rejection and reliance on the realist mode, the colonial worldview, and its civilizational hierarchies and models.

Instructor(s): Angelina Ilieva     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 29071, CMLT 29071

REES 39700. Reading/Research. 100 Units.

This is a specially designed course not normally offered as part of the curriculum that is arranged between a student and a faculty member.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Note(s): Requires the consent of the instructor.

REES 39800. Reading/Research: Czech. 100 Units.

REES 40000. Slavic Department Seminar. 100 Units.

This graduate-level seminar is conducted by one or more members of the Department, with a variable schedule that includes nine meetings of 3-hour duration. Meetings may be coordinated to include guest speakers in the department and other events. As content will change with each iteration, the course may be repeated for credit.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Spring

REES 43400. Salvage Poetics: Literature as Ethnography. 100 Units.

This interdisciplinary course will synthesize ethnographic and literary discourses to consider the ways in which the culture of the Jewish "shtetl," the small towns and villages in eastern Europe where Jewish culture thrived for nearly a millennium, has been represented in the United States after the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. We will read a wide variety of materials within the field of anthropology as well as Jewish literatures and cultures to tease out the concept of "salvage poetics" or a literary poetics that has been forged in popular attempts to bridge dramatically different historical moments, different geographic locations, and different cultures across the abyss of the Holocaust.

Instructor(s): Sheila Jelen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course meets the LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students. Undergraduates may petition the instructor to enroll.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 53400, AASR 53400, ANTH 53401, HIJD 53400, RLVC 53400

REES 43902. Colloquium: Stalinism. 100 Units.

We will explore Stalin as a personality and Stalinism as a political order, an economy, a cultural system, a set of beliefs and rituals, and a way of life. Topics include the dictator, his entourage, and his cult; decision making and the new elite; industrialization, collectivization, and the economy of shortages; revolution and conservatism; nationalism, internationalism, and ethnic cleansing; political terror, mass murder, and the Gulag; communal apartments, survival strategies, and intimate life; media and the socialist-realist dreamworld; legacies and historical consciousness. Readings include classics in the field and newest hits as well as works of fiction.

Instructor(s): E. Gilburd     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Advanced undergraduates with consent of instructor and prior coursework on 20th-C Russia or Russian Civ.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 43902

REES 43903. The Art of Healing: Medical Aesthetics in Russia & the U.S. 100 Units.

What makes a medical treatment look like it will work? What makes us feel that we are receiving good care, or that we can be cured? How are these responses shaped by the rhetorical practices of doctors, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies, by the physical appearance of hospitals, offices, and instruments, or by smells and sounds? Why does the color of a pill influence its effectiveness, and how can placebos achieve what less inert medication cannot? How do predictions of success or failure effect treatment responses? When does technology instill confidence, and when does it produce a sense of degradation? Is the doctor seen primarily as a caregiver or a scientist, and how does this affect treatment outcomes? What is the aesthetic experience of being "sick"? In this course we will consider these problems from the vantage points of a medical professional and a cultural historian, focusing on material from the United States and Soviet/post-Soviet Russia. Our methodology will combine techniques of aesthetic analysis with those of medical anthropology, history and practice.

Equivalent Course(s): HIST 45100, CDIN 43903

REES 45005. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960. 100 Units.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28600, MAPH 33700, ARTH 38600, ENGL 29600, ARTV 20003, CMST 28600, CMLT 32500, CMLT 22500, CMST 48600, ENGL 48900, REES 25005, MADD 18600

REES 45027. Between 'New Woman' and 'Sex Worker': Polish Women's Writings in the 1930s. 100 Units.

During the interwar period a constellation of Polish women writers defined through their novels politically and socially progressive positions; although not deeply influenced by Marxism, they were critical of the class society, state, ruling elite, and Catholic mentality. The seminar will investigate these writers' attempts to represent the unrepresented such as the proletariat, the jobless, the disabled, as well as other socially marginalized members of the society including sex workers. The course will discuss an emergence of the "new woman" against the backdrop of a deeply ingrained patriarchalism, and as an epitome of creative, sexual, and social independence. We will view these phenomena with its roots in 19th century Polish and French naturalism in context of the visual art of Neue Sachlichkeit and the emergence of reportage. Inspired by the social critique offered by writings of Boguszewska, Krzywicka, Melcer, Nałkowska, and others, the seminar will consider the way in which genres such as a novel, short story, and reportage can become tools for reform. All readings in this seminar are in Polish.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 45027, POLI 45027

REES 46000. Pro-Sem: Teaching Slavic Languages. 100 Units.

Teaching Slavic Languages (REES #####) prepares graduate students as effective instructors of Slavic Languages in Academia. This course introduces students to fundamental principles of Second Language Acquisition, an array of methodologies, as well as essential and practical tools for the development of individual language pedagogy. Particular emphasis is placed on leading trends in Second Language Pedagogy which include, but are not limited to, communicative and proficiency-oriented methods. Students are expected to participate in discussions, design relevant pedagogical and professional materials, and lead instruction in preparation for teaching Slavic Languages.

Instructor(s): Erik Houle     Terms Offered: Autumn

REES 46100. Slavic Literary and Critical Theory. 100 Units.

We will explore some of the most creative and rigorous tools for the analysis of literature and art in any language. These critics' answers to the questions of what is aesthetic value, the relationship of art to lived experience, and the nature of art as an act of communication endure as some of the most vital and challenging propositions in literary and art criticism. We will work through highlights of Symbolist, Formalist, Bakhtinian and Semiotic (Tartu school) criticism.

Instructor(s): Anne Eakin Moss     Terms Offered: Autumn

REES 46200. Critical and Literary Theory. 100 Units.

In this seminar, we carefully read selections from some of the most generative and important theorists and literary critics from the 20th and 21st centuries so as to be well equipped to understand their arguments, acknowledge their biases, and critically and responsibly find their shortcomings or discover their relevance for our field, and beyond. Among the authors whose work on cultural philosophy or the philosophy of language and literature we explore are Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, the members of the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, Habermas), Foucault, Ricoeur, Wittgenstein, Structuralism and post-structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari), the psychoanalysts Freud, and Lacan, theorists of gender and sexuality (Beauvoir, Butler, and Haraway, Halberstam) and of nationalism, colonialism and postcolonialism (Anderson, Fanon, Mbembe, Hardt) and of "speculative realism" (Meillassoux, Harman, Bryant), and theorists of the anthropocene and of environmental and biodiversity loss (Tedeschi, Alberro, Morton). The course is tailored to your own research interests and you are encouraged to engage with the theories and arguments by bringing your own interests and claims to a conversation with those of our readings. The requirements of this course are twofold: weekly discussion posts and active participation in class discussion. requirements of this course.

Instructor(s): Malynne Sternstein     Terms Offered: Winter

REES 47000. Time and Memory. 100 Units.

At the beginning of the 20th century moderns and modernists announced their break with the past and launched various artistic , philosophical, political, and social experiments that claimed to construct society and the individual anew. The machine, speed, technology, and the future were the watchwords of Futurists and other modernist groups. Revolutionary transformation on all fronts was the way forward. In the same period advances in science and technology radically changed the horizon of possibility. Yet other important artists and thinkers offered the contrasting view that the past remains alive in the present-both in individuals and in human cultures. Memory was key to the future. This seminar focuses on the second tendency by examining the work of three theorists-Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Victor Shklovsky-and three literary authors-Victor Shklovsky, Virginia Woolf, and Osip Mandelshtam.

Instructor(s): Harriet Murav     Terms Offered: Spring

REES 49800. Between the Jewish Question & the Modern Condition: Jewish Thought, Culture, and Politics, 1830-1940. 100 Units.

In the 19th c., the Jewish presence in Europe ceased to be a fact & became a Question: how were Jews to be transformed and integrated-or "emancipated"-into "society." From the 1870s, this Jewish Question was globalized & politicized by nationalism, new forms of antisemitism, European imperialism, capitalism's reordering of global life, mass migration from Eastern Europe to the US, the racialization of global politics & tensions of nation & empire in Eastern Europe, the Ottoman world & the Middle East. This class investigates how European, US & Middle Eastern Jews confronted the Jewish Question (1830s-1930s) communally & individually. It asks how this confrontation shaped key dimensions of modern Jewish thought, culture & politics: Zionism & other forms of modern Jewish politics, Jewish social thought, religious life, communal policy & new forms of secular culture. Conversely, we will also consider the limits of approaching modern Jewish culture & consciousness as a response to the Jewish Question: are modern forms of Jewish religiosity & secularity, gender norms, visions of culture, education & the moral life better understood as emergent responses to more general problems of modernity? Alternatively, should key aspects of contemporary Jewish life-such as religious nationalism & religious revivalism-be understood at least in part as products not so much of modernity's powers as of modernity's limited effects on a Jewish tradition evolving according to its own cultural logic?

Instructor(s): K. Moss     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Graduate students of all intellectual background welcome; advanced undergraduates with consent of instructor.
Note(s): Readings include classic and new scholarship matched to key works of Jewish thought and culture. All readings in English (translation), but I will happily facilitate reading in the original languages.
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 38821, NEHC 47800, HIST 49800

REES 53900. A Field on Fire in a World on Fire: Future(s) of REES and the Broader Region. 100 Units.

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.

Instructor(s): F. Hillis and D. Tsymbalyuk     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 53900