An introduction to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through each of the major disciplines represented in the program: language, literature, anthropology, geography, history, government, sociology, and economics.

Introduction to Russian literature of the modern period, from the late eighteenth century to the present. Explores a variety of genres, from fairy tales to the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Pelevin. All reading and instruction is in English.

Introduction to major works by 20th-century Eastern and Central European writers. Explore the history and cultures of the region, including imperial legacies, World Wars, totalitarianism(s), fall of communism, and borderlands.

Examines the vampire in the cultures of Russia and Eastern Europe, including manifestations in literature, religion, art, film, and common practices from its origins to present.

Examines historical texts from four different magical traditions to find the truth behind the fiction and the historical events that sometimes permitted and sometimes persecuted the religions, philosophies, and sciences that some call magic.

Survey of Czech history and culture from the middle ages to the present day. Subjects include the culture of daily life, literature, history, philosophy, and the arts.

An in-depth survey of the culinary traditions, history, and practices of Central and Eastern Europe.

Examine different ways to show and tell stories of armed conflict and state-sponsored violence, drawing on a variety of modern media forms - such as comics, cinema, novels, and photography - as well as contemporary digital platforms including social media. Focus on the 1990s conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia).

Survey Ukrainian authors from the 1920s to the present, examining writings from "Executed Renaissance," underground literature, and postmodernism. Focus specifically on works that challenge the paradigm of socialist realism by discussing forbidden subjects (famine, religion, Gulag) or accentuating themes that are not considered "major" (personal life).

Consider Soviet Culture by examining "heroes" from both real life and works of literature, cinema, and folklore. Explore the period from the Russian 19th century throughout the Soviet Era.

Examine the familiar and unfamiliar fragments of what remains from pre-Christian European culture--the limited written records, the artifacts, and the folklore--as well as the more plentiful anti-pagan writings of early Christian missionaries. Test many of the popular claims about how Europe's pre-Christian inhabitants lived, what they believed, and how Christianization impacted their lives against the limits of what we can actually know, using the tools from the study of history, cultural studies, and religious studies.

This course is used to record credit the student earns while enrolled at another institution in a program administered by the University's Study Abroad Office. Credit is recorded as assigned by the study abroad adviser in the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. University credit is awarded for work in an exchange program; it may be counted as coursework taken in residence. Transfer credit is awarded for work in an affiliated studies program.

Explores the dilemmas of homicide, suicide, patricide, and redemption in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Uses contemporary Russian film both as a means of exploring the confusion that resulted from the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the search for a new sense of identity in Russia throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

Medieval and early modern Russian literature and culture, including literary texts from Kievan and Muscovite Russia.

Explores Russian writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, particularly his progression from idealizing family life and the Russian state to renouncing sexual love and national allegiances.

Examines Russian narratives of war and revolution as represented in fiction, cinema, and journalism.

Examines the history and cultural products (films, music, writings) of Russia's youth, and their impact on contemporary society and politics.

Examine different ways of narrating the Chernobyl disaster and general disasters through history, environmental history, sociology, art, film, fiction, and science.

Examination of the Russian folktale, its roots in ancient, pre-Christian Slavic religious tradition, its connections with other forms of folklore such as myth and legend, and its transformation in modern Russian literature. Subjects include the continuing influence of folklore explored through various aspects of Russian culture, including literature, music, ballet, film, and popular culture.

Study of fictional and real rebels and revolutionaries across almost a century of Russian literature.

Focusing on literary and artistic expressions of Russian modernist and avant-garde esthetics, this course explores various responses to Russian cultural modernity between 1890s, when Russian Symbolists first published their works, and the Party decree of 1932 that established the Writers' Union and outlawed all other literary organizations.

Explores the novel in the context of other literary works by Bulgakov and its varied sources in world literature, music, and the visual arts.

History, culture, religions, and recent upheaval of the region of the northern Caucasus called Chechnya.

Explore complex history of Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism in Russia. Examine important worship sites, including monasteries and pilgrimage destinations. Have discussions with Russian scholars of religion and practitioners of different faiths.

Examine the construction of the ideology of love, intimate relations, and gender roles, deemed appropriate for a Soviet citizen, as it is demonstrated in a selection of films.

Examine popular music and its role in political struggle and collective identity formation in the Balkans. Analyze music genres in this region in the context of the historical changes it underwent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the fall of Communism and -- in the case of former Yugoslavia -- the formation of seven new nation-states through a series of bloody and brutal wars.

Examine the literature of Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors and their artistic successors. Engage novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and even song lyrics with questions of memory and of place.

Study representations of masculinity in products of Mexican and Russian popular culture at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

Examine the role and force of the Orthodox Church in Russian history, from the Christianization of the pagan Slavs in the 10th century, through the Russian Revolution into the Soviet era, and up to the present, while considering the prescriptive tenets of the Orthodox faith (religion) alongside descriptive experiences of life within and under Russian Orthodoxy (religiosity).

Examine mobility as a point of inquiry into questions of identity, community, belonging, place and landscape, art, representation, cultural difference, experience, and history.

Examine a wide array of American attitudes towards Russia and Russians. Using a variety of political, social, and cultural events and encounters, analyze the ways in which nationalism, imperialism, and geopolitics informed American narratives about Russia and Russians, assessments that range from enthusiasm and curiosity to condemnation and outright hostility.

Explore LGBTQI stories and political struggles in Eastern Europe with a focus on the region's queer culture: literature, cinema, and the arts.

Examine theoretical readings and concrete examples of how translation politics, translation-induced reconstruction of literary systems, censorship, manipulation, and market dynamics affect the production, distribution, and reception of translated products in the realm of arts and entertainment, news media and politics, and various academic disciplines in the Middle East, United States, and beyond.

Explore how to read identities as patterns in literary texts, linguistic and cultural corpora with digital methods, and come to a deeper understanding of individual texts and textual phenomena. Examine digital research methods, tools, and use cases. Work hands-on with literary and linguistic sources.

A survey of classic Russian authors as well as experimental works from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century.

This course is used to record credit the student earns while enrolled at another institution in a program administered by the University's Study Abroad Office. Credit is recorded as assigned by the study abroad adviser in the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. University credit is awarded for work in an exchange program; it may be counted as coursework taken in residence. Transfer credit is awarded for work in an affiliated studies program.

Survey of German political and military institutions, economic development, culture, and society.

The growth of the planned economy in industry, agriculture, and labor.

Examines several dimensions of the ongoing crises in the world economic order and the interrelationships among them. Problem areas covered are neoliberalism, international money, debt, famine, immigration, and energy shocks.

Examines the major political, social, and cultural events that shaped Eastern European society in the twentieth century.

Explores the key events and developments of Southeastern Europe, the region commonly referred to as the Balkans, in the twentieth century.

Examines the war in Eastern Europe with a particular emphasis on occupation, collaboration, and resistance; the Holocaust; and the connection between ethnic cleansing, population transfer, and the establishment of communism in postwar Eastern Europe.

History of diverse views and movements regarding German national identity within their respective contexts, 1800-present.

Explores the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe.

Examine the phenomenon of political warfare in a contemporary global context, focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe. Explore the evolution of techniques of political warfare, including psychological warfare and propaganda.

An in depth examination of the political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics at work in early twentieth-century Russia.

Examine the theories of criminal responsibility from a legal perspective. Explore the application of criminal punishment in Russia in the Imperial, Soviet and modern eras.

Explore revolutionary themes in Western and non-Western countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Explore and relate commodification of nature, the climate crisis, and preserving biodiversity from the past and present. Investigate how human societies have changed their environments and how the environment has influenced the courses of societies through case studies from the ecological impact of the Teutonic Crusades to nuclear waste management in Chernobyl.

Issues of nationalism and state-building facing Russia and its neighbors. Evaluation of the post-Soviet experience from the perspectives of both domestic and foreign policy.

Learn how technologies and social changes shape each other. Use case studies from Eastern Europe and Russia from the Industrial Revolution to the Era of AI. Explore the industrialization of production and consumption, the professionalization of engineering, the emergence of multidivisional industrial enterprises, the relationship between humans and machines, the uses of "cheap nature", and technological utopianism.

Examine key contemporary security issues and policy dilemmas through the perspective of post-communist Eastern European countries in the context of European Union (EU) enlargement waves, and in the framework of their membership in supranational organizations. Consider the transformation of regional states' national security strategies, threat perception, and priorities transitioning from former Warsaw pact to full-fledged EU and NATO membership in shaping their respective national security priorities.

Examine the development and transformation of espionage, intelligence, and surveillance in Europe from the first World War to the end of the Cold War.

Survey major political ideologies like socialism, capitalism, and fascism; as well as the more recent so-called "Fourth Political Theory of Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, (variable) popular ideologies, and internet manifestos. Explore each ideology through original texts and utopian/dystopian representations in popular culture (e.g., literature, film, music, graphic art, architecture, design).

Survey the political nature, profile, and patterns of populism in selected post-communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Examine populism in terms of impact on agenda setting, political process, and governance of the region in focus at specific national and European Union-wide levels.

Examine ordinary people's experience of socialism in the Soviet Union and the plural interpretations of this experience after the USSR's collapse.

Examine the specific national approaches to foreign and domestic intelligence and espionage of former Communist bloc countries from early twentieth century to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

Explore alternatives to nation-state imaginaries across Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Examine spatial thinking, utopia, dystopia, the history of geosciences, counter-mapping, and the decolonial geopoetics of space.

Examine an overview of major developments in the economic, political, social, cultural, and gender and sexuality fields of East European history before 1914. Explore diplomacy, institutional legacies of war and peace, urban and rural developments and inequalities, spaces of language and religion, race, labor migration, and the arts.

Discover the primary historical developments of the post-war period in Eastern Europe from the imposition of communism in 1945 until its collapse in 1989. Explore political, economic, and cultural transformations of the Cold War.

Relate broad issues of economic development across the post-communist space since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Question and explore concepts, assumptions, and tools we use to assess development.

Explore the key issues related to the political economy of human-nature interactions in post-communist countries, including politics of point-source natural resources, diffuse resources, and the commons.

Focus on multicultural history, shared imperial and national spaces, and geopolitics of entangled Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Relate major political and economic issues of post-Soviet Central Asia from Soviet legacy and regime types to state-business relations and investment environment. Learn about the characteristics that unite and distinguish the Central Asian region.

Examine the Holocaust as part of Nazi Germany's quest to build a new racial order.

Examine the complex and dynamic legacies of World War II and questions of memory, identity, and politics from 1945 to the present.

Survey of Russian history from seventeenth-century Muscovy to the fall of the Romanovs in 1917.

A survey of Russian history from the revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Consider the power struggles of the democratic process by closely attending to language, rhetoric and performance.

Examine an introduction to theories of colonial critique and visual culture studies. Explore the history of the Indigenous peoples of the Eurasian north.

Introduction to Russian political and protest cultures--beyond the headlines and outside the Kremlin walls.

Focus on ways Eastern Europe is depicted on American television screen. Use anthropological framework to study multiple types of television shows, including reality tv, network dramas, and miniseries. Analyze ethnic, racial, national, and gender representation and what these constructions tell us about the ways that Eastern Europe is imagined.

Consider critical questions about the constructions of whiteness and nationalism across the globe. Examine, through an anthropological lens, how the boundaries of whiteness changed throughout history, and its relationship to far-right political groups, to trace the history of white nationalism and its present-day global resurgence.

Use an anthropological framework to think critically and analytically about global past and contemporary issues in health. Examine the root causes of health, illness, and inequality.

Develop an anthropological perspective on disinformation and conspiracy theories and examine how these phenomena are embedded in cultural, social, and political contexts. Explore the ways in which disinformation is constructed, disseminated, and maintained within different media ecologies.

Examine how linguistic practices of (im)politeness and verbal aggression shape--and are shaped by--social hierarchies, cultural contexts, and political dynamics across different contexts, from liberal to anti-liberal. Analyze how seemingly neutral concepts of "civility" and appropriate speech" often mask power relations while exploring how taboo language, conflict talk, and transgressive communication can both challenge and reinforce existing social orders.

Spatial patterns in Europe, with emphasis on cultural, historical, and political geography.

A systematic introduction to cultural, physical, political, and economic geography of the former Soviet Union. Focus on the fundamental transformation that the former Socialist Union Republics, now sovereign states, have undergone since 1991.

Develops geographical understanding of the Circumpolar region of the North, an ancient human habitat, home to distinct millennia-old civilizations.

An introduction to the basic source texts for several pre-Christian belief systems evolving in geographic proximity and their influence on one another including pre-Christian Slavic; pre-Christian Scandinavian; pre-Christian Sami and Finnish; and ancient and modern Siberian shamanism.

Examines the anthropology of "nature" and "natural resources," with particular attention to the communities in the arctic and subarctic regions. Use ethnographies to learn about the cultures of peoples who inhabit northern latitudes, especially their cosmological modes of belief and their ecological ways of life.

A comprehensive overview of major religious culture regions in the former Eastern bloc countries.

Intensive reading and research planned with and approved by the honors adviser, followed by completion of a thesis.

Multidisciplinary seminar for students in area studies, business administration, law, and public policy. The faculty includes both academics and business leaders.

Core course.

Individual instruction on some aspect of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

The history, culture, religions, and recent upheaval of Chechnya.

Examines Russian literature's extensive reflection on the nature and place of evil in human existence.

Examine Stalinism as a complex historical, ideological, and cultural phenomenon that crucially shaped Russia's destiny from the twentieth century to the present moment. Consider this phenomenon beyond popular stereotypes (blood-thirsty tyrant; miserable and terrorized population; total propaganda; etc).

Examine 20th-century European novels that function as archives of cultural memory to retrieve individual and collective memories that lay hidden and forgotten by 20th-century history. Consider critically acclaimed writers, such as W. G. Sebald, Dubravka Ugresic, Danilo Kis, Witold Gombrowicz, and Dasa Drndic.

Examine a wide spectrum of conspiracist expression, from such historical texts as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the fictions of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viktor Pelevin, and others. Consider a number of pop culture artifacts that thematize conspiracy and paranoia, as well as secondary works by contemporary scholars working in the field of conspiracy studies.

Explore several contemporary novels, featuring comedy or satire, from different Eastern European regions (Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Dagestan, Slovenia, Romania) to consider how complex history and politics are often intertwined with fantastical, humorous, and grotesque elements.

Consider the range of protest movements and revolutions resulting from the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union. Examine the dismantling of the "socialist realism" paradigm in literature and the arts, using a range of literary and non-fiction texts and films to explore these developments in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Russia, and other countries.

Consider key foreign policy challenges and security issues facing post-communist Eastern European countries from the perspective of their respective NATO and EU memberships. Examine contemporary policy debates regarding a resurgent Russian, Chinese foreign policy outreach, and non-state actors, as well as challenges and concerns on terrorism, extremism, and ethnic, religious, and political radicalization.

Explore the causes, and the patterns and modes of mobilization, of protest and regime change in Eastern Europe from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. Examine and compare the specific national roots of discontent, the mechanics of mass mobilization, and the patterns of democratic uprisings, as well as the responses of national elites and external actors, in the context of these countries' socialist and post-socialist pathways.

Explore the complicated nature of communist rule in Eastern Europe in its many forms, from Poland in the North to Yugoslavia in the South. Examine the variety of lived experiences of citizens of Eastern Europe, from the imposition of communism in the region after World War II to the collapse of the system in 1989. Discuss the most recent scholarship on the region that ties regional developments to the broader Cold War context, and covers issues ranging from state-society dynamics, to religion, consumer culture, urban change, and collectivization.

Examine the major geopolitical issues in the post-Soviet space, including the history of formation of ethnic and cultural identities, nation-building, and challenges to the regional development. Consider the influences of the 'new world order' on the former Soviet Union republics and their political, demographic, and socio-economic patterns, with special attention on the development of foreign relations by the newly independent countries with their neighbors.

Trace the concept of race over time and in its various socio-racial configurations across the globe. Consider race and racism from a global perspective, and utilize anthropological frameworks to analyze the historical and contemporary aspects of racism, racialization, white supremacy, and racial belonging.

Investigate new digital technologies and their impact on social worlds, survey old media paradigms (the novel, the newspaper), and explore new social kinds (the troll, the hashtag, the GIF archive, the emoticon, the TikTok challenge). Focus on the "practical" contributions to conversations about media, but also consider classical theoretical text to develop a rigorous understanding of new media forms, and to design ethnographic data collection methods for projects that can answer a variety of questions about digitally mediated interaction.

Receive guidance and assistance through the process of writing a Master's thesis or report. Intended for Master of Arts candidates in the final year of their graduate studies.

Preparation of a report to fulfill the requirement for the master's degree under the report option.