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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.