Related Courses, Spring 2020

PLSC 455

This cross-disciplinary course focuses on two broad questions. First: how do politicians use new technologies to influence politics? Second: how do scholars use new technologies to study politics? It uses Russia as a laboratory to explore these questions. The course consists of four parts. It starts with a review of contemporary Russia and pays attention to the quantitative studies of its economy and politics. Next, the course provides a non-technical introduction to Big Data and AI algorithms. Finally, it outlines the applications of the new technologies to the study of Russian politics.

Prerequisites: A prior Yale statistics course (e.g., PLSC 425, S&DS 242); programming experience in R. A course on research design in the social sciences is helpful, but not required.

GLBL 883

This course examines the geopolitical, political, military, socioeconomic, and ideological factors that are challenging security and stability in the region of Central and Eastern Europe after collapse of the USSR. The goal is to give students a broad understanding of the reasons for the worsening security and stability in the region, particularly the Baltic states, Visegrad states, and GUAM member states, and to model further potential developments. The influence of the global players—United States, European Union, Russia—on the security situation in the region is considered.

Harvey Weiss

ANTH 773 / F&ES 793 / EVST 473 / ANTH 473 / ARCG 473 / NELC 473 / ARCG 773 / NELC 588

Instructor: Farbod Honarpisheh

Office Location: Rosenkranz Hall Room 345

Office Hours: W 4-6pm (or by appointment)

Email: farbod.honarpisheh@yale.edu; fh2180@columbia.edu

Course Description:

From the late1950s, demands for “new cinemas” were being raised in different parts of the world. What was soon to come forth changed the practice and understanding of film until our time. While open to diverse intellectual approaches, this course will investigate the emergence of various “new wave cinemas” by placing them not only in their national contexts but also within a global frame. Our comparative critical approach focuses on the cinematic, with a constant sideway gaze towards the visual and literary, modernism of Brazil (Cinema Novo), France (Nouvelle Vague with an eye for Nouveau Roman), Iran (Moj-e Now, often juxtaposed and analyzed with the “New Poetry” ), and Yugoslavia (The Black Wave). 

Authoritative historiographies of these new wave cinemas have repeatedly underappreciated documentary films, often placing them into the evolutionary narrative of a “national cinema” or that of an auteur. This course, in reverse, foregrounds the transnational and the nonfiction. The documentaries produced in the formative years, the moment of emergence, of these new waves are established as a kind of “pre-history” that impacted how these cinematic modernisms developed in time. As the class moves forward, two major sub-themes will emerge: the body and the city. We will consider these questions: Do films brought under the designation new wave have a different relationship to the materiality of the profilmic world? In what ways the bodies and urban environments they film affect them? Can one speak positively of a global new wave style? And, if the answer to that question is yes, what were the conditions of its border crossings?

No previous training in cinema and media studies is required for this course. The students may choose to write on other new waves of the era (for instance, Germany’s Das Neue Kino, the New Hollywood, the Hungarian New Wave, the Indian New Wave, and the Turkish Yeni Sinema) or on the more contemporary cinematic manifestations of the “new” (the New Korean Cinema, the Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, the Romanian New Wave).    

RSEE 385, PLSC 385, SOCY 349

This course aims at exploring and discussing the patterns and trends in collective actions in post-Soviet Russia; it also aims at unraveling the interplay between contention and regime dynamics. Students examine the ebbs and flows of mobilization, its cross-temporal and cross-regional specifics, and its impact on the political processes. Russian language proficiency not required.

ANTH 438, ANTH 638

The course analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption of petroleum in order to explore key topics in recent social and cultural theory, including globalization, empire, cultural performance, natural resource extraction, and the nature of the state. Case studies from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union, among others.

Open to graduate students only.

ER&M 376,  PLSC 376, MGRK 304, SOCY 307

Extreme and radical right movements and political parties are a recurrent phenomenon found in most parts of the world. Discussion of their foundational values and the causes of their continuous, even increasing, support among citizens and voters.  

FILM 416, FILM 755 FREN 394, LITR 366, CPLT 935, FREN 752

This seminar uses a sample of twenty films (with clips from many others) to survey four decades of the tradition of French cinema crowned by the privileged moment of the New Wave. Graduate students are asked to challenge the idea of “national cinema” by reporting on some non-canonical or marginal film before midterm. Keeping the culture industry in view, we question the extent to which such a consistently robust cinema has been bound to—or remained partly independent of—a nation that from 1930 to 1970 underwent a depression, a socialist experiment, an occupation, a liberation, and the humiliations of decolonization abroad and social unrest (May ’68) at home. In addition to the midterm contribution, graduate students write a substantial term paper.

RSEE 336, ANTH 338, WGSS 738

Gender is an intensely politicized fault line that runs through post-Soviet society. In Russia, both political protest and political reaction are played out in overtly gendered terms (from Pussy Riot’s punk prayer to Putin’s bare-chested machismo). This seminar considers, from an ethnographic perspective, how gender has become a site of explicit politicization and contestation in post-Soviet societies. The first half of the course examines the changing circumstances of women and men in the post-Soviet economy; the post-Soviet crises and reformulations of femininity and masculinity; and the social effects provoked thereby, such as violence, homophobia, and new activism. The second half examines the various intersections of gender with other domains of social difference including class, age, race, religion, nationality. How gender is problematized in certain sites, workplaces, the home, and family is a topic of discussion, as is how certain ways of inhabiting gendered norms might give rise to forms of self and person, to modes of agency and freedom. Each post-Soviet case study is juxtaposed with comparative ethnographic examples in order to discern whether the post-Soviet region has its own gender dynamic, or instead partakes in broader global trends. These ethnographic cases are read alongside texts in feminist, gender, queer, and postcolonial theory to think across empirical examples in creative ways.

This workshop course is inspired by the great Dictionary of Untranslatables (in French in 2004; English translation 2014), edited by Barbara Cassin and involving scholars such as Étienne Balibar, Jacques Lezra and Emily Apter. Cassin’s dictionary is devoted to terms crucial to philosophical thought, but rather than offer a handbook of reified definitions, it (to quote the introduction) “explores the networks to which [a given] word belongs, and seeks to understand how a network [of philosophical concepts] functions in one language by relating it to the networks of other languages.” The result is an extraordinary investigation - historical, philological and theoretical all at once - of the interdependence of translation, philosophical speculation, and cultural setting.

            In this workshop, we will do something similar for key terms in film and media studies. As scholars of film and media, we continually encounter cruxes of translation not as obstacles, but as provocations to new thinking, not least about the very contours of our field globally considered. Our meetings will involve presentations by two, perhaps three participants, who will come prepared to discuss the ins-and-outs of a specific term we have decided upon (and about which the rest of the group will also have thought). If possible, we want the presenters to offer ideas on terms they are dealing with in their current work.

            Questions that might be asked of each term or concept could include: which problems does a term solve in a given language, and which problems might it create? What kind of work on language is performed in each instance (e.g., the use of calques; inventing neologisms; incorporating explanatory passages or notes to explain or specify the use of a given term)? How do film and media terminological “networks” relate to other networks both within a specific language and across languages (e.g., the vocabularies of literary or art criticism, of communications technologies, of other disciplines such as history, sociology, or psychology)? How do the linguistic features of specific languages inflect these migrating terms?

The course will be grounded in collective work and presentations, and will culminate in a collectively-authored set of short pieces, and hopefully to be published in the online section of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Each will focus on a single term of importance within critical film and media studies, considered within some of the different language and disciplinary contexts within which they operate and between which they migrate. 

Bryan Fuermann

ARCH 314 / URBN 314

This course is designed as an introductory survey of the history of landscape architecture and the wider, cultivated landscape in Western Europe and the United States from the Ancient Roman period to mid-twentieth century America. Included in the lectures, presented chronologically, are the gardens of Ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the early and late Italian Renaissance, 17th century France, 18th century Britain, 19th century Britain and America with its public and national parks, and mid-twentieth century America. The course focuses each week on one of these periods, analyzes in detail iconic gardens of the period, and placse them within their historical and theoretical context.

This course explores the diversity of Western Christianity from the end of antiquity to the start of the early modern period. Central themes include the development of theology, concepts of reform, mysticism, gender, and relations between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In lectures and sections the class investigates a broad range of primary sources, including written texts, visual images, architecture, and music. The medieval age witnessed constant change and innovation in church and society and was transformed by its encounters with religions and cultures beyond Europe.

Mitja Velikonja

RSEE 334

Nostalgia for socialism is one of the most unexpected social, cultural, and political phenomena that appeared in post-socialist societies. It acquires very different characteristics in different countries, for different groups of people and for different reasons. The course focuses on the question why nostalgia today appears in most different fields of social life of the post-socialist Eastern Europe: in popular and consumer culture, as part of personal and collective memory, in political life, among collectors of memorabilia, at different social events, in art, aesthetics and design. Particular emphasis on specific forms of nostalgic reminiscences common among very young generations without first-hand experiences of socialist decades. Taught in English.

Aniko Szucs

RSEE 381 / THST 342

Thirty years after the dictatorial regimes collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe, performances of resistance have recently gained a new momentum, both in artistic venues and at public spaces. In the now ‘illiberal democracies’ of the region, expressions of dissent and the mobilization of the suppressed opposition have become increasingly important to protect human rights, freedom rights, and the civil society. This course sets out to study the genealogy of artistic and political resistance in the region: first, we consider the many genres, including radical performance art, rock concerts, and banned theatre events, and themes through which Central Eastern European artists covertly, and later overtly, expressed their oppositional views during state socialism. Then, building on our analyses of these political performances of the past, we turn to the present and discuss recent and contemporary artworks and protest-movements that advocate for resistance in the ‘illiberal democracies’ of Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Macedonia. To initiate a transnational and trans-continental discussion, some of the readings center on Latin American artists, whose underground artworks critiqued the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s or challenges the authoritarian regimes of the present.  

Mitja Velikonja

RSEE 335

The course critically examines one of the most vibrant, controversial, and multi-sided urban cultures: political graffiti and street art. While focused on contemporary Central-Europe and the Balkans, the course positions this complex visual production in a global perspective, as part of wider political developments and cultural processes. Sprayed, written, glued on, painted, or scratched graffiti from post-socialist Central Europe and the Balkans is compared with that from other parts of the world. Students learn to use different methods of researching this particular visual creativity, such as compositional interpretation, content analysis, visual semiology, and audience studies.  Taught in English.  

Paul Bushkovitch

HIST 677 

An introduction to the principal events and issues during the transformation of Russia in the years 1650 to 1725. Topics include political change and the court; Russia in Europe and Asia; religion and the revolution in Russian culture.

Katerina Clark

FILM 442 / RUSS 403 / LITR 403

Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan

ANTH 700

Second term of yearlong core course on the major theoretical orientations in social and cultural anthropology (especially in the United States and Europe), their historical development and importance, their relation to one another and to other disciplines. Reserved for first-year doctoral students in Anthropology. Prerequisite: ANTH 500.

RSEE 312, LITR 253, HIST 260, RUSS 312, HUMS 255

The course is a semester-long study of one big Russian novel–Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece War and Peace (1865-1869), about Napoleon’s failed 1812 campaign against Russia. War and Peace is a sweeping panorama of nineteenth-century Russian society, a novel of profound philosophical questions, and an unforgettable gallery of artfully drawn characters. Reading the novel closely, we pose the following questions: In what ways is it a national and an imperial novel? What myths does it destroy and construct?  What is the relation of fiction to history? And what forces drive history, as it unfolds in the present? To what extent do individuals control their own lives and, if they’re emperors and generals, the lives of nations? Finally, how does one live a meaningful life as a private person and as a member of a society? We explore these questions while refining our tools of literary analysis and situating the novel in its historical context. Secondary materials include Tolstoy’s letters, contemporary reviews, maps, historical sources, political theory, and literary criticism. All readings and class discussions in English.  No prerequisites.

GLBL 827,  HIST 966

Fall 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which ushered in the largest and most all-encompassing social engineering experiment in human history. For most of the past hundred years, historians, novelists, social scientists, and philosophers (many themselves victims, survivors, or disillusioned believers) have struggled to understand the twentieth-century experiences of Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism. Politics alone fails to explain what the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev described as a “deep deformation of the structure of consciousness” prompting “individual conscience to flee from the world.” We discuss what we can learn about our present “post-factual” world where, as Peter Pomerantsev describes, “nothing is true and everything is possible,” by revisiting classic works like Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Other authors likely include Vasily Grossman, Eugen Ionescu, Tony Judt, Victor Klemperer, Leszek Kolakowski, Czeslaw Milosz, and George Orwell.

HIST 078

This European intellectual history seminar explores the epistemological question in philosophy: does the world really exist? How do I know it’s really there and not just a projection of my consciousness? is there such a thing as truth? We begin with European philosophy, moving through Descartes, Kant and Husserl and through the role of ideology and lies in 20th century totalitarianism, then to dissident thought in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally to the emergence of “post-truth” in the 20th century and its implications in both philosophy and life. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.