Related Courses, Fall 2024
Agrarian Societies: Culture, Society, History, and Development
ANTH 541
Applied Methods of Analysis
This course is an introduction to statistics and their application in public policy and global affairs research. It consists of two weekly class sessions in addition to a discussion section. The discussion section is used to cover problems encountered in the lectures and written assignments, as well as to develop statistical computing skills. Throughout the term we cover issues related to data collection (including surveys, sampling, and weighted data), data description (graphical and numerical techniques for summarizing data), probability and probability distributions, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, measures of association, and regression analysis. The course assumes no prior knowledge of statistics and no mathematical knowledge beyond calculus. Graded only, sat/unsat option is not permissible.
Art and Myth in Greek Antiquity
Art and Resistance in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine
RSEE 313/LITR 210/SLAV 313/THST 314
This interdisciplinary seminar is devoted to the study of protest art as part of the struggle of society against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. It focuses on the example of the Soviet and post-Soviet transformation of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. The period under discussion begins after the death of Stalin in 1953 and ends with the art of protest against the modern post-Soviet dictatorships of Alexander Lukashenka in Belarus and Vladimir Putin in Russia, the protest art of the Ukrainian Maidan and the anti-war movement of artists against the Russian-Ukrainian war. The course begins by looking at the influence of the “Khrushchev Thaw” on literature and cinema, which opened the way for protest art to a wide Soviet audience. We explore different approaches to protest art in conditions of political unfreedom: “nonconformism,” “dissidence,” “mimicry,” “rebellion.” The course investigates the existential conflict of artistic freedom and the political machine of authoritarianism. These themes are explored at different levels through specific examples from the works and biographies of artists. Students immerse themselves in works of different genres: films, songs, performances, plays and literary works.
Feminism without Women: Modernist and Postcolonial Textual Experiments
History and Holocaust Testimony
Introduction to Italian Literature: From the Duecento to the Renaissance
Introduction to Methods in Quantitative Sociology
SOCY 580
Introduction to Modern Central Asia
Introduction to the Study of Politics
PLSC 510
Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Introduction to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as a field of knowledge and to the interdiscipline’s structuring questions and tensions. The course genealogizes feminist and queer knowledge production, and the institutionalization of WGSS, by examining several of our key terms.
Making European Culture Jewish: Five Media, 1780-1930
Meaning and Materiality
ANTH 401/ANTH 601
Nineteenth-Century French Art
Politics of Memory
Production Seminar: Theater in Education
Renaissance Literature, Philosophy, and Art
Representing the Holocaust
Russia in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, 1850-1905
HIST 221J/RSEE 231
Russian politics, culture, and society ca. 1850 to 1905. Tsars’ personalities and ruling styles, political culture under autocracy. Reform from above and revolutionary terror. Serfdom and its abolition, problem of “traditional” Russian culture. Growth of industrial and financial capitalism, middle-class culture, and daily life. Foreign policy and imperial conquest, including the Caucasus and the Crimean War (1853-56). Readings combine key scholarly articles, book chapters, and representative primary sources. All readings and discussions in English.
Socialist '80s: Aesthetics of Reform in China and the Soviet Union
RUSS 316/EALL 288/EAST 316/LITR 303/RSEE 316
This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the complex cultural and political paradigms of late socialism from a transnational perspective by focusing on the literature, cinema, and popular culture of the Soviet Union and China in 1980s. How were intellectual and everyday life in the Soviet Union and China distinct from and similar to that of the West of the same era? How do we parse “the cultural logic of late socialism?” What can today’s America learn from it? Examining two major socialist cultures together in a global context, this course queries the ethnographic, ideological, and socio-economic constituents of late socialism. Students analyze cultural materials in the context of Soviet and Chinese history. Along the way, we explore themes of identity, nationalism, globalization, capitalism, and the Cold War. Students with knowledge of Russian and Chinese are encouraged to read in original languages. All readings are available in English.
Sociological Theory
SOCY 542
Soviet Russia 1917-1991
The Catholic Intellectual Tradition
The Russian Works of Vladimir Nabokov
Tragedy in the European Literary Tradition
Twentieth-Century Jewish Political History: Holocaust, Israel, American Jewry
HIST 230