ELEM BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• Instructor: Aleksandar Boskovic
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

ELEMENTARY CZECH I

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• Instructor: Christopher W Harwood
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

ELEMENTARY POLISH I

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• Instructor: Christopher Caes
  Info
• 4 points

FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

• Instructor: Marina Grineva
  Info
• 5 points

FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

• Instructor: Marina Grineva
  Info
• 5 points

FIRST-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

• Instructor: Marina Grineva
  Info
• 5 points

ELEMENTARY UKRAINIAN I

Designed for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammar structures are introduced and reinforced, with equal emphasis on developing oral and written communication skills. Specific attention to acquisition of high-frequency vocabulary and its optimal use in real-life settings.

• Instructor: Yana Prymachenko
  Info
• 4 points

ELEMENTARY CZECH II

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

• Instructor: Christopher W Harwood
  CULPA: 4 Info
• 4 points

INTER BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN

Prerequisites: BCRS UN1102 or the equivalent. Readings in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian literature in the original, with emphasis depending upon the needs of individual students.

• Instructor: Aleksandar Boskovic
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

INTERMEDIATE POLISH I

Prerequisites: POLI UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar; readings in contemporary nonfiction or fiction, depending on the interests of individual students.

• Instructor: Christopher Caes
  Info
• 4 points

SECOND-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Prerequisites: RUSS UN1102 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.Off-sequence

• Instructor: Marina Tsylina
  Info
• 5 points

SECOND-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Prerequisites: RUSS UN1102 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.Off-sequence

• Instructor: Marina Tsylina
  Info
• 5 points

INTERMEDIATE UKRAINIAN I

Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent. Reviews and reinforces the fundamentals of grammar and a core vocabulary from daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of communicative skills (oral and written). Verbal aspect and verbs of motion receive special attention.

• Instructor: Yana Prymachenko
  Info
• 4 points

SLAVIC CULTURES

The history of Slavic peoples - Russians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, Bulgarians - is rife with transformations, some voluntary, some imposed. Against the background of a schematic external history, this course examines how Slavic peoples have responded to and have represented these transformations in various modes: historical writing, hagiography, polemics, drama and fiction, folk poetry, music, visual art, and film. Activity ranges over lecture (for historical background) and discussion (of primary sources).

• 3 points

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS

An introduction to the study of language from a scientific perspective. The course is divided into three units: language as a system (sounds, morphology, syntax, and semantics), language in context (in space, time, and community), and language of the individual (psycholinguistics, errors, aphasia, neurology of language, and acquisition). Workload: lecture, weekly homework, and final examination.

• Instructor: John H McWhorter
  CULPA: 26 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

THIRD-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent, and the instructor's permission. Recommended for students who wish to improve their active command of Russian. Emphasis on conversation and composition. Reading and discussion of selected texts and videotapes. Lectures. Papers and oral reports required. Conducted entirely in Russian.

• Instructor: Tatiana Mikhailova
  Info
• 4 points

Language, Brain and Mind

The ability to speak distinguishes humans from all other animals, including our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Why is this so? What makes this possible? This course seeks to answer these questions. We will look at the neurological and psychological foundations of the human faculty of language. How did our brains change to allow language to evolve? Where in our brains are the components of language found? Are our minds specialized for learning language or is it part of our general cognitive abilities to learn? How are words and sentences produced and their meanings recognized? The structure of languages around the world varies greatly; does this have psychological effects for their speakers?

• Instructor: William Foley
  h-index: 0 Info
• 3 points

LITERATURE & EMPIRE (19C LIT)

Explores the aesthetic and formal developments in Russian prose, especially the rise of the monumental 19th-century novel, as one manifestation of a complex array of national and cultural aspirations, humanistic and imperialist ones alike. Works by Pushkin, Lermonotov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Knowledge of Russian not required.

• Instructor: Liza Knapp
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 3 points

RUSSIAN FOR HERITAGE SPEAKERS

Prerequisites: RUSS V3430 or the instructor's permission. This course is designed to help students who speak Russian at home, but have no or limited reading and writing skills to develop literary skills in Russian. THIS COURSE, TAKEN WITH RUSS V3431, MEET A TWO YEAR FOREIGN LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT. Conducted in Russian.

• 3 points

SUPERVISED IND RES-LING THESIS

• 1-4 points

Hebrew: History, Politics, Culture, Lite

Hebrew: Hist, Poli, Cult,

This class offers an introduction to Hebrew culture from a historical and literary perspective, focusing on the intersection of linguistic ideology, and literary and cultural creativity. What, we will ask, is the relationship between what people think about Hebrew and what they write in Hebrew?

We will investigate the manners in which Hebrew was imagined – as the language of God, the language of the Jews, the language of the patriarchy, the language of secularism, the language of Messianism, the language of nationalism, a dead language, a diasporic Eastern European language, a local Middle Eastern Language, ext., and how these conflicting imaginaries informed Hebrew creativity.

This class does not require prior knowledge of Hebrew. Students proficient in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, and/or European languages are encouraged to contact the instructor in advance for supplementary material in these languages.

• Instructor: Offer Dynes
  Info
• 3 points

DOSTOEVSKY,TOLSTOY & ENG NOVEL

A close reading of works by Dostoevsky (Netochka Nezvanova; The Idiot; A Gentle Creature) and Tolstoy (Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; Family Happiness; Anna Karenina; The Kreutzer Sonata) in conjunction with related English novels (Bronte's Jane Eyre, Eliot's Middlemarch, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway). No knowledge of Russian is required.

• Instructor: Liza Knapp
  CULPA: 28 Info
• 3 points

Experimental Cultures

This seminar course will provide a punctual survey of trends and figures in the experimental cultures of East Central Europe.  Formations include the avant-gardes (first, postwar, and postcommunist); experimental Modernisms and Postmodernisms; alternative film, media, and visual culture; and formally inventive responses to exceptional historical circumstances.  Proceeding roughly chronologically from early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, we will examine expressionist/surrealistic painting and drama; zenithist hybrid genres such as cinépoetry and proto-conceptualist writing; mixed-media relief sculpture; post-conceptual art; experimental and animated film; and avant-garde classical music.  In terms of theory, we will draw on regional and global approaches to artistic experimentation ranging from Marxist and other theories of value through discourses of the body and sexuality in culture to contemporary affect theory.  The course will be taught in English with material drawn primarily from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.  Each session will include a lecture followed by discussion.

• 3 points

Poets, Rebels, Exiles: 100 Years of Russ

POETS, REBELS, EXILES

Poets, Rebels, Exiles examines the successive generations of the most provocative and influential Russian and Russian Jewish writers and artists who brought the cataclysm of the Soviet and post-Soviet century to North America. From Joseph Brodsky—the bad boy bard of Soviet Russia and a protégé of Anna Akhmatova, who served 18 months of hard labor near the North Pole for social parasitism before being exiled—to the most recent artistic descendants, this course will interrogate diaspora, memory, and nostalgia in the cultural production of immigrants and exiles.

• Instructor: Anna Katsnelson
  Info
• 3 points

CREATING ID-CONTEMP UKRN CULTR

This course presents and examines post-Soviet Ukrainian literature. Students will learn about the significant achievements, names, events, scandals and polemics in contemporary Ukrainian literature and will see how they have contributed to Ukraine’s post-Soviet identity. Students will examine how Ukrainian literature became an important site for experimentation with language, for providing feminist perspectives, for engaging previously-banned taboos and for deconstructing Soviet and Ukrainian national myths. Among the writers to be focused on in the course are Serhiy Zhadan, Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko and Taras Prokhasko. Centered on the most important successes in literature, the course will also explore key developments in music and visual art of this period. Special focus will be given to how the 2013/2014 Euromaidan revolution and war are treated in today’s literature. By also studying Ukrainian literature with regards to its relationship with Ukraine’s changing political life, students will obtain a good understanding of the dynamics of today’s Ukraine and the development of Ukrainians as a nation in the 21st century. The course will be complemented by audio and video presentations. Entirely in English with a parallel reading list for those who read Ukrainian.

• Instructor: Mark Andryczyk
  Info
• 3 points

Anarchist Thought, Art, and Action

Anarchist Thought, Art &

Anarchy is Order!” proclaims the modern anarchist movement. The anarchist values not violence and chaos, but democracy, solidarity, and freedom from all forms of coercion. The ideal society is antiauthoritarian and decentralized, comprised of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals. In this course we will dissect these ideas, debating anarchist conceptions of freedom, authority, and human nature, beginning with late 18th-19th c. figures (Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy) and ending with more recent developments in this tradition (ecological thought, indigeneity, gender). We will engage with these ideas as expressed in political essays, but also in art (drama, poetry, visual art, fairytales, children’s literature, science fiction), and in autobiographical writing. How, we may ask, are anarchist values and critique formulated differently in these different modes of expression? What is the place of art and aesthetic experience in a radically liberatory movement? Readings will be studied in their historical contexts, especially moments of revolutionary action: across Europe in 1848, in Russia and Ukraine (1917-1921), during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), led by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico (1994-).

There are no prerequisites for this class; all readings will be available in English.

• Instructor: Jessica E Merrill
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

LANG DOCUMENTATION/FIELD MTHDS

Prerequisites: LING 3101: Introduction to Linguistics and LING 4376: Phonetics & Phonology

This course provides training in linguistic fieldwork for language
documentation and description. We will work with a speaker of an understudied language
to investigate the structure of the language (its sounds, word and sentence formation,
ways of expressing meaning, and usage) and learn about its speakers and their
communities, both in NYC and abroad. Through this process, students will learn
collaborative linguistic fieldwork techniques as well as the art of writing linguistic
descriptions. This course will draw on all aspects of students’ linguistic training to date,
and the success of the course will depend on our ability as a class to work together
cooperatively with the language consultant and language community more broadly to
document and describe the language.

• Instructor: Meredith Landman
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 5 Info
• 3 points

Agent of Change: Ukrainian Art Between R

The course will trace the appearance of the avant-garde on the territory of the Russian Empire with a focus on Ukrainian art as compared to Russian. Examining the art aspiring not only to reflect but to alter the reality originating both in the center and the periphery, the class will explore the array of strategies employed by art for that end. The foundational theories of avant-garde, non-conformism, and dissident art will be studied alongside the most celebrated and influential examples of innovative and radical art from the region. Beginning with socially minded realist practices, the class will consider the impact of the collapse of the Russian and then Soviet Empires on art and reflect on how the societal upheavals affect the understanding of the function and the definition of art. The appearance of Socialist Realism and the versions of opposition to it will be studied, from dissident undermining to neglect and escapism of the second avant-gardes. Ukrainian art of recent decades will be studied in the context of several revolutions (Granite, Orange, Euromaidan) that defined its contemporary history.

The class is offered for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian is not required.

• Instructor: Olena Martynyuk
  Info
• 3 points

Russian Through Music

This content-based language course is designed for students who already have an equivalent of five semesters of college-level Russian. The course aims to explore various types of Russian music that have been popular since the 1960s. Popular music expresses widely-shared trends and interests of society and evokes emotions and associations via memories. Sharing these musical associations will enhance students’ knowledge of Russian values and beliefs, and help them understand how and why these values and beliefs have changed since the thaw period, as well as how they continue to change in the 21st century in response to social mood. Students will learn how to interpret popular music and work on the development of the language skills needed to be an engaged listener of Russian music as well as an engaged partner in conversations on related topics. Learners will use language in meaningful interactions and negotiate meaning in real-life contexts. Through engagement with authentic sources, students will solidify and further develop their knowledge of the case and verbal systems as well as cause-and-effect relationships within sentences and paragraphs. They will learn how to interpret music from a cultural perspective that implies the ability to read between the lines. Conducted entirely in Russian.

• Instructor: Marina Tsylina
  Info
• 3 points

Cold War Reason: Cybernetics and the Sys

The Cold War epoch saw broad transformations in science, technology, and politics. At their nexus a new knowledge was proclaimed, cybernetics, a putative universal science of communication and control. It has disappeared so completely that most have forgotten that it ever existed. Its failure seems complete and final. Yet in another sense, cybernetics was so powerful and successful that the concepts, habits, and institutions born with it have become intrinsic parts of our world and how we make sense of it. Key cybernetic concepts of information, system, and feedback are now fundamental to our basic ways of understanding the mind, brain and computer, of grasping the economy and ecology, and finally of imagining the nature of human life itself. This course will trace the echoes of the cybernetic explosion from the wake of World War II to the onset of Silicon Valley euphoria.

• Instructor: Adam Leeds
  h-index: 2 Info
• 3 points

FOURTH-YEAR RUSSIAN I

Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test. Systematic study of problems in Russian syntax; written exercises, translations into Russian, and compositions. Conducted entirely in Russian.

• Instructor: Tatiana Mikhailova
  Info
• 4 points

PHONETICS & PHONOLOGY

Prerequisites: LING UN3101 An investigation of the sounds of human language, from the perspective of phonetics (articulation and acoustics, including computer-aided acoustic analysis) and phonology (the distribution and function of sounds in individual languages).

• Instructor: Meredith Landman
  CULPA: 1 h-index: 5 Info
• 3 points

OLD RUSSIAN LITERATURE

• Instructor: Valentina Izmirlieva
  CULPA: 14 Info
• 4 points

INTRODUCTION TO SLAVIC LITERARY THEORY

INTRO TO SLAVIC LITERARY

This course introduces graduate students to the major 20th-century literary theories that emerged in Russia and Eastern Europe. The course's main purpose is to familiarize students with these approaches and teach them how to use theoretical models as tools for analyzing literary texts.

By the end of the course, students will be required to write a paper investigating the theoretical aspects of one or more literary texts discussed in class. This paper will test not only students' mastery of literary analysis through the prism of multiple theoretical models, but also their ability to challenge a literary text through theory and vice versa.

Writing the paper will include a workshop-style class in which students design their thesis and outline. The course will also introduce students to the Bahmeteff Archive and Columbia's library holdings.

This course counts as Proseminar for Slavic graduate students but is also open to students in other disciplines, which is why all readings are in English.

• Instructor: Mark Lipovetsky
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Russian Formalism

Twenty-first century literary studies has seen a steadily growing interest in formalist literary theory. This trend has manifested in new movements, such as New Formalism, Historical Poetics, and Quantitative Formalism. This interest in formalism has been accompanied by a widely expressed desire for a better understanding of literary form, and to find ways to connect its study with cultural and political history. The archive of Russian Formalism, a protean movement which was active in the 1910s and 1920s, is a rich source for those interested in rethinking the concept of form today. Beginning in the 1960s and ‘70s, Russian Formalism was interpreted as the precursor to French Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. In this class we seek to recontextualize Russian Formalism—not in terms of the ideas of the Cold War period—but rather in light of the cultural and political milieu of revolutionary and Civil War era Russia. By connecting theories of form with the cultural and political contexts from which they emerged, our goal is to develop an understanding of form as a concept defined not only in aesthetic or linguistic terms, but also as a construct with sociopolitical import.

• Instructor: Jessica E Merrill
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points