We would like to share these two courses that address the current situation in Ukraine. Register for Fall 2023!
REES 4210/5210 Topics in Russian and Eastern European Culture: Understanding Ukraine: Culture, Diversity, Conflict
Counts towards Europe/Eurasia Geographic Concentration
Professor Anastasiya Osipova
Fall 2023, T Th 12:30-1:45
The course will introduce students to Ukraine’s cultural diversity and orient them in the history of a country at the heart of contemporary world politics. It will provide the necessary historical framework for understanding current wartime cultural debates about Ukraine’s contested heritage and future.
We will start with a broad introduction to the history of Russian imperialist ambitions in Ukraine, consider the status of Ukrainian writers in the nineteenth century and the emergence of the romantic nationalist imagination, discuss Ukrainian national modernism and national communism during the Soviet years, consider the cultural memory of the Holocaust in contemporary Ukraine, the influence of the Chernobyl catastrophe on Ukrainian cultural imagination, and address the question of Ukrainian Russophone and Crimean Tatar culture in Ukraine after the Maidan uprising. The bulk of the course will be given to material created during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a special section dedicated to the film, literature, and art that emerged between the start of Russia's invasion in Ukraine in 2014 and the outbreak of the full-scale war in February 2022. All readings and assignments are designed to help students understand the present Russia-Ukraine war. All readings will be in English.
REES 4120/RUSS 5120 Russia After Communism: Post-Soviet Politics and Culture
Professor Anastasiya Osipova
Fall 2023, T Th 3:30-4:45
This course is designed to orient students within the major ideological shifts and cultural currents that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and shaped the first thirty years of post-Soviet Russian life.
Among the topics that will be addressed in this class are: Russia's war in Ukraine, “the wild nineties” and their fashionable return in the 2010s, “shock therapy” and privatization, post-Soviet youth culture, nationalism, Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, changes in media culture, protest art and performance, ecology & petroculture, contemporary Russian feminism, and Russian rap. One of the aims of this course is to challenge Cold War rhetoric and to reframe narrow mainstream narratives about Russian post-Soviet sociopolitical dynamic.