HUM2410 - Asian Humanities

This course is a historical survey of the humanities in India, China, and Japan from the prehistoric era to modern times. The core of our studies will be how cultural values are revealed in visual art, architecture, theatre, literature, music, history, religion, and philosophy, in varying degrees.

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RUT3101 - Russian Masterpieces

Course description: When Virginia Woolf read Dostoevsky, she compared the experience to crawling out from under a train wreck. Down through the years millions of readers have had powerful – if far more pleasant – experiences reading Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov.

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LIN4656 - Gender & Language

This course offers a perspective on gender and sexism in discourse. It is an opportunity to study how language is used by women and men and about women and men in the various domains of interaction (e.g. social, family, workplace) to create and sustain social status and power. It offers the chance to study how sex and sexism function in language and their repercussions for all areas of life.

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Lin2101- Sounds of Human Language

Humans use a wide variety of sounds in producing language. This course enables the students to recognize the sounds of human languages, to understand how they are made, and to identify the physical properties that correspond to them. We study the patterning and function of sounds in languages of the world, doing in-class research on an unfamiliar language to apply the methods of analyzing a language's sound system.

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LIN4721 - Second Language Acquisition

This course covers key concepts, theories, and empirical research on child and adult second language acquisition (SLA).  Students acquired the ability to intelligently discuss aspects of the theory and practice of language learning based on knowledge of scholarly research in the field. Also, how to analyze learner data both for research purposes and to inform ESL teaching practice.

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ANT 3620 - Language & Culture

Whether speaking, reading, writing (or texting), language pervades our lives. Language shapes our everyday reality. It informs our sense of self, identity, and community. Language is part of culture, and culture is communicatively constituted. This course explores basic concepts in linguistic anthropology in order to understand how this field approaches enduring questions about language and the ways it shapes—and is shaped by—culture and society. Linguistic anthropology is one of the four primary subfields of anthropology in the United States and has close connections to the field of linguistics. Its beginnings go back to the formation of the discipline in the late 19th century and are strongly influenced by the study of American Indian languages. Linguistic anthropologists combine linguistic and anthropological techniques in their work and focus on a variety of areas, including: interactions between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition; language and social categories such as class, gender, race, and ethnicity; language acquisition and socialization; language and digital worlds; language politics and national borders; language documentation and revitalization.

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LIN3460 - Structure of Human Language

This course explores two branches of linguistics, morphology (word formation) and syntax (sentence structure) across the world’s languages. We will analyze linguistic phenomena to uncover the similarities and differences across the world's languages. Course material focuses on the necessary tools for linguists to discover such latent patterns through vigorous problem-solving—finding patterns in extensive language data.

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RUS3240 - Oral Practice in Russian

This course helps student expand their vocabulary, their active command of Russian grammar, and their ability to speak at the high-intermediate level.

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RUT3504 - Russia Today

“Russia Today” will give you a comprehensive introduction to the various traditional and newly emerging institutions, practices, behaviors, beliefs, attitudes and symbols that shape everyday life and thought from the late-Soviet era to the present day (1985–2021). No less importantly, it will also help you develop the methodological and analytical tools needed for critically examining any culture, foreign or native. The course will draw from anthropology, journalism, politics, literature, film, and popular culture as a means of exploring the special place that culture (broadly defined) occupies in the complex process of defining and reinventing national, social, and individual identity. In doing so it will take a thematic approach and will depend on regular and active student participation. It will also provide you with extra-credit opportunities designed to enhance your interaction with and understanding of Russian culture and society today.

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LIN4930 - Language Documentation

Approximately half of the approximately 7000 languages in the world are not being passed to the next generation of speakers and are in danger of disappearing with little documentation that they ever existed. The course covers issues and skills for addressing this situation. Students will read, discuss, and articulate major and recent perspectives and findings about documentary linguistics. Students will learn best practice guidelines to create a language and culture documentation project proposal and evaluate an archived documentary corpus, incorporating the role of theory, ethics, and technical tasks.

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RUT3500 - Russian Cultural Heritage

This course introduces students to the basics of Russian cultural history, beginning with the adoption of Christianity in Kievan Rus(sia) in the 10th century and ending with the latest developments today. In this course, culture is defined as the manifestation of the highest human endeavors primarily through the media of literature, visual and performing arts, philosophy, ethics, esthetics and education, with language and verbal arts forming the basis of culture. From this perspective, cultural heritage may be defined as the sum of human achievements in literature, the arts, architecture, philosophy, theater, film, and music.

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EUS6005 - Intro to European Studies

The creation and development of the European Union are one of the most fascinating political events of the last century. It represents a unique opportunity to study the evolution of a political system without having to rely solely on historical documents. In the past half-century, the EU has grown from a set of weak/poorly defined institutions with a limited policy domain and an emphasis on national sovereignty into an extensive political system with increasingly strong supranational actors influencing all aspects of political and economic life. What began in 1951 as an experiment in cooperation in the coal and steel sectors among six states has grown to be a formal political and economic union between 28 member states from Estonia to Ireland and Malta to Sweden (and it is still growing) reducing to 27 with the recent Brexit referendum. The goals of the course will be to examine this transformation both theoretically and historically from a comparative political perspective, keeping in mind the changing (and growing) global role of the EU. 

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RUS4501 - Russian Research Seminar

This is a multi-part course that is designed to introduce Russian majors and minors to some of the more significant trends and ideas in Russian literary, cultural, and historical studies. Students will develop their ability to understand and produce critical scholarly arguments in a variety of formats, including class discussion, formal presentation, and a written research project. The main portion of the course will be devoted to readings and discussion in English in literary and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on the notion of Russian identity as between east and west. It will consider several key Soviet/Russian cultural institutions and patterns, such as the kommunalka, nostalgia for the Communist past, and gender issues. The course also examines some examples of contemporary Russian-American fiction for the window it provides into the Russian experience of the post-Soviet world. A second portion of the course will be devoted to selected readings/discussions in Russian on topics of Russian history.

 

FOT4801 - Theory & Practice of Foreign Language Translation

Provides a historical and theoretical basis in translation studies, exposure to different translation techniques, introduction to some of the ethical, political and cultural discussions in the field, and practical experience. Discussion is based on close readings of original and translated texts in various media and from a variety of disciplines.

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FOT4810 - Advanced Foreign Language Translation Workshop

Advanced variable content seminar focusing on special topics in translation such as literacy translation, translation history, criticism, cross-cultural communications, translation ethics, and the philosophy of translation. 

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RUS4503/4504 - Russian English Translations I & II

The course provides a theoretical basis for and hands-on practice in resolving typical difficulties in conveying word, phrase, and sentence semantics in Russian-to-English and English-to-Russian translation. This course focuses on the theory and practice of conveying word semantics (the denotative and connotative components of meaning of individual word senses), sentence and paragraph semantics, and the aesthetic and cultural features of complete texts in Russian-to-English and English-to-Russian translation. Put differently, the central objects of analysis in this course will be predominantly words and “non-predicative” phrases, i.e. groups of words that do not constitute independent clauses or sentences; the tension between the syntactic and the semantic structures of sentences constituting paragraphs (sentence and paragraph semantics); and the pragmatics (the overall aesthetic and cultural effect) of complete texts.

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SPN4930 - Intro to Spanish Heritage Speakers

The main goal of this course is to introduce students to the field of Spanish heritage speaker bilingualism. Via readings, lectures, presentations and a final exam, students will learn about Spanish in the US, the effects of Spanish-English language contact, and the acquisition development, maintenance, and loss of the heritage language.

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RUT3443 - War & Peace

From the battlefield to the ballroom, Tolstoy's epic novel of life in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century is a profound meditation on the causes of war, the nature of social relationships, the poles of human suffering and love, and, perhaps most importantly, the nature and meaning of history itself. In this course, we will read War and Peace closely in its entirety. The course examines the origins of the novel in Tolstoy's early writing and considers the historical, political, and social contexts, both of the events described (the Napoleonic Wars) and the period fifty years later in which Tolstoy wrote War and Peace.

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