This course engages Indigenous feminist approaches to research, and the application of theories of refusal to academic knowledge production.

The continent of Africa has a fundamentally rich and dynamic history, dating at least as far back as the Nubian civilization, pre-dynastic Egyptian systems of thought through to the many diverse philosophical traditions found around the continent today. Contemporarily, many Pan-Africanist thought scholars have made the argument that the West’s exclusive claims on knowledge have complicated the rationality of non-Western peoples, most especially those of African descent. “African Classics: Decolonial Thought in Education” will engage students in critically examining the relevance and importance of comprehending the African Philosophy, gender, economics, governance, politics, spirituality, phenomenology, ontology, and epistemology. This course involves the development of a framework to map the geographical beginnings in the context of African decolonial thought in education. These connections are aimed at providing context for students’ engagement in the philosophical foundations of African ways of theorizing and practise. Through this, students will be able to engage in critical self-reflection. Students in this course will make sense of the role played by discourses around the construction and reconstruction of African decolonial systems of thought.

Practical experience in an area of the humanities, social sciences and/or social justice education fieldwork is a vital element of the development of skills in the application of knowledge from theory and research. In consultation with the SJE departmental Practicum Liaison person, the student shall establish a practicum supervisor and a suitable placement in consultation with her/his practicum supervisor, signaled by completion of an EdD 'Practicum Agreement Form' (SJE website, 'Students', 'Dept. Specific Forms'). For successful completion of this course, the student is required to: a) spend 72 hours in active educational fieldwork; b) have regular contact with their individual practicum supervisor; c) submit an interim report of approximately 1500 words to the Practicum Supervisor; and submit a final paper of approximately 8000 words to the Practicum Supervisor offering a final synthesis of specific field experiences & their relationship to a relevant body of academic and sociological literature which shall be graded on a Pass/Fail basis. Examples of relevant educational placements include but are not limited to school boards, community organizations, social service organizations, unions, cultural organizations and other organizations with relevant educational functions, broadly conceived.

Course description same as SJE2998H.

Courses that will examine in depth topics of particular relevance not already covered in regular course offerings in the department. The topics will be announced and described in the schedule of courses.

Course description same as SJE5000H, but at the doctoral level.

The proseminar in Slavic studies is aimed at the professional orientation and development of students at the doctoral level. The course introduces graduate students to the history of their academic discipline in Europe and North America, and surveys the discipline’s thematic and methodological breadth. It also imparts a sense of the larger scholarly community to which students belong as researchers and teachers in Slavic studies, fosters the development of research skills central to our academic field, and helps students cultivate good professional habits. The course is taught by a team of instructors from the Slavic Department and cognate academic programs. The proseminar is offered every other year and, while it carries no course-credit value, it is required of all doctoral students who must take it prior to their qualifying exams. MA students are encouraged but not required to take the course (MA students who enrol in the department's doctoral program must take the proseminar whether or not they have audited it before). Although a semester-long (H) course, the proseminar is taught on a bi-weekly basis throughout the academic year.

A cultural history of the Ukrainian capital: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Jewish "versions" of the city; artworks and literary texts that capture the complexity of Kyivan history and culture.

This course investigates various language pedagogy approaches and theories discussed in pedagogical literature, and during seminars takes a practical approach to language pedagogy by improving teaching practice and by addressing the issues that arise during TAs' teaching. This course helps experienced and inexperienced language teachers to develop understanding of learning and teaching a foreign language. All readings, activities, and projects will encourage trainees to think through problems and approaches to teaching. Course assignments and tasks will be modelled on assignments and tasks typical of the foreign language classroom.

Development of advanced speaking, reading, listening, and writing skills on a wide variety of topics. Work on grammar and vocabulary building. Reading of classical and contemporary, non-adapted literary and mass-media texts. Students do regular independent projects (presentations, compositions, etc.) on the authentic material drawn from their current graduate curriculum in literature and culture.

Syntactic structures and their relation to meaning and style, word order, intonation. Consolidation of morphology, vocabulary building through extensive reading. Translation, composition, and oral practice. Students do regular independent projects (presentations, compositions, etc.) on the authentic material drawn from their current graduate curriculum in literature and culture.

"It is theatre-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument…" — this is how Roland Barthes defined the notion of theatricality. The proposed course is a study of this complex concept, its multiple definitions and possible applications to Cultural Studies in Russia and the West. Students will explore what place was occupied by the Public Spectacle, on the one hand, and Theatrical Event, on the other, in the history of Russian culture, traditionally considered performative as such. The study of public spectacles will go from the court celebrations of the 18th century, modelled after Early Modern Spectacles in Europe, through the Revolutionary festivals of the 1920s — all the way to the celebration of the 300 years of Saint-Petersburg and, most recently, the opening ceremony of 2014 Winter Olympics, with its contradictory ideological message. The close reading of the key texts of the 19th-century Russian Drama ("Woe from Wit," "The Inspector General," "The Forest," "The Seagull") will be followed by the study of the most important productions of these plays in the early 20th century.

This course examines twentieth-century novels and short stories by writers from Slavic and East European countries that thematize exile, migration, and displacement. Alongside literary works, we will read theoretical essays that speak to concepts of home, nation, and language. Taught in English. Readings in English.

This course examines the genesis and evolution of the image of "the jews," central to all European cultures, from the theology and psychology of Christian anti-Judaism to their reflection in European arts and folklore, and to the survival of the "jewish" vocabulary of difference in secular forms in post-Christian cultures. Special attention is given to "the jews" of East European imagination and in Russian literature. All readings are in English.

A comprehensive survey of the literature of Kievan Rus (see note below) and Muscovy to the Petrine period. All of the principal genres are included in the course, such as chronicles, epics, saints' lives, and homiletic works. A brief study of the history of the study of Old Russian Literature is followed by a close textual and stylistic analysis of the major movements of each genre in successive historical periods. Note: readings in Russian.

This course studies the prose, poetry, and dramaturgy of the most prominent Russian literary figures of the eighteenth century: such as N. Karamzin, V. Tretiakovsky, M. Lomonsov, D. Fonvizin, G. Derzhavin, A. Radishchev and I. Krylov. Aspects of literature during the reign of Peter the First, as well as of literature and satirical journalism during the reign of Catherine the Second and of the era of Russian classicism and sentimentalism, will be examined. This course is taught in Russian. Readings in Russian.

The course examines the major Russian social and political thinkers and movements in the nineteenth century, and the historical, philosophical and literary contexts in which they were writing. Topics studied may include: the Russian Enlightenment and the growth of rationalism; Decembrism; Chaadaev's "Philosophical Letter"; Russian Hegelianism; the Slavophiles and Westernisers; Herzen and Russian socialism; the tradition of Russian literary criticism from Belinsky to Pisarev; nihilists, liberals, and conservatives in the mid-nineteenth century; populism and anarchism; the foundations of Marxism in Russia. Taught in a combination of lectures and seminars, with weekly readings in English and, for Russian majors, in the original.

A study of the main principles of Russian prosody (meter, rhythm, rhyme, phonetic instrumentation, verse, stanza, genre) in relation to the creation of meaning of a poetic text. The formal aspects of Russian versification are examined in their historical evolution from the 18th century to the present, in both "classical" and "experimental" poetic modes. Taught in Russian, readings in Russian and English.

A survey of the golden age of Russian poetry with special attention to the evolution of verse forms and poetic genres. In this course students acquire advanced skills in the close reading of poetic forms and in their contextual historical analysis and interpretation. Taught in Russian, readings in Russian and English.

Survey of major movements and institutions (salons, literary groups, albums, almanacs, journals, censorship), familiar and less studied writers and intellectuals of the first half of the nineteenth century. Romanticism as literary movement, cultural ideology, and lifestyle. Survey of key literary genres and themes. Emergence of literature as profession, public sphere, and commerce. The rise of literary criticism. Literature and nationalism. Russian cultural aspirations in European context. Taught in English, all readings in English.

This course examines some of Dostoevsky's most important works through the lens of novel theory. We will read several of Dostoevsky's novels in chronological order, examining the evolution of his own thoughts on the novel as a genre from his first novel, Poor People, to his problematic penultimate work, The Adolescent. Alongside the novels we will read works by several central novel theorists and Dostoevsky scholars, including Viacheslav Ivanov, Georg Lukacs and Mikhail Bakhtin, examine the influence of Dostoevsky's novels on their understanding of the novelistic form and on the evolution of their ideas about the genre and its relation to history and modernity. Topics of discussion will include: the novelistic narrator; novelistic plot; novelistic narrative; time and space; the generic history and prehistory of the novel; the novel and the self; the novel's relation to the present; novelistic subgenres including the Bildungsroman; the novel's simultaneous status as fragment and totality; and the particular and the universal in novelistic representation.

What is distinctive about Russian realism? The course will examine nineteenth century Russian realist fiction in relation to various theoretical approaches from Erich Auerbach to Roman Jakobson, and will read contemporary works of criticism or thought from Russia and Europe that may have influenced it. Readings will be in English, although students who know Russian or other relevant languages may do their reading in these.

Survey of major movements and institutions, genres, familiar and less studied writers and intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century. Imperial culture in the reform era. Realism as literary movement, professionalization of literature and criticism, the novel and serialization. Where possible, graduate students should read in Russian. Where this is not possible, English translations are fine.

Russian poetry, prose, and literary criticism from the late 1880s until 1940. Topics include: Russia's fin-de-siècle culture in its European context; the main aesthetic and philosophical trends informing the modernist field and the current theoretical problems in the study of the modernist period; the modernist renewal of Russian poetry, including a survey of the period's representative figures and texts; experiments with narrative and genre in the prose of the 1910s to 1930s, in Russia and in emigration; conservative reactions to modernism, from L. Tolstoi to Socialist Realism; the modernist strategies of survival (metanarratives, children's literature, internal and external exile, literature of the absurd). Readings may include: Chekhov, Solov'ev, Bunin, Z. Gippius, Sologub, Rozanov, Annenskii, Blok, Belyi, Kuzmin, Babel', Esenin, Zamiatin, Pasternak, Mandel'shtam, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Tsvetaeva, Kharms, A. Tolstoi, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Khodasevich. Taught in Russian. Readings in Russian and English.

Stories and plays in the context of their global reception. Russian originals will be read in conjunction with their rewritings in new contexts including in Ireland, India, South Africa, Japan, Turkey, Canada, Argentina. Taught in English; all readings in English.

This course examines Vladimir Nabokov's novels, written both in his "Russian" and "American" periods of creative activity. Special attention is paid to the nature and evolution of Nabokov's aesthetics; the place of his Russian- and English-language novels in the European literary tradition; Nabokov's creative uses of exile to artistic, philosophical and ideological ends; and the implications of the writer's switch from Russian to English as his primary language of artistic expression. Taught in English. All readings are in English. No prior knowledge of Russian literature and culture is required.

Tolstoy's major fictional and non-fictional writings examined in the context of his spiritual and intellectual development; a survey of the most important Tolstoy criticism. Readings in English.