Course Schedule

RSSS 515 – Advanced Topics in Russian Language, Literature and Linguistics

A variable topics course taught in English or Russian (depending on subject material). Graduate-level requirements include graduate students being held to higher standards of proficiency in all exams and coursework. Graduate students will be given more challenging assignments and may have additional, separate meetings with the instructor.

RSSS 583 – History of the Russian Language

Diachronic study of the Russian language from Indo-European up to the modern period.

RSSS 590 – Identity, Language, & Nation

This course explores, through a range of topics and theoretical lenses, the relationship between language, identity, and larger social and cultural contexts in Russia, the Post-Soviet geopolitical arena and beyond. We will first examine the ways in which language is used to create personal and group identities and how different cultural, social, and national identities are set off against one another, and against the criteria for inclusion or exclusion within and across national boundaries and various human communities of practice. We will then examine how particular forms of speech, language varieties, and accents are tied to specific traits of speakers and the ways in which the perception of particular people and the way they communicate impacts the projection of social and cultural characteristics. Finally, we will explore the critical dimensions of the language-identity relationship, looking at the function of language to build and divide nations, define peoples, create inequalities, and shape ideologies and local literacy practices in communities, digital spaces, and educational settings. Students will examine various approaches to theorizing identity in sociolinguistics and second language acquisition studies, and will learn to disentangle such constructs as multilingual identity, national\local\ethnic identity, subjectivity, self-concept, mobile identity, digital identity, the self-system, etc.

RSSS 593C – Internship

Specialized work on an individual basis, consisting of training and practice in actual service in a technical, business, or governmental establishment.

RSSS 596J – Second Language Acquisition Research

The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers.