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 579 – Second/Foreign Language Teaching and Learning

This class is intended to prepare students to teach a second/foreign language. It will provide students with the essential foundations in language teaching methodology and theory, pedagogical grammar, curriculum and materials development, classroom management, and formal and informal assessment techniques. In addition, students will gain practical knowledge through video practicum components, which allow them to watch and reflect on actual classroom teaching. Students will complete this program with the pedagogical knowledge and practical understanding necessary to be confident and effective language teachers.

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 597 – Language & Digital Media

This course examines, through a range of topics and research frameworks, a relationship between language and digital media and the many ways language communication dynamics operates across changing mediascapes. The course provides a solid foundation in relevant theoretical concepts balanced with practical exercises and creative projects. The course adopts a broad interpretation of the term "media" focusing on existing online media platforms as well as on the issues that arise from various uses of digital media for social, political, and cultural purposes, including virtual community building, digital semiotics, memes, viral spreads, surveillance, political opposition and oppression, and propaganda, marginalization and liberation, participatory cultures, production dimensions, etc. The course is designed for graduate and undergraduate students in Russian sociolinguistics, and (second) language studies interested in learning how to research digital media discourse. The course is taught in English; no knowledge of Russian language is required.

RSSS 696D – Russian Literature: 20th Century

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.

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 561 – Human Rights in Eurasia

This course will examine a variety of seminal human rights in the Eurasian region. We will consider what are international human rights and how international human rights are integrated into the various states of the region, focus on the historical background and socio-cultural underpinnings of various states in the region when approaching human rights (especially of minorities and other communities) and then focus on specific issues including LGBTQ+, minority and linguistic rights, feminism in the region, and other important rights. We will then also consider how the international human rights system might (or is, at times) employed to uphold the various rights discussed, with a view to incorporating the variety of approaches and perceptions accorded to rights and to different groups by states and controlling factions.

RSSS 581 – Russian Phonology and Morphology

Synchronic study of the phonology and morphology of modern Russian.

RSSS 587 – Assessment in Second/Foreign Language Learning

The primary objective of this course is the development of language teachers' assessment literacy, which includes knowledge of key assessment principles and skill in creating or adopting assessment tools and procedures for the language classroom. Participants in this course will develop their knowledge and skills related to assessing all skill areas in the language classroom, including productive skills (writing, speaking), receptive skills (reading, listening), and assessing grammar and vocabulary. Grading and student evaluation will also be important topics of consideration and exploration in this course. Designed specifically for in-service (and pre-service) language teachers, the course combines theory with practice by covering essential principles of effective classroom assessment and the development of effective assessment tools for classroom use. Participants completing this course will become more assessment literate and better able to evaluate student performance in their classrooms fairly and effectively.

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 696E – Post-Soviet Literature and Culture of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia

This course provides an in-depth overview of the major literary and artistic trends of the late 20th Century to the present day, surveying the transition from the Soviet to post-Soviet period, with a special focus on how Postmodernism interacts with and/or reflects the Post-Soviet condition. Students will explore a variety of responses to the legacy of state communism and the transition to a new political and economic regime. We will discuss the rise of Postmodernism in the late 20th century and its relation to the period of transition in the 1990s. Students will be able to discuss recurrent themes in this multinational literature (such as paranoia, carnival, dislocation, corporeal experience, crime and mafia, nostalgia) and the varied literary techniques employed (palimpsest texts, unreliable narrators, misdirection and mystification, use of popular genres, metanarrative). Finally, we will consider how the literary traditions of the region evolve and respond to contemporary events and trends in the 21st century as the various nations in the region embark on a search for a post-Soviet national identity.