Courses

RUSS B001 Elementary Russian Intensive

Fall 2025

Study of basic grammar and syntax. Fundamental skills in speaking, reading, writing, and oral comprehension are developed. Seven hours a week including conversation sections and language laboratory work. Approach: Course does not meet an Approach; Haverford: A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts) (A), Humanities (HU) Enrollment Cap: 18; If the course exceeds the enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery: Freshman; Sophomore; Junior; Senior. Two additional hours of Conversation (per week) will be set according to students' schedules.

Course does not meet an Approach

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RUSS B002 Elementary Russian Intensive

Spring 2026

Study of basic grammar and syntax. Fundamental skills in speaking, reading, writing, and oral comprehension are developed. Seven hours a week including conversation sections and language laboratory work. Approach: Course does not meet an Approach; Haverford: A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts) (A), Humanities (HU) Enrollment Cap: 18; If the course exceeds the enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery: Freshman; Sophomore; Junior; Senior. Two additional hours of Conversation (per week) will be set according to students' schedules.

Course does not meet an Approach

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RUSS B101 Intermediate Russian

Fall 2025

Continuing development of fundamental skills with emphasis on vocabulary expansion in speaking and writing. Readings in Russian classics and contemporary works. Five hours a week

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RUSS B102 Intermediate Russian

Spring 2026

Continuing development of fundamental skills with emphasis on vocabulary expansion in speaking and writing. Readings in Russian classics and contemporary works. Five hours a week.

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RUSS B201 Advanced Russian

Fall 2025

Intensive practice in speaking and writing skills using a variety of modern texts and contemporary films and television. Emphasis on self-expression and a deeper understanding of grammar and syntax. Five hours a week.

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RUSS B202 Advanced Russian

Spring 2026

Intensive practice in speaking and writing skills using a variety of modern texts and contemporary films and television. Emphasis on self-expression and a deeper understanding of grammar and syntax. Five hours a week.

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RUSS B232 Coal, Oil, Nuclear: Narrative Afterlives

Not offered 2025-26

Coal. Oil. Nuclear energy. These items give shape to our everyday lives in countless ways. They impact our health, our politics, and our very survival on earth.. Nevertheless, because these resources permeate nearly every aspect of our existence, the human mind can struggle to comprehend them in their totality. In this course, we'll explore texts that engage with our environment to help us bring humans' relationship to these materials into focus. Scientific, historical, and economic studies tend to focus on their scale and widespread impact. Reading stories, watching

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Environmental Studies; International Studies.

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RUSS B233 Experimental Literature; or, Weird Stuff

Spring 2026

Stuck in a reading rut? Is the strange, the peculiar, the mind-shattering, the paradigm-shifting calling? Texts that imagine and generate changed perspectives, cultures, and lives? Reading a wide variety (multiple literatures, 20th- and 21st-centuries), we'll investigate-gravely and playfully-what experimenting with/in literature means as well as experimental literature's capacity in representing cultural margins. In particular, in which ways can experimental literature intersect with atypical attitudes and values, alternative lifestyles, and issues such as nature and land, Indigeneity, and gender? What makes the experimental enter the mainstream, and can they interact fruitfully? What happens at the very margins when writers use unusual techniques and styles? Let's get weird. (Catch the Oulipo constraint in here?) Note: Taught in English. No knowledge of Russian language/culture necessary. Open to all.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Comparative Literature.

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RUSS B235 The Social Dynamics of Russian

Fall 2025

An examination of the social factors that influence the language of Russian conversational speech, including contemporary Russian media (films, television, and the Internet). Basic social strategies that structure a conversation are studied, as well as the implications of gender and education on the form and style of discourse. Prerequisite: RUSS B201, RUSS 102 also required if taken concurrently with RUSS 201.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

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RUSS B237 Crime or Punishment: Russian Narratives of Incarceration

Fall 2025

This course explores Russian narratives of incarceration, punishment, and captivity from the 17th century to the present day and considers topics such as social justice, violence and its artistic representations, totalitarianism, witness-bearing, and the possibility of transcendence in suffering. Taught in English. No knowledge of Russian language/culture necessary. Open to all.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Peace Justice and Human Rights.

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RUSS B240 Russian through Art

Not offered 2025-26

Course examines visual art in the Russian Empire of the 19th and early 20th century, in the Soviet Union, and in the Post-Soviet space. You will learn about major Russian-speaking painters and their work, as well as about important museums, collectors, and exhibits, both in and outside of Russia. You will learn about peredvizhniki, Mir iskusstva, avantgarde artists, socialist realism in art, Sots-Art, the Lianozovskaya group, and other important movements in the history of art in the last two hundred years. All texts and class interaction will be in Russian.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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RUSS B252 Love, Death, Justice, & Russian Literature

Spring 2026

This Inside-Out course will be conducted inside a correctional institution and will bring inside (SCI Chester) and outside students (BMC) into dialogue. Can Russian novels and short stories help us understand our lives? We'll closely read and analyze works by several Russian authors and discuss how they each treat themes including life, death, family, love, the individual and society, generational conflicts, crime and punishment, and power dynamics. Finally, our broad goal will be to explore how these texts speak to contemporary issues, our lives, and eternal problems that all of humanity faces-what Russians call the "accursed questions."

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

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RUSS B265 Queer Russias

Fall 2025

This course presents an alternative vision of Russia's cultural legacy with a focus on queer writing, film, and art from the early nineteenth century to the present day. We consider key moments in this history by examining texts that explore what it has meant to be queer in Russia under different regimes with various levels of tolerance, while centering their power as works of protest art, personal expression, and creative exploration and experimentation. Topics includes: queer masculinities and femininities, reproductive rights, pop and Internet cultures, queer joy, homophobia and protest, trans rights, queerness and disability, marriage, among others. Taught in English. No knowledge of Russian language/culture necessary. Open to all.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.

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RUSS B277 Nabokov in Translation

Not offered 2025-26

A study of Vladimir Nabokov's writings in various genres, focusing on his fiction and autobiographical works. The continuity between Nabokov's Russian and English works is considered in the context of the Russian and Western literary traditions. All readings and lectures in English.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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RUSS B317 Power and the Poet: Resistance and Otherness in Russian, Sov

Spring 2026

In Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia, literature and, later, cinema have served to augment voices calling for freedom and non-conformism in opposition to censorship and oppression. Vis-à-vis these calls for freedom, the concept of the Other has always occupied a prominent space in the Russian collective mindset, as well as in literature and art. Evoking the broad image of the writer, artist, philosopher, and thinker in Russian culture and embodying Otherness, the poet has often challenged Russian society to confront difficult issues. This course will examine how the so-called poet's Otherness has been imagined and depicted in Russian prose and poetry, cinema and media, and in the culture as a whole. By questioning underlying assumptions in Russian culture, students will explore the processes of constructing and representing the Other in terms of ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and dissidence. Conducted in Russian

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

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RUSS B390 Russian for Pre-Professionals I

Fall 2025

This capstone to the overall language course sequence is designed to develop linguistic and cultural proficiency in Russian to the advanced level or higher, preparing students to carry out academic study or research in Russian in a professional field. Suggested Preparation: study abroad in Russia for at least one summer, preferably one semester; and/or certified proficiency levels of 'advanced-low' or 'advanced-mid' in two skills, one of which must be oral proficiency.

Writing Attentive

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RUSS B391 Russian for Pre-Professionals II

Spring 2026

Second part of year long capstone language sequence designed to develop linguistic and cultural proficiency to the "advanced level," preparing students to carry out advanced academic study or research in Russian in a professional field. Prerequisite: RUSS 390 or equivalent.

Writing Attentive

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RUSS B400 Senior Essay

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RUSS B403 Supervised Work

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COML B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Spring 2026

What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object-oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? By bringing together the study of major theoretical currents of the 20th century and the practice of analyzing literary works in the light of theory, this course aims at providing students with skills to use literary theory in their own scholarship. The selection of theoretical readings reflects the history of theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology), as well as the currents most relevant to the contemporary academic field: Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. They are paired with a diverse range of short stories across multiple language traditions (Poe, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Calvino, Morrison, Djebar, Murakami, Ngozi Adichie) that we discuss along with our study of theoretical texts. We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shape what we are reading. The class will be conducted in English, with an additional hour taught by the instructor of record in the target language for students wishing to take the course for language credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; East Asian Languages & Culture; English; French and Francophone Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; German and German Studies; History of Art; Italian and Italian Studies; Philosophy; Russian; Spanish.

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