Courses

We live in an image-saturated world. How do we make sense of the moving image and its powerful roles in shaping culture and mediating our relationship with the world? This course will equip students with the tools to understand and decipher film language. It introduces and interrogates the basic notions, technologies, terminologies, and theories of film analysis. We will study visual and compositional elements, like mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Films we discuss will include different geographies, genres, major directors, schools, and film movements. Through writing, students will learn to analyze films with accurate, medium-specific vocabulary, develop informed and nuanced arguments, and critically reflect on the position of the viewer.

Full details for COML 1104 - FWS: Reading Films

What do Frankenstein and Things Fall Apart have in common? What lies behind the fantastical stories of Aladdin? Do we have to like Garcia Márquez and Shakespeare? These texts and authors re-imagine the human experience at its most intriguing level. In this course, we will discuss human rights, intimacy, joy, isolation, and other controversies at the heart of these books. Throughout the semester, students will learn how to articulate an informed and nuanced position on these issues via formal practices in analytical readings, drafting, peer review, and self-editing. Actual selection of readings may vary depending on the instructor's focus.

Full details for COML 1105 - FWS: Books with Big Ideas

In 2015, Japan's SoftBank Robotics Corporation announced the world's first robot with feelings. Many people were excited, many more disturbed. If robots are simply, as the dictionary suggests, machines "designed to function in the place of a living agent," then what is so disturbing about them? Since robots are designed to replace human labor (first economic, and now also emotional), do they represent a threat as much as they do an aid? What happens when robots exceed their purpose, and become more humanlike? How do robots read, write, and feel? How do the activities of coding and writing, or decoding and reading differ? Students will be equipped with the vocabulary and writing strategies to rigorously analyze, compare, and debate the meaning of robots in the human imagination from different epochs, countries, languages, and media. In doing so, they will write in a variety of registers about works such as the play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, who invented the term "robot". Other materials may include philosophical texts, fiction, videogames, films, graphic novels, and hip-hop concept albums.

Full details for COML 1106 - FWS: Robots

In this course, we will work with poems of varied styles and traditions. You will learn to understand poetry through analytical writing and through the composition of your own poems. 

Full details for COML 1134 - FWS: Reading Poetry

On the eve of his discovery of the treasures of Pharaoh Tutankhamen in the Egyptian desert, archaeologist Howard Carter famously described his findings as 'wonderful things'. This idea of wonder, amazement – and fantasy – defines moments of encounter between travelers from Europe and America, on the one hand, and the cultures of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, on the other. In this course, we will study examples of 'wonderful' artistic production emerging from such moments of cross-cultural contact, across literature, art, architecture, fashion, and opera. Through the practice of composing conceptually and structurally compelling essays, this course invites us to explore case studies of cross-cultural artistic production, while gaining a background in global history, postcolonial theory, and politics.

Full details for COML 1137 - FWS: Wonderful Things: Orientalism in Art, Literature and Culture

What was colonialism? And, of equal importance, what is colonialism? In response to these questions, this class turns to literature, media, and philosophy to ask after the bonds between colonialism and contemporary issues of migration, extraction and environmental degradation, globalized labor, and algorithmic justice. By exploring a diversity of interrelated contexts in the Global North and South alike, students will be equipped with the vocabulary and writing strategies to rigorously analyze, compare, and contextualize these issues alongside artists and thinkers including Aimé Césaire, Mati Diop, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Achille Mbembe, and Frantz Fanon.

Full details for COML 1138 - FWS: Colonial Afterlives

Take your love for literature, film and media into uncharted waters. This course journeys beyond national, linguistic and disciplinary borders to explore implications of our globalized and technologized world. Engage in cutting-edge debates in the fields of comparative literature and film and media studies. Exploring texts from across the globe, we will explore how different media represent and stage encounters with the other.  Authors, artists, and directors whose work we will study include people like: Rodrigo Bellot, Carmen Maria Machado, Amanda Gorman, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Hao Jingfang, Franz Kafka, and Yoko Tawada.   Topics may include: postcolonial theory, translation, BIPOC studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, and media studies. Writing assignments will include a range of forms, genres, and media that help us hone our analytical, critical, and creative understanding, reflection, and expression.

Full details for COML 2030 - Comparative Literature, Film, and Media

Literature has long been understood as a window into the human condition, with nature serving as its mere backdrop. How would our relationship with literature change if we reversed this hierarchy? In an age when human activity has irreversibly transformed all four elements of nature -- air, water, earth, and fire – how do we rediscover the active role that the elements have always played in the constitution of the literary imagination? Through a journey with texts from six continents, this course offers a new model of world literature, one predicated not on social actors and cultural forces alone but on the configurations, flows, and disruptions of the elements. In the process, it addresses the place and work of literature in an increasingly threatened planet.

Full details for COML 2036 - Literature and the Elements of Nature

Where do we get our images of poets, and of poetry? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in music and popular culture? How do such figures inform both the images we find in poems and poetry's own image? What is poetry's relation to other genres and discourses, to self and language, history and politics? Exploring such issues in verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media, including among others Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Poe, Baudelaire, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Parra, Bolaño, and Dylan, the course will arc toward impactful recent interventions by such contemporary intermedial artists as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar.

Full details for COML 2251 - Poetry's Image

From radical manifestos written by revolutionaries and satirical plays of union organizers to experimental novels, poetry, art, and music, this course examines Latinx literatures published in the United States beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present. We also pay particular attention to the precursors of U.S. Latinx literature, pushing back on the "borders" of national canons of art and culture to rethink "the start" or origin point of "American" literature. Exploring oral histories and intergenerational memory in the narratives of spoken word, visual, craft, and ephemeral art, we sample fiction, poetry, letters, and other forms of storytelling that document the experience of Latinx peoples. Authors include Julia Alvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Luisa Capetillo, José Martí, José Montoya, Cherríe Moraga, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Pedro Pietri, Ernesto Quiñonez, Helena Viramontes, and others. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Full details for COML 2400 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the "The Story of Sinuhe" and "The Epic of Gilgamesh," as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the "Travels" of Ibn Battuta, the "Shahnameh" of Ferdowsi, and "The Arabian Nights." We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Full details for COML 2754 - Wondrous Literatures of the Near East

What do comparatists do when we approach our objects of study? What enables or justifies comparison across different languages, different genres, different media, and different disciplines? Does all comparison assume a common ground of some kind (whether historical, formal, conceptual, or ideological), or is comparison inherently ungrounded, provocative, or political? We will explore these questions through examination of a wide range of comparative projects, from those often cited as foundational to the discipline and their most important critics to contemporary comparative projects that are reshaping the discipline and expanding it in new directions. Readings will be complemented by discussions with Cornell faculty and graduate students working in the field.

Full details for COML 3001 - Methods of Comparison

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history. Global Cinema I covers the period from 1895 to 1960. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: early silent cinema; the emergence of Hollywood as industry and a "classical" narrative form; Soviet, German, French and Chinese film cultures; the coming of sound; interwar documentary and avant-garde movements; American cinema in the age of the studio system; Italian Neorealism; the post-war avant-garde.

Full details for COML 3261 - Global Cinema I

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary.

Full details for COML 3314 - Korean Literature and Performance: From P'ansori to K-Pop

We will engage the political thinking of Jacques Derrida, attempt to disinter and engage attitudes toward history, ancestry, and progress in the radical nineteenth century, and consider the possible relevance of Marx now. We will read Derrida's Specters of Marx, along with key texts Derrida examines there--from Hamlet to the Communist Manifesto to the American triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama. We will also consider a range of critiques of Derrida in response to his own text. Special attention will be devoted to Marx's and Derrida's own "Jewish specters" vis-à-vis the Christian West's non-Christian Others.

Full details for COML 3458 - Specters: Derrida, Marx, and Other Ghosts

Popular consciousness of The Thousand and One Nights tends to focus on the female protagonist's inexhaustible oratory talents. Less frequently marveled at is the way in which the text's frame story and its one unchanging feature begins with an interdiction on "interracial" sex. What does the representation of this initial sexual encounter in the Arabian Nights have to do with global discourses on race, gender and sexuality? This course explores the millenia-long history of mediations and translations of this ancient Perso-Arabic compilation of myth and fable across literature, film, and popular culture, in Southwest Asia (the Middle East), the U.S. and in Europe. We will pay attention to the historical transmission of tropes about sexuality and blackness as they manifest in various versions of the Arabian Nights. We will situate our discussions within debates in film and media theory, feminist and queer theory, black studies, and psychoanalysis. Students will develop familiarity with various forms of cultural inquiry and theory.

Full details for COML 3708 - Race and Sex: Arabian Nights

Fictions of dictatorship, as termed by scholar Lucy Burns, denote both the narratives and spectacles produced by authoritarian governments and the performances, events, and cultural objects that work against these states of exception. This course will critically examine histories of dictatorships, through both documentary & creative forms (i.e. novels, memoirs, and performance) and with a geographic focus on Asia and Latin America, in order to understand authoritarian returns in our present historical moment.

Full details for COML 4040 - Fictions of Dictatorship

COML 4190 and COML 4200 may be taken independently of each other. Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for COML 4190 - Independent Study

This is an introduction to the three 'master thinkers' who have helped determine the discourses of modernity and post-modernity. We consider basic aspects of their work: (a) specific critical and historical analyses; (b) theoretical and methodological writings; (c) programs and manifestos; and (d) styles of argumentation, documentation, and persuasion. This also entails an introduction, for non-specialists, to essential problems of political economy, continental philosophy, psychology, and literary and cultural criticism. Second, we compare the underlying assumptions and the interpretive yields of the various disciplines and practices founded by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: historical materialism and communism, existentialism and power-knowledge analysis, and psychoanalysis, respectively. We also consider how these three writers have been fused into a single constellation, 'Marx-Nietzsche-Freud,' and how they have been interpreted by others, including L. Althusser, A. Badiou, A. Camus, H. Cixous, G. Deleuze, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, H.-G. Gadamer, M. Heidegger, L. Irigaray, K. Karatani, J. Lacan, P. Ricoeur, L. Strauss, S. Zizek.

Full details for COML 4250 - Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

This StudioLab course connects critical design teams with researchers, NGOs, and nonprofits working on human rights, public health, and environmental and land rights in the US and abroad. Practicing methods of transmedia knowledge, critical design thinking, and strategic storytelling, students collaborate on projects with the Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, Health Access Connect (Uganda), NYS 4-H, and SOOFA Ranch (GA). Consulting on partners' ongoing projects, teams study and practice processes from IDEO's Human-Centered Design Thinking and Stanford's Design for Extreme Affordability, as well as UX, tactical media, and activist organizing developed by ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, Guerrilla Girls, and contemporary, multi-platform campaigns, presenting and sharing their collaborations via project site and other platforms.

Full details for COML 4281 - Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for COML 4451 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester. A letter grade is awarded on completion of the second semester, COML 4940.

Full details for COML 4930 - Senior Essay

Times TBA individually in consultation with director of Senior Essay Colloquium. Approximately 50 pages to be written over the course of two semesters in the student's senior year under the direction of the student's advisor. An R grade is assigned on the basis of research and a preliminary draft completed in the first semester.

Full details for COML 4940 - Senior Essay

This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should enroll online in the instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for COML 6190 - Independent Study

This course examines Korean literature and performance traditions from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) to the present. Through performance workshops, the course enables students to experience how Korean epic and lyric traditions were performed in the past and how they continue to flourish in the present across various media, including recorded music, written texts, and film. We will examine how Korean literature and performance traditions have transformed over time, with attention given to how these traditions speak to local and global audiences following the Korean Wave. The course concludes with recent developments in Korean popular music, including K-pop bands and K-hip-hop. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is necessary.

Full details for COML 6314 - Korean Literature and Performance: From P'ansori to K-Pop

We will engage the political thinking of Jacques Derrida, attempt to disinter and engage attitudes toward history, ancestry, and progress in the radical nineteenth century, and consider the possible relevance of Marx now. We will read Derrida's Specters of Marx, along with key texts Derrida examines there--from Hamlet to the Communist Manifesto to the American triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama. We will also consider a range of critiques of Derrida in response to his own text. Special attention will be devoted to Marx's and Derrida's own "Jewish specters" vis-à-vis the Christian West's non-Christian Others.

Full details for COML 6458 - Specters: Derrida, Marx, and Other Ghosts

This course examines black feminist theories as they are articulated in the cross-cultural experiences of women across the African Diaspora. We will explore a variety of theories, texts and creative encounters within their socio-political and geographical frames and locations, analyzing these against, or in relation to, a range of feminist activisms and movements. Some key categories of discussion will include Black Left Feminism, Feminist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and African feminisms. Texts like the Combahee River Collective statement and a variety of US Black feminist positions and the related literature as well as earlier black feminist articulations such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice will also be engaged. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own research projects from a range of possibilities.

Full details for COML 6465 - Black Feminist Theories: Sexuality, Creativity, and Power

This graduate seminar provides a basic introduction to the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and to the latter's interpretation and appropriation of the former. A major concern is the articulation of philosophy and politics, particularly in the case of Heidegger. We are also interested in the types of argumentation and styles of writing of both thinkers, including in light of the hypothesis that they were working in the ancient tradition of prudent exotericism, viz. that they never wrote exactly what they thought and that they intended their influence to come slightly beneath the level of conscious apprehension. We also consider their impact on the long list of intellectuals across the 'Left-Center-Right' spectrum, including (depending on seminar-participant interest): Adorno, Agamben, Bataille, Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Irigaray, Klossowski, Löwith, Marcuse, Rorty, Leo Strauss, Vattimo, Zupancic.

Full details for COML 6630 - Nietzsche and Heidegger

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for COML 6651 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

This course argues that modern literary strictures – such as market forces, censorship, and new media forms – are contiguous with and interpretable in the same way as more traditional literary strictures like meter, rhyme, and tonal regulation. It asks how we can come to a more thorough understanding of contemporary art by treating its sociological and political context as a source of generative restraint. Theoretical texts will range from Foucault to Vaclav Havel; primary texts will be drawn from contemporary Chinese fiction, poetry and film. All texts will be made available in English for non-Chinese speakers.

Full details for COML 6686 - Literary Stricture

"Prophetic Realisms" explores the notion that certain literary texts – those that are deeply embedded in the socio-economic totality of the world they build – not only provide insight into the present world, but also anticipate the shape of things to come: the tendencies and trajectories of coming historical formations. The latent is already manifest so that, strangely, one of the proving grounds of literature is history. This idea is very pronounced in Georg Lukacs' 1930s writing on Realism, but also shared by his antagonists in the 'Expressionist Debates,' such as Ernst Bloch: the one point they agree on is literature's ability to 'anticipate' historical developments. This idea is expressed, in a different way, by Erich Auerbach's 1937 essay "On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday" and 1938 essay "figura". In this course we will look at these 1930s writings, constellating them with the 1830s texts that harken back to as anticipating the direction of capitalism (Balzac, but also Stendahl), alongside the early 1900s novels anticipating the rise of fascism (Heinrich Mann, but also Fallada), and finally juxtaposing them with science fiction since the 1960s, including theoretical reflections on them with respect to 'prediction', such as Philip K Dick, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. We are interested in moments when historical time seems to become 'concentrated,' hence the axes of 1830/1930/2030.

Full details for COML 6730 - Prophetic Realisms: Literature and the Shape of Things to Come, 1830-1930-2030

The course will consider the aesthetics and politics of "touch" in dialogue with critical, artistic experimentation. Emphasizing interactivity and immersion in art and theory, the course will discuss renewed critical emphasis on the legacy of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Deleuze to affect theory) in dialogue with recent writings on global critical race and sexual theory (Glissant, Spillers, Mbembe, Ganguly, Lalu, Moten, Cardenas). Designed as an archive-based course, students will be invited to shape the second part of the syllabus around works featured in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and in the 2022 CCA Biennial on "Futurities, Uncertain" with the aim of staging a final text/exhibit/performance based on conceptual approaches to "touch."

Full details for COML 6920 - Aesthetics and Politics of Touch

Explore the ways of 19th to 21stcentury Russian Jewry through survey of literature, film, and art. Learn about life in Russia from the perspective of Jewish and Russian-Jewish writers as well as through portrayal of Russian Jews in works of prominent Russian authors in the context of period. Selected works of Pushkin and Chekhov, Sholom Aleichem and  Chagall, Pasternak and Yevtushenko will help create a multidimensional picture of the political and socio-cultural environment that shaped the identity of the modern-day Russian Jews in their deep, inherent connection to the Russian culture and often in disconnect with their roots, which characteristically distinguishes them from their American contemporaries.

Full details for RUSSL 2001 - Russian Jews and Jewish Russians in Literature and Film

The nineteenth century was the first great age of Russian poetry – beginning with Pushkin's predecessors, continuing through Lermontov, and ending with Tiutchev and Fet and anticipations of modernism. In this course you'll learn how to read short poems carefully, you'll expand and deepen your understanding of the Russian language, and you'll gain insight into one of the world's major literary traditions.

Full details for RUSSL 3331 - Introduction to Russian Poetry

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for RUSSL 4492 - Supervised Reading in Russian Literature

Reinforces the speaking skills learned in RUSSA 1121. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computer. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1103 - Conversation Practice

Gives a thorough grounding in all the language skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Course materials include clips from original Russian films and televisions programs. Homework includes assignments that must be done in the language lab or on the students' own computers. Note the RUSSA 1103 option. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1121 - Elementary Russian through Film

The emphasis is on reading unabridged articles on a variety of topics from current Russian web pages and translating them into English; a certain amount of discussion (in Russian) may also be undertaken. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 1125 - Reading Russian Press

RUSSA 1131 and RUSSA 1132 cover the standard Cornell first-year Russian language curriculum at a slower pace than RUSSA 1103 -RUSSA 1104 and RUSSA 1121 -RUSSA 1122, the pace to be chosen by each individual student in consultation with the instructor. Somewhat larger homework reading, writing, and online assignments with fewer and shorter meetings with the instructors in very small groups. Detailed description on the Russian Language Program website.

Full details for RUSSA 1131 - Self-Paced Elementary Russian I

Guided conversation, translation, reading, pronunciation, and grammar review, emphasizing the development of accurate and idiomatic expression in the language. Course materials include video clips from an original Russian feature film and work with Russian web sites, in addition to the textbook. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 2203 - Intermediate Composition and Conversation

Taught on a specialized basis for students with special projects (e.g., to supplement a non-language course or thesis work).

Full details for RUSSA 3300 - Directed Studies

Intended for students who speak grammatically correct Russian but do not know Russian grammar and have not learned to read or write Russian well (or have not learned written Russian at all). May be taught slightly faster or slower in a given year, depending on the needs and interests of the students. Two classes a week teach writing and grammar and include related reading. These classes are required, and the students who take them receive 2 credit hours. The third (optional) class teaches reading and discussion, and grants an additional credit hour. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 3305 - Reading and Writing for Heritage Speakers of Russian

Involves discussion, in Russian, of authentic Russian texts and films (feature or documentary) in a variety of non-literary styles and genres. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 4413 - Modern Russia: Past and Present I

Designed for students whose areas of study require advanced active control of the language. Fine points of translation, usage, and style are discussed and practiced. Syllabus varies from year to year. May be taken more than once. Detailed description at russian.cornell.edu.

Full details for RUSSA 6633 - Russian for Russian Specialists

By the end of this course, you will be able to carry on basic conversations in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian on many topics from your daily life. You should be able to make polite requests, ask for information, respond to requests and descriptions, impart personal information, and have simple discussions on familiar topics. You will also acquire the skills to read and understand simple informational texts, such as newspaper headlines and menus, announcements and advertisements, and to extract the general idea of longer informational texts. You will master the writing systems of the languages, and you should be able to write notes or simple letters and keep a journal.

Full details for BCS 1131 - Elementary Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I

The intermediate course in BCS is a continuation of the elementary course and is intended to enhance overall communicative competence in the language. This course moves forward from the study of the fundamental systems and vocabulary of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian to rich exposure to the spoken and written language with the wide range of speakers and situations. The goal of the course is to give students practice in comprehension, speaking, and composition, while broadening their vocabulary and deepening their understanding of grammar and syntax. The course will focus on the following skills: conversation, writing, role-playing, interviewing, and summarizing. To develop these skills the students will be assigned dialogues, language exercises, translations, descriptions, summaries, and a final independent project.

Full details for BCS 2133 - Intermediate Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian I

The Elementary Finnish I course is designed for students without prior knowledge of Finnish. Students have an opportunity to practice listening, speaking, reading and writing in Finnish. Students learn to provide information about their opinions and feelings, their families, their immediate environment and their daily activities. The course is taught in Finnish.

Full details for FINN 1121 - Elementary Finnish I

The purpose of this course is for the students to develop elementary proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing in Ukrainian, while acquiring some basic knowledge of Ukrainian culture, history, geography, and way of life.

Full details for UKRAN 1121 - Elementary Ukrainian I

The course starts with a review and subsequent reinforcement of grammar fundamentals and core vocabulary pertaining to the most common aspects of daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of students' communicative skills (oral and written) on such topics as the self, family, studies and leisure, travel, meals and others.

Full details for UKRAN 2133 - Intermediate Ukrainian I

This content-based modular course aims to develop students' capacity to use the Ukrainian language as a research and communication tool in a variety of specialized functional and stylistic areas that include literary fiction, scholarly prose, printed and broadcast journalism. It is designed for students with interest in the history, politics, literature, culture and other aspects of contemporary Ukraine, as well as those who plan to do their research, business or reporting about Ukraine.

Full details for UKRAN 3133 - Advanced Ukrainian I