Join the SEELC this Summer in one of our online courses! Maybe you need to fill a GE requirement, need the credits, or simply want to take a class you have missed before? Whatever the reason, we welcome you to sign up today.

All courses taught in English 

First-Session 8-Week Courses 

RUSSIAN 2850: Other Russias

Russia is a country that spans eleven time zones and has undergone immense social change over the course of its long history. However, most observers in the West receive only partial information about this vast and diverse country. This class is an introduction to lesser known or marginalized people and identities inhabiting Russia. Students learn about gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity as lived experiences, as categories and experiences embedded in historical and cultural contexts, and as categories of social difference that are intersectional, shifting, and shaped by hierarchies of power.  3 credit hours.

GE Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies

RUSSIAN 3355.99: Vodka in Russian Society and Culture: Deconstructing Myths (Online)

Vodka in Russia is important to virtually all social functions, is used as a home remedy for ailments, and is a frequent theme of jokes, folk songs, films, and literature. It also has an important political history, having long been used by the Russian (and Soviet) state as a form of social control. This course explores Russian culture and history through its most famous drink.

RUSSIAN 3480.99: The Russian Spy: Cultures of Surveillance, Secret Agents, & Hacking from the Cold War through Today (Online)

This course explores the concept of the spy in the cultural imaginations of both Russia and the West from the early 20th century through the present. Topics will include stereotyping in popular culture, the relationship between fiction and the political imagination, Western (especially American) and Russian views of each other, the Cold War, privacy, security, fear, and war.  

GE Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies

SLAVIC 2230.99: Vampires, Monstrosity, and Evil: From Slavic Myth to Twilight (Online)

Changing approaches to evil as embodied in vampires in East European folk belief & European & American pop culture; function of vampire & monster tales in cultural context, including peasant world & West from Enlightenment to now. 

GE Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies

SLAVIC 2365.99: Sports, Socialists, and Society in Russia and Eastern Europe (Online)

This course looks at the development of sports as a substitute and arena for battle between countries, as well as the rise of sports culture more generally in Central and Eastern Europe in terms of nationhood, politics, and corporeality. In this course, students will learn about the history and culture of sports, spectatorship, fandom, the Cold War, and Central and Eastern Europe. Not open to students with credit for SLAVIC 2365.01.

GE Theme: Traditions, Cultures, & Transformations

SLAVIC 3320: Queer Comrades: Sexual Citizenship and LGBTQ Lives in Eastern Europe (Online)

Through the lens of film, literature, theater, and art, this course explores what it means to be a queer citizen of Eastern Europe. Countering ideas of inherent backwardness, which tend to erase the existence of a diverse group of people, we will get to know works of art that bear witness to the wealth of queer experiences in 20th century Eastern Europe.

GE Theme: Citizenship for a Just & Diverse World