This is the first in a two-semester sequence that introduces students to all three major variants of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, while facilitating their mastery of one variant. The course provides a solid foundation in BCS by teaching all four major communicative skills... (read more).
Following its break with the Soviet Union in 1948, a small Balkan country once known as Yugoslavia began to develop its own alternative model of socialism. In economic and political terms, this led to the development of... (read more)
This course is a comparative study of “post-Yugoslav literature,” a term commonly used in reference to a diverse, transnational, and multilingual body of works produced over the past three decades by people (and the descendants of people) who once lived in a common, socialist... (read more)
The country of Yugoslavia existed for less than a century, and in that brief time, it developed a novel socialist system and culture that decisively broke with Stalin's Soviet bloc; formed connections with India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and other countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America... (read more)
Today’s highly mediatized conflicts have raised in a newly urgent way longstanding ethical and aesthetic concerns about the role of film in documenting, representing, and intervening in war. These concerns have been thoroughly engaged in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav film... (read more)
In a region home to many different ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities, folklore has long been a rich source of collective identities – a shared body of cultural expressions in which history remains alive and future often takes shape. Far from being an antiquated practice... (read more)
The Balkans is a region that is often marginalized, even though throughout modern history it has stood at the crossroads between East and West and has been the locus of the major developments of the 19th and 20th centuries – the site of Great Power competition, de-colonization movements... (read more)
The horrors of war are often described as unspeakable and unimaginable. Words supposedly fail to convey the cruelty and suffering caused by large-scale organized violence and destruction. Yet even a cursory look at the history of the written word reveals that literature does not obey these... (read more)
“This machine kills fascists” was the message printed on a World War II-era sticker American machinists affixed to their metalworking lathes and drill presses. As the war intensified, the folksinger and leftwing... (read more)
Thinking about a world beyond our own usually involves a whole series of difficult questions. The most obvious of these questions are epistemological in nature: what makes knowledge of this transcendent realm possible in our present condition? To rely solely on our empirical faculties... (read more)
