Slavic Languages and Literatures

Humanities Quadrangle, 203.432.1300, slavic.department@yale.edu
http://slavic.yale.edu
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
John MacKay (interim) 

Director of Graduate Studies
Marijeta Bozovic

Professors Edyta Bojanowska, Marijeta Bozovic, John MacKay 

Associate Professor Molly Brunson

Assistant Professors Jinyi Chu, Claire Roosien, Nariman Shelekpayev

Senior Lectors II Constantine Muravnik, Julia Titus

Senior Lectors I Krystyna Illakowicz, Anastasia Selemeneva, Olha Tytarenko

Fields of Study

The graduate program of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures values interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on Russian, East European, and Eurasian literatures and cultures. While maintaining a foundation in the study and teaching of language and literature, the department sees both as embedded in a global context and a broad network of cultural production. Students are encouraged to develop their primary fields of study as well as meaningful connections with other disciplines, including comparative literature, history of art, film and media studies, history and the social sciences, gender and sexuality studies, the environmental humanities, and the digital humanities.

The department’s primary doctoral track is the Ph.D. in Slavic and Eurasian Literatures and Cultures, with a strong emphasis on transnational and transmedial approaches. The department also offers a combined degree in Slavic and Eurasian Literatures and Cultures and Film and Media Studies (see below). By special arrangement, the department will consider individualized ad hoc programs with other departments. Students are encouraged to complement their research and teaching interests with one of Yale’s certificate programs, such as Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Film and Media Studies; Translation Studies; Environmental Humanities; or the MacMillan Center’s Councils on African, European, Latin American and Iberian, and Middle East Studies.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree

Course Requirements All graduate students are required to take sixteen courses in their first two years of graduate study, which must include RUSS 5851, Proseminar: Theory and Methods. In addition to this one mandatory course, students must fulfill the following distributional requirements through graduate-level coursework:

  • Minimum of one course on Slavic and/or Eurasian literature or culture before the eighteenth century
  • Minimum of one course on eighteenth-century Slavic and/or Eurasian literature or culture
  • Minimum of two courses on nineteenth-century Slavic and/or Eurasian literature or culture
  • Minimum of two courses on twentieth-century Slavic and/or Eurasian literature or culture
  • Minimum of one course on twenty-first-century Slavic and/or Eurasian literature or culture
  • Minimum of two (but no more than four out of the required sixteen) courses outside the Slavic department. 

Students who have done graduate-level coursework elsewhere may petition for up to three courses taken at another institution to count toward degree requirements, and may use any course slots freed through prior study to take additional elective courses at Yale. Language courses do not count toward the required sixteen courses.

Language Requirements Entering students are expected to have sufficient knowledge of Russian to allow for satisfactory work at the graduate level and are required to pass a departmental proficiency examination in Russian. Students must also demonstrate competence in a second foreign language, as soon as possible or by the beginning of the fifth term of study. Students may choose to pursue proficiency in a second East European or Eurasian language; in a language useful for broader access to scholarship; or in any language relevant for well-motivated comparative work. Competence in a second foreign language may be demonstrated through coursework or a reading examination.

Minor Field Students are responsible for developing a minor field of specialization in one of the following:

  1. a second language or literature;
  2. visual culture or one of the other arts;
  3. a topic in intellectual history or a specific interdisciplinary approach; or
  4. another discipline relevant to their primary interests. 

To demonstrate competency in their chosen minor field, students are required to submit a minor field portfolio no later than September 1 of their third year of graduate study.

Qualifying Paper Students must submit a qualifying paper (7000–9000 words) no later than September 1 of their third year. The paper, which in many cases will be a revised version of a seminar paper, should be developed in consultation with a faculty adviser.

Comprehensive and Qualifying Examinations In early October of their third year, students will take a comprehensive examination on Russian literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. The comprehensive is split into two six-hour take-home exams, to be completed several days apart. This exam is meant to test the students’ knowledge of the broad scope of Russian literature and culture, as well as their ability to analyze various kinds of cultural products and position specific works within their historical, cultural, and critical contexts. Students should use the departmental reading list as a guide in preparing for this exam, but they are also welcome to draw from beyond the list in their answers. In early December of their third year, students will also take a qualifying examination based on two specialized reading lists. This exam is a one-hour oral exam with twenty-five minutes allotted to each list, evaluated by two faculty advisers and the Director of Graduate Studies. The exam is meant to test the student’s knowledge of two specific areas of study, which often serve as important preparation for the development of a dissertation topic.

Pre-Prospectus Colloquium and Prospectus Presentation In early February of their third year, students will present a preliminary version of their dissertation prospectus (the pre-prospectus) at a one-hour colloquium attended by all Slavic ladder faculty. At the colloquium, students will present a brief introduction to their prospective dissertation, which will be followed by discussion and feedback. After the pre-prospectus colloquium, students will ask two faculty members to serve on their dissertation committee. These committee members will oversee the revision of the preliminary prospectus into a final draft (approximately 5000 words plus a detailed bibliography). In early April, students will present the final version of their dissertation prospectus to all students and faculty in the department. The prospectus presentation will take one hour, beginning with a brief introduction by the student and followed by discussion.

Dissertation The dissertation committee should include at least three faculty members: a chair (who must be a ladder faculty member from Slavic), one additional ladder faculty member from Slavic, and one faculty member either from Slavic, another department, or outside Yale. Students can petition to add additional committee members. Students must determine the constitution of their committee by October 1 of their fourth year. The dissertation is the culmination of the student’s work in the doctoral program and an important emblem of professional competence, intellectual rigor, and academic potential. As such, it should demonstrate mastery of a defined field of research and should articulate an original and substantive contribution to knowledge. While all dissertations should have clearly defined empirical and theoretical stakes and be grounded in appropriate methodological choices, each project will approach its central questions in necessarily distinct ways: some based more heavily in archival research, others shaped more profoundly by theoretical discussions, and still others determined by entirely different disciplinary or interdisciplinary demands.

First-Chapter Talk During the spring semester of the fourth year, students will deliver a forty-five-minute talk on their first chapter to the entire department. Students will revise their chapter after the talk, submitting a final draft to their dissertation committee no later than May 1.

Teaching All graduate students are expected to teach for a minimum of four semesters, typically in the third and fourth years of study. Teaching is required to receive additional sixth-year funding. Students are usually assigned at least two semesters of language teaching and two semesters of literature/culture teaching.

Combined Ph.D. Program with Film and Media Studies

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures also offers, in conjunction with the Film and Media Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in Slavic and Eurasian Literatures and Cultures and Film and Media Studies. For further details, see Film and Media Studies in this bulletin and the department’s website. Applicants to the combined program must indicate on their application that they are applying both to Film and Media Studies and to Slavic Languages and Literatures. All documentation within the application should include this information.

Master’s Degrees

M.Phil. See Degree Requirements under Policies and Regulations.

M.A. The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures does not admit students for the terminal M.A. degree, nor does it award an M.A. en route to the Ph.D. degree. If, however, a student admitted for the Ph.D. leaves the program prior to completion of the doctoral degree, the student may be eligible to receive a terminal master’s degree. The student must have completed at least fifteen term courses in Slavic and/or Eurasian literature and culture, chosen in consultation with the DGS. A grade of Honors in at least two term courses and an average of High Pass in the remaining courses must be attained. Candidates must pass a departmental proficiency examination in Russian, and prove competency in a second foreign language.

More information is available on the department’s website, http://slavic.yale.edu.

RUSS 6606a / E&RS 6011a / RSEE 6606a, Socialist Realism and Its Legacies  Claire Roosien

Socialist Realism was promulgated in the 1930s as the sole mode for cultural production in the Soviet Union. Since that time, it has been maligned as totalitarian, lauded as emancipatory, dismissed as hackish, and reappropriated in a variety of ways—from homage to parody. This course offers an introduction to Socialist Realism and its legacies, beginning with its prehistory in the early Soviet avant-garde and other cultural movements, tracing its official adoption under Stalin, its reassessment in the late Soviet period, and its legacies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Special attention is paid to the interpretations of Socialist Realism in the emerging national cultures beyond the Russian SFSR. The course also examines select examples of the impact of Socialist Realism beyond the Soviet Union, particularly in the “Third World” during the era of Cold War cultural diplomacy. Questions for discussion include: How did Socialist Realism imagine, enforce, and unsettle hierarchies of gender, race, and ethnicity? What did Socialist Realism look like beyond literature: in film, visual art, architecture, and music? How did the imperative to use Socialist Realism connect to the Soviet project to create minority cultures that would be “national in form, socialist in content”? How did people outside the Second World co-construct and appropriate Socialist Realism?
W 9:25am-11:20am

RUSS 7890a / HSAR 6833a / SLAV 6240a, Paper Icons  Justin Willson

Print profoundly transformed how people thought about images and the nature of depicted subject matter. This seminar examines the impact of print through the prism of the early modern Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia. Our focus is on the trajectory of looseleaf prints, though we attend to the relation of standalone compositions and book printing. We begin in the fifteenth century with the earliest Greek and Cyrillic prints and end in the late nineteenth century, exploring, along the way, the techniques of woodcut, engraving, monotype icon tracings, and lithography. Key themes are the epistemic challenges posed by an ephemeral medium, the archaeology of medieval iconography, economies of loss, pilgrimage cartography, Slavic poetics and the emblem, and the monastic pastoral. Primary sources in translation complement secondary readings, shedding light on key artistic actors. Extensive use is made of the Greek and Slavic collections at the Beinecke and Yale University Art Gallery. No previous coursework in art history is required.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

RUSS 8649b, Advanced Research Methods in Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture  Edyta Bojanowska

This workshop is intended to serve advanced graduate students in their fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh year of the Ph.D. program, who are working on topics related to Slavic and Eurasian cultures. Students discuss scholarly methods, research practices, and matters of professionalization (including the job market) in small groups or one-on-one with the instructor. Instructor permission is required.
M 7pm-8:55pm

RUSS 8680b, Space and Place in Modern Theory and Fiction  Edyta Bojanowska

This course explores “the spatial turn” in literary studies, combining theoretical texts from multiple disciplines with readings in modern Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet literature and culture.  We focus on the geometric, geographic, social, and epistemic spaces of literary texts. How do humans organize—and are organized by—space? How do literary texts conceptualize and sometimes transgress their own spatial order? How does spatial discourse situate knowledge, culture, and society? Borders, thresholds, and in-between spaces occupy us, along with transformations and animations of space. We consider meanings accrued in Russian culture by the human body, wilderness, sacred space, the street, the city, and imperial periphery, and by such paradigmatic Russian loci as the gentry estate, forest, and communal apartment. Theoretical readings span philosophy, literary and cultural theory, anthropology, sociology, history, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and geography. Literary readings are in Russian; limited accommodations for students without reading knowledge of Russian may be possible (contact the instructor for permission).
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

SLAV 5807a or b, Pedagogy Seminar  Staff

Faculty members instruct their Teaching Fellows on the pedagogical methods for teaching specific subject matter.
HTBA

SLAV 6240a / HSAR 6833a / RUSS 7890a, Paper Icons  Justin Willson

Print profoundly transformed how people thought about images and the nature of depicted subject matter. This seminar examines the impact of print through the prism of the early modern Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia. Our focus is on the trajectory of looseleaf prints, though we attend to the relation of standalone compositions and book printing. We begin in the fifteenth century with the earliest Greek and Cyrillic prints and end in the late nineteenth century, exploring, along the way, the techniques of woodcut, engraving, monotype icon tracings, and lithography. Key themes are the epistemic challenges posed by an ephemeral medium, the archaeology of medieval iconography, economies of loss, pilgrimage cartography, Slavic poetics and the emblem, and the monastic pastoral. Primary sources in translation complement secondary readings, shedding light on key artistic actors. Extensive use is made of the Greek and Slavic collections at the Beinecke and Yale University Art Gallery. No previous coursework in art history is required.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm