GNS Courses Spring 2021

(3 credits)

• ONLINE (TR 1:00-2:15 pm)          Instructor: Nâlân Erbil

Course Description: Nation, History, Family in Turkish TV and Film explores the reasons for the recent boom in Turkish TV show production and export focusing on constructions of family, nation, and history. We will analyze how particular interpretations and visual representations of these concepts challenge and/or legitimize the country’s cultural, historical, and political claims today. This course is taught in English and no knowledge of Turkish is necessary.

Prerequisites: None.

(4 credits)

• MTWR 8:50-9:40 am          Instructor: Gulnara Glowacki

Course Description: Building on skills learned in first semester Kazakh, learn to communicate in more extended situations. Information on holidays, traditions and colloquial phrases will be introduced. Pays special attention to reading and writing and to vocabulary expansion.

Prerequisites: GNS 331.

(4 credits)

• ONLINE (MWF 2:25-3:15 pm)          Instructor: Nâlân Erbil

Course Description: Second semester Turkish is designed for students who are interested in learning the modern Turkish language (“Istanbul dialect”) and cultures, and who have taken first semester Turkish (GNS 339) or have already a basic command of modern Turkish. Students will have the opportunity to practice the materials to increase their elementary level listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in line with the ACTFL proficiency guidelines for Turkish and based on the World-Readiness Standards.

Prerequisites: GNS 339.

(3 credits)

• ONLINE (TR 2:30-3:45 pm)          Instructor: Thomas DuBois and Kirill Ospovat

Course Description: What are cities? Places of commerce? Demonstrations of national or imperial power? Crucibles of revolutionary ideals? Places of refuge, encounter, immigration, innovation, danger, decay? In this course, we will traverse cityscapes of past and present cities in the wide array of countries encompassed in the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic. Through examining city plans, architecture, monuments, museums, parks, poetry, prose, film and online culture, we will delve into the many meanings of cities past and present, with particular attention to what the cities of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe can teach us about Western ideas of the city more generally. While focusing on a particular set of well-known cities (e.g., St Petersburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockhom) we will also visit many other cities in the term as well, ranging from Instanbul in the east and Reykjavik in the west, and reaching across the Atlantic to ethnic enclaves in places like New York and Chicago.  Think of the course as a welcome antidote to the cabin fever of the Covid-19 lockdown as well as a substantive look at the pivotal roles cities play, tangibly and symbolically, in the volatile politics and culture of today.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing.

(3 credits)

• ONLINE (MW 4:00-5:15 pm)          Instructor: Liina-Ly Roos

Course Description: This is a topics course on migration as a prevalent theme in European films, literature, television programs and other modes of media. Often, these texts bring out displacement, racism, complicated identity politics, and the shifting trajectories of migration. In this course we will look at various forms of migration and movement across borders in a selection of films, novels, poems, television programs, YouTube videos, and newspaper articles in Europe, focusing particularly on the Northern, Eastern and Central European countries such as Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Germany. Much of the course will focus on contemporary examples, but we will also talk about the history of migration and the changing borders in Europe. Some of the concepts that we will be engaging with in discussing different depictions of migration are diaspora, refugees, border consciousness, fortress Europe, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and self-narration.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing.

(3 credits)

• ONLINE (TR 1:00-2:15 pm)          Instructor: Gulnara Glowacki

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing.

(3 credits)

• ONLINE (MW 4:00-5:15 pm)          Instructor: Oksana Stoychuk

Course Description: Since the early 1990s, there has been an explosion of women’s writing in Central and Eastern Europe greater than in any other cultural period. This is due to the fact that women in this region have experienced more cataclysmic transformations than most of their contemporaries in Western Europe. This course focuses on the question of how women writers have responded to the collapse of communism, searching in their work for new forms of posttotalitarian identities – national, cultural or sexual, creating the new empowered female voices. We will read a number of contemporary Central and Eastern European women writers, such as Terézia Mora, Olga Tokarczuk, Svetlana Alexievich, Oksana Zabuzhko, Herta Müller, Aglaja Veteranyj and Olga Grjasnowa and others. We will trace narrative manifestations of the women’s struggle against different forms of authority: political regimes, religion, cultural hegemony, and patriarchy. In addition to works of fiction, we will read articles, interviews, and other secondary sources to achieve a general understanding of contemporary politics, cultural conflict, and gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe.

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing.

(4 credits)

• ONLINE (MWF 3:30-4:20 pm)          Instructor: Nâlân Erbil

Course Description: Fourth Semester Turkish is designed for students who have studied three semesters of Turkish or its equivalent. This course is designed to help students develop intermediate competence in spoken and written Turkish. Emphasis is on listening comprehension, reading, speaking, writing, and cultural and historical knowledge in line with ACTFL proficiency guidelines for Turkish and the World-Readiness Standards.

Prerequisites: GNS 439.

(1 credit)

• ONLINE          Instructor: Yekaterina Pak

Prerequisites: Junior standing.

(3 credits)

• ONLINE (TR 2:30-3:45 pm)          Instructor: Nâlân Erbil

Course Description: This course will focus equally on reading, writing, listening and speaking skills with the goal to enhance critical literacy in Turkish. Materials will include various authentic texts produced for speakers of Turkish such as novels, short stories, poems, and films. Perspectives of Turkish speaking cultures will be analyzed in comparison. Azeri/Ottoman will be incorporated upon demand.

Prerequisites: GNS 539.