Here are some of the courses that I've taught and continue to teach
(course assignments are available upon request)

Society and Culture in the Putin Era
(Univ. of Washington, Seattle, Spring 2018)

This reading-intensive seminar focuses on post-Soviet Russia, its shifting values and cultural / ideological foundations through works of interpretative, investigative and graphic (comics) journalism, oral history, memoir, and cinema. In addition to exploring the Putin regime and its effects on Russian attitudes toward the free press, protest, gender, sexuality, and everyday life, we’ll seek to understand its impact and representation outside Russia, including in Ukraine and in America under Trump.

Soviet and Russian Film
(Lafayette  College, Fall 2012;
Univ. of Washington, Seattle, 2017--present)

From the early years of the Soviet avant-garde to the post-Stalinist era of covert critique, Russian film offers an intriguing perspective on Soviet life and the art of film. We will explore the pioneering cinema of Eisenstein and Vertov; the Hollywood-modeled propaganda films of the 1930s; the representation of World War II in Soviet film; the aesthetic and moral quests of post-Stalinist filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Muratova; and new directions in post-Soviet cinema. English subtitles.

Russian Revolutions: Film
2020 syllabus (Covid-19/Zoom edition)
2017 syllabus: UW Seattle syllabus
Syllabus (Lafayette College)

Russian Jewish Experience
(University of Washington, Autumn 2018;
CU Boulder, Spring 2014 & Spring 2017; Rutgers, Spring 2013; Tufts, Spring 2011)

This course offers an examination of the experience of Russian Jews from the end of the 19th century to the present, focusing on the late Imperial, the Soviet, and the post-Soviet periods. An examination of cultural artifacts dealing with the challenges of co-existence of Jews and their neighbors in the Russian Empire; we will also consider experiences of and reflections on the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, the Holocaust, the post-Stalin period; the place of Jews as individuals and members of a minority group within Russian and Soviet society, ideology, and culture; migration and emigration; everyday life in Russia, the Soviet Union, and among immigrant communities in America and elsewhere at the beginning of the 21st century. We will study fiction, films, diaries, memoirs, political propaganda, transcripts of trials, essays, and contemporary scholarship.

Winter 2020 syllabus (Univ. of Washington, Seattle)
Autumn 2018 syllabus (Univ. of Washington, Seattle)
Spring 2017 syllabus (CU Boulder) 
Spring 2014 syllabus (CU Boulder)
Spring 2011 syllabus (Tufts)
​

Modern Jewish Literature 
(University of Colorado Boulder)

In this course we study the work of Jewish writers from around the world. We look at a broad spectrum of texts that show the ways in which Jewish authors from different places and times speak about the world. We pay attention to questions of secularity and tradition, the experience of diasporic Jews, as exiles and as citizens, the move into modernity and questions of identity raised by the intellectual transitions brought about by political and social emancipation, as well as the enormous changes wrought by the ever-faster momentum of the modern world with its population redistribution, traumatic world-wide wars and rapid cultural transformations, and the creation and experience of living in a new homeland. The course is taught in English, and is approved for the arts and sciences core curriculum of literature and the arts.

Fall 2014 syllabus (CU Boulder)
Fall 2013 syllabus (CU Boulder)

Introduction to Jewish Culture
(University of Colorado Boulder)

This course explores the development and expressions of Jewish cultures across the chronological and geographical map of the Jewish people, with an emphasis on the variety of Jewish ethnicities and their cultural productions and changes, including such issues as sexuality and foodways. Sets the discussion in relevant contexts, and looks at cultural representations that include literary, religious, and visual texts.

Spring 2017 syllabus (CU Boulder) 
​Spring 2015 syllabus (CU Boulder)

Contemporary Jewish Societies
(University of Colorado Boulder)

This course uses a transnational lens to explore contemporary debates about Jewish people, places, and practices of identity and community; places that Jews have called “home,” and what has made, or continues to make, those places “Jewish”; issues of Jewish homelands and diasporas; gender, sexuality, food, and the Jewish body; religious practices in contemporary contexts. Readings drawn primarily from contemporary journalism and scholarship.

Spring 2015 syllabus (CU Boulder) 
Spring 2013 syllabus (CU Boulder) 

Back to the USSR: The Soviet Experiment 
(Lafayette College, Fall 2012)

Paul McCartney said he thought of the USSR as a mythical place when he wrote the famous Beatles song.  Two decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, what can we understand about its society and culture, and about its resonance in the popular imagination today? Through fiction, film, diaries and other sources this course examines the radical Soviet experiment that sought to reshape concepts of family, sexuality, space, time, and the meaning of being human. 

Syllabus (Lafayette College)

Exile and Displacement in the Contemporary Imagination
(Tufts University, Fall 2011)

With the unprecedented upheavals of the 20th and early 21st centuries, exile and displacement have become the norm rather than the exception. Contemporary imagination, in turn, has been affected by the narratives of migration and dislocation. This course examines novels, essays, poems, and films dealing with the experience of exiles and migrants in the 20th and the 21st centuries. We will encounter stories in which exile is a source of creativity while being deeply enmeshed in history of wars and violence, immigration and colonization. Taking a cross-cultural approach, this course considers narratives of homecomings alongside narratives of no return, stories of voluntary exile alongside stories of forced displacement, looking closely at the concepts of identity, home, language, and memory.

Syllabus (Tufts) 

Imagining the City
(Tufts University, Spring 2012)

Half the world’s population lives in cities; urban areas are expected to expand significantly in our lifetime because of migration and globalization as well as for economic and social reasons. While the reality of the world’s cities is multifaceted, writers, film directors, and installation artists have frequently represented cities in mythic or dystopian terms, creating a certain kind of incongruence between the urban experience and the city as an imagined space. In this course we will examine some such works, which imagine modern cities as sinful, dangerous, alienating and at the same time liberating; as sites of violence, oppression, and dread as well as of memory, sexuality, and desire.

Syllabus (Tufts)

Dostoyevsky: A Seminar
(Lafayette College, Fall 2012)

An examination of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s major works, with a view to showing how the problems they contain (social, psychological, political, religious) are inseparable not only from his time but from the distinctive novelistic form he created. Readings include Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s two famous novels about murder, among other titles (Poor Folk, Notes from Underground, and Demons) in addition to relevant theoretical and contextual texts, such as the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. All readings in English; a separate section may be arranged for students who wish read excerpts from texts in the  Russian original. 

Syllabus (Lafayette College)

Courses taught as a Teaching Fellow

• Elementary Intensive Russian (Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard)
• Modern Jewish Literature (led 2 discussion sections; administered this 96-person course as a Head Teaching Fellow in the Gen Ed program at Harvard; I also taught a standalone seminar based on this course at UCLA)
• Introduction to Russian Literary Studies (tutorial for sophomores concentrating in Russian Studies at Harvard; stand-alone course with my own syllabus)

Student evaluations 

Student evaluations from the University of Washington, University of Colorado Boulder, Harvard, UCLA, Tufts, Lafayette College, and Rutgers University are available upon request.