Department: Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Code Name Description
REES100 Current Issues in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia comprise a vast region of the world that is vitally important politically, strategically, historically and culturally. This seminar series brings leading experts, from around the world - scholars and practitioners -...
REES110 Politics and Society in Early Soviet Russia: View from the Hoover Library & Archives The course offers an examination of early Soviet history (1917-1924) based on the archival collections, digital records, and rare books and periodicals in the Hoover Library & Archives, with a focus on the papers of the American Relief Administration...
REES128 Literature of the former Yugoslavia What do Slavoj Zizek, Novak Djokovic, Marina Abramovic, Melania Trump, Emir Kusturica, and the captain of the Croatian national football team have in common? All were born in a country that no longer exists, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugosla...
REES185B Jews in the Contemporary World: Culture, Pop Culture, and Representation (HISTORY 185B is 5 units; HISTORY 85B is 3 units.) From Barbra Streisand to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from The Dybbuk to Broad City, and from Moscow to LA, this course applies a multicultural perspective on different experiences of Jewishness in the 20th...
REES200 Current Issues in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia comprise a vast region of the world that is vitally important politically, strategically, historically and culturally. This seminar series brings leading experts, from around the world - scholars and practitioners -...
REES204 Cities of Empire: An Urban Journey through Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean This course explores the cities of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires in the dynamic and turbulent period of their greatest transformation from the 19th century through the Two World Wars. Through the reading of urban biographies of Venice an...
REES205 The Business of Socialism: Economic Life in Cold War Eastern Europe This colloquium investigates the processes of buying, making, and selling goods and services in Cold War Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. We will familiarize ourselves with a variety of approaches to writing the history of economic life and discu...
REES210 Readings in Russian Realism For graduate students or upper-level undergraduates. What did Realism mean for late imperial Russian writers? What has it meant for twentieth-century literary theory? As we seek to answer these questions, we read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Ch...
REES211 Politics and Society in Early Soviet Russia: View from the Hoover Library & Archives The course offers an examination of early Soviet history (1917-1924) based on the archival collections, digital records, and rare books and periodicals in the Hoover Library & Archives, with a focus on the papers of the American Relief Administration...
REES213 US-Russia Relations After the Cold War A quarter century ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. At the time, Russian leaders aspired to build democratic and market institutions at home. They also wanted to join the West. American presidents Democrat and Republican encoura...
REES219 A New Cold War? Great Power Relations in the 21st Century Thirty years ago the Cold War ended. Today, great power competition is back - or so it seems - with many describing our present era as a "New Cold War" between the United States and China and Russia. What happened? Is the Cold War label an illuminati...
REES221 Ukraine at a Crossroads Literally meaning "borderland," Ukraine has embodied in-betweenness in all possible ways. What is the mission of Ukraine in Europe and in Eurasia? How can Ukraine become an agent of democracy, stability, and unity? What does Ukraine's case of multipl...
REES222B The Baltic World What makes a small, shallow and cold sea surrounded by very poor farming land stand out? Can we talk about a sea surrounded by nine countries as a single unit? This course traces and analyzes the interconnectedness and interdependence that shaped the...
REES223E Topics in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine Explores and contrasts Ukraine and Russia ca 1450-1800, when most of Ukraine had not yet been conquered by Russia: governmental structures, religion and culture, ideology, social organization, agrarian economy.
REES224A The Soviet Civilization (History 224A is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 424A is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) Socialist visions and practices of the organization of society and messianic politics; Soviet mass state violence; culture, living...
REES225E From Vladimir to Putin: Key Themes in Russian History Formative issues in Russian history from Muscovy to the present: autocracy and totalitarianism; tsars, emperors, and party secretaries; multi-ethnicity and nationalism; serfdom, peasantry; rebellions and revolutions, dissent and opposition; law and l...
REES227 All Quiet on the Eastern Front? East Europe and Russia in the First World War Until recently history has been comparatively quiet about the experience of World War I in the east. Far from being a peripheral theater of war, however, the experiences of war on the Eastern Front were central to shaping the 20th century. Not only w...
REES230 Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law This course explores the different dimensions of development - economic, social, and political - as well as the way that modern institutions (the state, market systems, the rule of law, and democratic accountability) developed and interacted with oth...
REES231B Understanding Russia: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order Russia presents a puzzle for theories of socio-economic development and modernization and their relationship to state power in international politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought into being the new Russia (or Russian Federation)...
REES237 Political Exhumations. Killing Sites Research in Comparative Perspective The course discusses the politics and practices of exhumation of individual and mass graves. The problem of exhumations will be considered as a distinct socio-political phenomenon characteristic of contemporary times and related to transitional justi...
REES240P Populism and the Erosion of Democracy What is populism, and how much of a threat to democracy is it? How different is it from fascism or other anti-liberal movements? This course explores the conditions for the rise of populism, evaluates how much of a danger it poses, and examines the d...
REES254 Animism, Gaia, and Alternative Approaches to the Environment Indigenous knowledges have been traditionally treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as mistaken epistemologies, i.e., un-scientific and irrational folklore. However, within the framework of environmental humanities, current interest...
REES254W Environmental Knowledges: Western and Indigenous The aim of the course is to analyze the relations between Indigenous and Western knowledges, and highlight the most important points of contact between the two systems. It will contribute to building inclusive and holistic knowledge in order to addre...
REES259C Ecological Humanities What sort of topics, research questions, approaches, theories and concepts lead to an integration of various kinds of knowledges? Ecological Humanities provides a conceptual platform for a merger of humanities and social sciences with earth and life...
REES299 Directed Reading No Description Set
REES300 MA Capstone Seminar Required for and limited to REEES MA candidates. Colloquia with CREEES Director and Associate Director to assist with refinement of research topic, advisor support, literature review, research, and thesis writing.
REES301B Eastern European Cinema From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Cz...
REES304 Cities of Empire: An Urban Journey through Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean This course explores the cities of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires in the dynamic and turbulent period of their greatest transformation from the 19th century through the Two World Wars. Through the reading of urban biographies of Venice an...
REES304G War and Society (History 204G is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 304G is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) How Western societies and cultures have responded to modern warfare. The relationship between its destructive capacity and effects...
REES322 Chernobyl: from Soviet Utopia to Post-Soviet Apocalypse The course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the history of the late Soviet utopian project of the "atomic cities" to the intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic responses that the Chernobyl catastrophe generated in the...
REES326 The Russian Revolution: Politics, Society, Culture The centennial of the Russian Revolution of 1917 serves as the occasion for this course, which surveys the political, social, and cultural upheavals that transformed Russia under the last Tsars and the first Soviet commissars. The course will be offe...
REES327 All Quiet on the Eastern Front? East Europe and Russia in the First World War Until recently history has been comparatively quiet about the experience of World War I in the east. Far from being a peripheral theater of war, however, the experiences of war on the Eastern Front were central to shaping the 20th century. Not only w...
REES328 Russian Nationalism: Literature and Ideas Russia is huge and linguistically and religiously diverse. Yet the ideology of nationalism --the idea that culturally unified groups should rule their own territories-- took root in Russia in the early 19th century and is powerful today. What made th...
REES348 Slavic Literature and Culture since the Death of Stalin The course offers a survey of Soviet and post-Soviet literary texts and films created by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian artists and marginalized or repressed by the Soviet regime. The first part of the course will focus on the topics of opposition...
REES409 Theories of the Image: Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West This seminar explores the role of images in the three major powers of the medieval Mediterranean: the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines. For each the definition of an image- sura, imago, or eikon respectively-became an important means of...
REES801 TGR Project No Description Set
REES85B Jews in the Contemporary World: Culture, Pop Culture, and Representation (HISTORY 85B is 3 units; HISTORY 185B is 5 units.) From Barbra Streisand to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from The Dybbuk to Broad City, and from Moscow to LA, this course applies a multicultural perspective on different experiences of Jewishness in the 20th...