HUSI-2008 Courses

Language Courses:

Beginning Ukrainian (8 Units)
Alla Parkhomenko, British Council, Kyiv, Ukraine

An intensive course for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammatical structures are introduced and reinforced through an active oral approach. By the end of the course students are expected to develop the ability to conduct short conversations in a range of familiar situations related to daily activities, understand simple factual texts, and write routine messages. They will be able to initiate, maintain and bring to a close simple exchanges by asking and responding to simple questions. A variety of original sources will be used to establish an authentic environment.


Intermediate Ukrainian (8 Units)
Yuri I. Shevchuk, Lecturer, Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University

Development of students’ conversational skills in a variety of real life communicative settings gets priority treatment in the course.  This is accompanied by a review of basic structures and further expansion of grammar fundamentals. Major emphasis is placed on the development of vocabulary through readings and viewings of videotaped programs focusing on contemporary cultural and political issues. By the end of the course students will be able to narrate and describe in major time frames and deal effectively with unanticipated complications in most informal, and some formal, settings on topics of personal and some general interest.


Advanced Ukrainian (8 Units)
Volodymyr Dibrova, Preceptor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.

This is an intensive course for students who wish to develop their mastery of the language. Reading selections include annotated articles on contemporary issues in business, economics, politics, and culture. Short written reports and oral presentations will be part of the course. By the end of the course the students will be able to discuss extensively a wide range of general interest topics and some special fields of interest, hypothesize, support opinions and deal with linguistically unfamiliar situations. Classes will be conducted largely in Ukrainian.


History and Literature Courses:

History of Ukraine (4 units)
Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History

The course explores the history of Ukraine from the arrival of the Vikings and the Christianization of Rus’ (988) to the disintegration of the USSR and formation of an independent Ukrainian state (1991). It puts the history of Ukrainian territory and its people into a broad context of political, social and cultural changes in Eastern Europe in the course of the last millennium. Special emphases are put on the role of Ukraine as a cultural frontier of Europe, positioned on the border between settled areas and Eurasian steppes, Christianity and Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, as well as a battleground of major imperial and national projects of modern era.


Twentieth Century Ukrainian Literature: Rethinking the Canon (4 Units)
George G. Grabowicz, the Dmytro Cyzevs'kyj Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Harvard University

A survey of the major writers and works of Ukrainian literature from the 1920s century through the present with a special focus on how their reception and evaluation has been reconfigured by Ukraine’s independence.  The course will examine among others such movements and developments as modernism, the “executed renaissance” (rozstriljane vidrodzhennja), socialist realism, the literature of dissent and emigration, underground literature and post-modernism through close readings of representative works.
Prerequisites: reading knowledge of Ukrainian or permission of the Instructor.

The Red Prince: The Ukrainian Mission of a Habsburg Archduke
Timothy D. Snyder
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History
Yale University

Blending Sacred and Secular Concerns: Changes in the Religious Landscape in Ukraine Today
Catherine Wanner
Associate Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies
Penn State University

Taxi Driver, by Roman Bondarchuk; Bozhychi, by Anastasia Kharchenko; Stray Dog, by Valery Yambursky
Theme: “New Works and New Names in Ukrainian Cinema”
Presented by Yuri Shevchuk
Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Film Club and the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University

Lenin, “Great Russia,” and Ukraine
Roman Szporluk
Research Professor of History, Harvard University

Between Tradition and the Avant-Garde
Natalka Husar
Artist

Zvenyhora, 1928
Theme: “An Unknown Oleksander Dovzhenko”
Presented by Yuri Shevchuk
Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Film Club and the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University

“Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex” A solo play by Halyna Stefanova, based on the novel by Oksana Zabuzhko
*Performance is in Ukrainian

Андріївський узвіз (Andrew’s Way)
Volodymyr Dibrova
Writer-in-Residence and Publications Editor, Ukrainian Research Institute Preceptor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Ukraine’s Anti-Imperial Choice: The Case of Leonid Pervomais’kyi
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Northwestern University

Valentin Silvestrov and the Mythopoetic Imagination
Virko Baley
Distinguished Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Import-Export, by Ulrich Seidl (Austria 2007)
Theme: “Ukraine: A View from the West”
Presented by Yuri Shevchuk
Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Film Club and the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University

Break, Blow, Burn: Famine as Virtual Opera
A Lecture on the Making of His Original Opera, Hunger: Red Earth
Virko Baley
Distinguished Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Current Perceptions of the OUN and UPA in Ukraine: The Dilemmas of History and Memory
David Marples
Professor, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta

Ukraine, the EU, and Globalization
An Open Forum for the 2008 Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute and Harvard Summer School
Organized by Svitlana Pokrason, HUSI 2008 Student
Moderated by Dr. Steven Seegel, HUSI 2008 Director

by Peter Bejger and Dani Stodilka

Professor George Grabowicz will be introducing the film. The event is free and open to the public.