We train all of our students to become successful academics. We prepare students for both the research and teaching aspects of their future careers with courses and seminars on Slavic literatures, cultures, and cinema; team-taught seminars on research methodology as well as on relevant cross-cultural topics; and a series of pedagogy courses and workshops designed to develop students’ teaching portfolios and capabilities within the classroom.
Our graduate program, like most in the U.S., has in the past focused primarily on Russian literature, although we have always also required knowledge of a second Slavic language and literature as well. We anticipate this Russian “track” as still being a frequent choice for our students. However, our curricular innovations will allow students to make an East or Central European literature and culture other than Russian a major focus, with a second language and literature (usually Russian) in a supporting cross-cultural role.
Faculty that we have added in recent years have greatly enhanced our ability to offer such an interdisciplinary program due to their major research interests in areas other than Russian literature including areas such as Polish literature; Czech literature; Serbian and other Balkan literatures and national mythologies; literature and nationalist ideology; Yiddish and Russian literature of the modern period; interactions between Russian and Baltic literatures; and the comparative study of Russian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian literatures. A number of us also have very strong research interests that go beyond literature including: Czech visual culture of the modernist period; Central European and Balkan architecture and its relation to ethnicity and politics; and Russian and East European cinema.
In general, we expect students’ individualized plans of study to be a well-rounded and comprehensive mix of a primary Slavic language and literature, a second language and literature of the area, and a third component in a relevant discipline such as comparative literature, history, Judaic studies, cinema, or art and architecture, among others.
Faculty and students at Michigan are engaged in a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue ranging across the humanities and the social sciences that nevertheless coheres as a curriculum, due to the faculty's shared interest in historical and cultural questions. Traditionally, departments of "language and literature" have sought to provide rigorous training in literary criticism and literary history. We are strong in all these areas, but we are also able to incorporate these more traditional approaches into a broader vision of Slavic Studies that includes the humanities and social sciences. Seminars offered in the different areas of Slavic Studies cover a wide array of literary and theoretical concerns across the disciplines, while also emphasizing the distinct textual and analytical skills required for this kind of work.
