Expanded during one conflict, Russian language and literature departments consider how they should change during another Professors of Russian history and language are grappling with how to teach the subject matter – and how their methods inform students’ views of the country’s invasion of Ukraine – as the war between the two nations continues. Many courses’ focus on Russian president Vladimir Putin leads to the idea of a strong, unified imperial Russia, said Ainsley Morse, a Dartmouth College literature professor in the school’s Russian Department – and that, she said, has contributed to today’s conflict. “The idea of a very strong Russia is one of the driving forces behind the war that is happening right now,” said Morse, who has taught Soviet and post-Soviet Russian / Russophone literature at Dartmouth College, Pomona College and University of California San -Diego. Rather than teach about him or the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Morse instead focuses her classes on “talking about what ordinary people’s lives are” in Russia, she said last week. That might mean “talking about what individual writers and artists and other cultural figures are trying to do to make sense of often catastrophic events,” she said. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Morse said she and her colleagues at other colleges around the country and around the world have been discussing how Russian studies are being taught and what is missing. Currently, she said, courses too often ignore the history of colonization within the USSR and Russian empire. And there should be more recognition, she said, that Russia and the post-Soviet bloc is not a monolithic empire, but a place made up of a diversity of languages and cultures. “We have not tried hard enough to figure out other ways of talking about this material that we all work on,” Morse said. Russian departments at American universities gained prominence during the Cold War, according to the 2015 Report on the State of Russian Studies in the US by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, but many have since been plagued by budgetary restraints fueled by declining enrollments as US-Russian tensions shifted. Five years later, the Carnegie Corporation summarized the two main points of the 2015 report as “1) the field of Russian studies in the social sciences was described as facing ‘crisis a crisis: an unmistakable decline in interest and numbers in terms of both faculty and graduate students’ and 2) The dramatic decrease in funding from both government, federal and state, and private foundations also raises concerns that the United States will have enough well-trained experts in the field in the future. ” If you want to keep tabs on Vermont’s education news, sign up here to get a weekly email with all of VTDigger’s reporting on higher education, early childhood programs and K-12 education policy. Related Leave a Reply Cancel replyYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Email * Website Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ
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