People
BLS Stories
BLS 222: Notes from Underground: Resistance and Everyday Culture
This course provides students eager to understand Russia today with a more complex look at how people in Russia survived and sometimes…
BLS 221: Know Slow: Countering the Culture of Speed
Concentrated, inspired conversation is a widely undervalued source of new knowledge, new feelings, new impulses. –Bodil Jönsson In this practice-based course, we…
BLS 320: Russian Literature from Stalin to Putin
Take a peek behind the Iron Curtain! Let’s go beyond the traditional Cold War views of the Soviet Union to explore a…
BLS 324: Banned Books
Obscene. Heretical. Defiant. Dangerous. Enlightening. These are the qualities that provoke legal action against books, and often the selfsame qualities that make…
BLS 327: Contemporary Asian Literature
In the last half-century, China, Japan, and India have undergone enormous change and become world powers. Their relations with the West have…
BLS 326: Telling Stories: The Art & Craft of the Memoir
A good memoir is shaped like a good story. If told well, with a sharp focus and a bit of self-effacing irony,…
BLS 325: Mystery, Mayhem, & Murder
It was a dark night in the city that never sleeps. Almost anybody who reads this line would suspect that what they’re…
BLS 323: Short Reads
This course focuses on 21st-century works by authors—many of them relatively unknown—from a diversity of social statuses, cultures, and geographical locations. Short…
BLS 322: Revolutionary Lives: Radical Reflections in Russian Literature
For the Russian reading public, literature has long been expected to raise social issues and express hard truths. The short works we…
BLS 321: Reading the Human Experience
Exploration of individual experience, interpersonal relationships, and cultural identity through the reading and critical analysis of works of short fiction from the…
