Welcome to the Harvard Slavic Department Website
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures offers innovative approaches to learning about Slavic peoples and their cultures, in particular those of Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine. Our twenty-two faculty members offer courses in the language, linguistics, literature, film, art, and cultural history of these lands, from the medieval period up through the ever-changing world of the present. Our regular faculty often invites visitors from other American and international universities to offer courses in their particular areas of expertise.
The teaching of Slavic languages has a long and distinguished history at Harvard, beginning with the introduction of courses in Old Church Slavonic, Polish, and Russian in 1896. The program was reconfigured as the Slavic Department in 1949. Our approach to Slavic cultures has evolved continuously, reflecting the diversity of theories found in the broader humanistic study of today.
Our undergraduate concentration has one track: Slavic Literatures and Cultures. Most of our undergraduate courses are open to non-concentrators. Our graduate program provides for specialization in literature or linguistics.
The language program is designed to provide introductory through advanced study of Russian, Czech, Croatian/(Bosnian)/Serbian, Polish, and Ukrainian lanuages and cultures. Courses emphasize speaking proficiency reinforced through reading and writing in multiple areas of literature, cultural studies, social sciences and politics. Multimedia, film, literature, journalism, and television material are used in different courses to acquaint students broadly with the cultures being studied and to provide topics for exploration and interpretation in class discussion and written work. High priority is placed on the norms of social interaction, preparing students to understand the behaviors that will make them successful participants in the many different kinds of situations they might encounter. Russian students put on annual theatrical and cabaret performances with broad participation from beginners to advanced students, and enthusiastic audiences. The department encourages study abroad and makes available materia about the many summer and semester programs now flourishing in Russia and Central Europe.
Most of our literature, linguistics, and culture courses are taught in English, with readings in English translation or in the original (if knowledge of the language is required, it is be noted in the course description). The Slavic lands have been at the crossroads of tremendous political and cultural change, particularly in the recent past, and our courses are designed to study these broader processes, past and present, as well as the particular texts and contexts of the Slavic world.
As a faculty, we are quite diverse in our training, age, area of specialization, and theoretical orientation, but we share a commitment to interdisciplinary study. The literature programs invite the study of a wide range of periods, genres, and approaches; we encourage students to see literature in the broad context of cultural production, and to connect Slavic cultures to one another and to other cultures around the world. The linguistics program offers synchronic, historical, and comparative approaches to the study of Slavic languages. We explore specific Slavic languages in depth, using neostructuralist and generative approaches to develop a more insightful understanding of Slavic linguistic structure, and to incorporate evidence from Slavic into the ongoing elaboration of Universal Grammar.
We have integrated many approaches from adjacent fields into our work in the Department, including gender studies, film, theater, music, comparative literature, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, art history, history, and semiotics. All students, graduate and undergraduate, are encouraged to supplement their work in the Department with courses from other fields, and to design a program of study that fits their interests and curiosities.
We invite you to explore our Department through this web site, and to visit us on the third floor of the Barker Center at the University. Please contact our Department Administrator Judith Klasson for information about the office hours of individual faculty members, and for printed information about our undergraduate concentration or the graduate program.