Overview

In addition to courses on classic writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov, the program offers broadly interdisciplinary courses such as "Russian Fairy Tales," “Russian Cinema,” “Stories of Siberia,” “Russian Science Fiction,” “Russian Crime Fiction,” “Russia at War” and “The Russian Avant-Garde.” Both the major and minor in Russian are designed to be extremely flexible. Alongside study of Russian language and culture, students may choose to focus their degree on fields such as history, political science and economics as they pertain to the Russian context. 

The Russian Program is currently developing a system of overseeing undergraduate research and granting honors. In the meantime, we encourage our majors to pursue honors programs in other disciplines and we offer independent studies to facilitate their research. Most recently, Kristin Rose (2015) defended an honors thesis entitled “Locating the Russian Hero: Genre, Gender, and National Identity in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time” within the English Department and received the department’s highest honors.

Students have several possibilities for studying abroad in Russia, including summer-, semester- and year-long programs in Moscow and St. Petersburg (where they have the option of studying history, politics, economics and/or culture alongside the Russian language). We also offer the popular Maymester service program in Vladimir. In order to further develop their language skills while on the Vanderbilt campus, students may choose to live in the Russian hall at the McTyeire International House, where they can practice Russian in everyday situations with an international group of undergraduate and graduate students from many disciplines.