Rebecca in Red Square

Rebecca Jane Stanton

teaching portfolio

[click here for curriculum vitae (PDF)]     [click here for home page]

  

 

 [table of contents]

  1. Statement of teaching philosophy [PDF]
  2. Complete list of courses taught
  3. Future teaching plans
  4. Selected course materials (syllabi, evaluations where available, and sample teaching materials).
  5. Testimonial from Prof. Mark C. Carnes (History, Barnard College) [PDF]
  6. Testimonial from Paul Sonne, Columbia College Class of 2007 [PDF]

 

[list of courses taught]
all courses taught at Columbia University except where noted

Russian language courses:

  • Elementary Russian I and II
  • Intermediate Russian I and II
  • Twentieth-Century Prose Writers (short works of the 1920s, in Russian, for students at third-year level or higher)

Courses in Russian literature and culture:

  • Keys to Russian Literature (writing-intensive survey of representative works from 1792 to 1992, at Queens College-CUNY)
  • Literature & Revolution (undergraduate survey of 20th-century Russian literature, in English)
  • Senior Seminar for Russian Majors (undergraduate thesis seminar)
  • Literature, Politics, and Tradition After Stalin (graduate seminar)
  • A Revolution in Literature, 1917-1934 (graduate seminar)
  • The Discourse of Self in Russia & the West (graduate seminar, cross-listed with Comparative Literature)
  • Legacies of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union (interdisciplinary colloquium, co-taught with a social scientist; cross-listed with History and Political Science)
  • Supervised Individual Research (BA and MA level)

Comparative Literature courses:

  • Race, Ethnicity, Narrative in the Russian/Soviet Empire (open to graduates and undergraduates; crosslisted with Ethnic Studies and Global Core)
  • Magic and Modernity (open to graduates and undergraduates)
  • Imagining the Self (undergraduate course)

First-Year Seminars and Core Curriculum

College-level courses for high school students

  • Reacting to the Past: Greenwich Village, 1913.  Harlem Educational Activities Fund, supported by a grant from the Teagle Foundation.  Co-taught with Laurie Postlewate  (Fall 2012, Fall 2013).
  • What Is Great Literature? Columbia Summer Program for High School Students (2000).


[future teaching plans]

  • Cultures of International Communism
    More than twenty years after the so-called "fall of Communism," students have little understanding of what Communism "was" (or is, in parts of the world where Communist parties continue to play a significant role), either politically or as a way of life.  This renders Soviet-era texts partially illegible, as students are unable to grasp the nuances of a novel like Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, or even the much broader political rhetoric of a classic film like the Vasiliev brothers' Chapaev (1934), without a working knowledge of Communism in theory and practice.  “Cultures of International Communism” aims to address this gap by offering an interdisciplinary, international survey of Communism in art and society, including theoretical and political readings in addition to works of literature and film.

  • Soviet Laughter
    A course on Soviet-era humorous genres (from anekdoty to satire to comedy films) across media and including both “high” and “low” culture. In English or Russian.

  • Cities of the Russian Empire
    An interdisciplinary look at the “city text” in Russian literature and culture. In English or Russian. Could be broken into modules on individual cities (e.g., Odessa) and offered “on location” as a J-term course or similar.

  • The 1960s
    An interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional survey of the Soviet 1960s: material culture, political debates and reversals, film, new voices in literature (women, non-Russians, peasants, zeks), significant trials (Brodsky, Sinyavsky and Daniel), the space race. In English or Russian.

  • Black Sea Cultural Capitals
    As a member of the extended scholarly team working on Columbia's Black Sea Networks Global Initiative, I will be helping to develop the "Odessa" unit of the planned team-taught course, “Black Sea Cultural Capitals,” under the umbrella of the new Humanities project “Cities of Knowledge: Reading the Global Metropolis.” The planned course will include seven modules: six focused on a single city (Istanbul, Plovdiv, Belgrade, Constanţa, Odessa, and Tbilisi), and one on the Crimean peninsula. The course will use technologies currently employed exclusively for language acquisition through the Mellon-sponsored Columbia-Cornell-Yale shared course initiative, and create an open-access digital library for Black Sea Studies that will support a future multi-media publication.

[course materials]

Russian language:

Elementary Russian I and II

Intermediate Russian I and II

Twentieth-Century Prose Writers
a "language through content" seminar on short works of the 1920s, in Russian

Courses in Russian literature and culture (files in PDF format unless otherwise noted):

Comparative Literature courses (files in PDF format unless otherwise noted):

First-Year Seminars and Core Curriculum (files in PDF format unless otherwise noted):

College-level courses for high school students

  • Reacting to the Past: Greenwich Village, 1913  (Harlem Educational Activities Fund)
  • What Is Great Literature? Columbia Summer Program for High School Students, 2000.

[testimonials]

  1. Testimonial from Prof. Mark C. Carnes (History, Barnard College) [PDF]
  2. Testimonial from Paul Sonne, Columbia College Class of 2007 [PDF]

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