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FROM THE FRONT

War forces Slavic Studies onto its toes

SLAVIC FROM PAGE 1

residing in Russia and Ukraine. In particular,the Department has lost access to many of its Russian-housed archives, affecting dissertation plans for its graduate students.

The conflict’s continuation into summer and fall presented further issues to the Department, including the difficult decision to hold their St. Petersburg Summer Program entirely on campus in New Haven.

Director of Study Abroad Kelly McLaughlin told the News that after the U.S. Department of State issued a “Do Not Travel” advisory for Russia, the Study Abroad department immediately modified its Russian language program into a domestic one. The Do Not Travel advisory for Russia is still in place.

A statement made by the study abroad office last spring announced that students would not be able to move their applications to another Yale Summer Session Program Abroad. The Russian summer study abroad program, which was canceled last year, is being moved to the Black Sea coast of Georgia, where students will instead immerse themselves in Georgian culture and learn the basics of the language.

Summer ended, but the conflict — and its complications for the Department — did not.

The Department is offering 44 courses this fall, 26 in the Russian Program of Study and three in the Ukrainian. Students and faculty alike have faced added stressors in teaching and learning usual subject material as the invasion looms in the background.

Bojanowska, however, noted that the Department did not have “to scramble to react to this crisis unprepared.”

Since its inception, the Department has taken care to cover empire and colonialism in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as an emphasis on Russophone cultures rather than a monomaniacal focus on Russia alone. Students are taught to critique and investigate famous Russian works of art, rather than simply accept their nationalist nature, Bojanowska explained.

“We cultivate a transnational approach in both our research and teaching,” Bojanowska said. “Again, this is not something that we began doing in the spring of 2022. We embraced this vision long ago, which is why, when the war hit, we were ready to meet the intellectual and ethical challenges of the historical moment.”

Nevertheless, Bojanowska told the News that the Department has had to modulate some of its curriculum in response to the conflict. She emphasized that departmental faculty are striving to decenter their approaches to the study of the region and to “dislodge Russia from its hegemonic position in our field’s epistemologies.”

The Department already offers “Russia Between Empire and Nation,” a course on Russian and Soviet imperialism. This spring, the class will be adjusted from a seminar to a lecture in anticipation of increased student demand. One of the Slavic Department's responses to the conflict is to try reorienting and adapting the presentation of Russian culture in class to fit into today's world / Zoe Berg, Senior Photographer

Bojanowska added that the Department is working to increase its focus on Ukrainian history and protest culture. She noted that one basic Russian grammatical lesson incorporated “the fraught political implications behind two different Russian prepositions used to say ‘in Ukraine’ ... showing how each is associated with different political claims about [its] status.”

English-language Russian culture classes have also been deeply affected by the conflict. Bojanowska teaches a lecture course called “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’,” a popular offering within the department and Yale College’s biggest literature course, with over 100 students.

This year, Bojanowska explained that she has centered her lectures around “direct connections between the novel and what is in the news,” using the text as to consider current sociopolitical issues.

Bojanowska insisted that the Department’s solution to the conflict was not to “‘cancel’ Russian culture,” but rather to reorient and adapt it to fit into today’s world. She added that she hopes more, not fewer, students will now attempt to understand Russia’s culture and history.

“I can think of no better immunization against the Kremlin’s propaganda: to know that some supposedly inviolable ‘truths’ may actually be culturally constructed myths,” Bojanowska stated.

Bojanowska admitted, however, that the Department still sees the potential to go further in addressing the conflict.The Department is currently looking for a specialist in non-Russian Eastern European languages and cultures and is attempting to install in-person instruction of the Ukrainian language at the University.

Faculty in other departments are also finding ways of responding to the conflict.

“Personally, I decided to create a new general survey of Ukrainian history, HIST 247, which is an open course,” Professor Snyder told the News.

Snyder noted that the first lecture has already garnered more than 400,000 views, and that the course is only the second lecture survey on Ukrainian history being taught in the U.S.

The Slavic Languages and Literatures Department is housed in the Humanities Quadrangle at 320 York Street.

Contact MIRANDA WOLLEN at miranda.wollen@yale.edu .

Dorms without heat as weather cools

HEATING FROM PAGE 1

wrote to the News that no one on her floor has heat. Benson added that a student on her floor called facilities, who told them they would not get heat turned on until Oct. 15 because the “power plant needs to reroute.”

“It’s kind of hard to focus or do anything because of that,” Benson wrote to the News. “Everyone in McClellan is irritated because we were already sad about being annexed and now we are sad and cold. You would think with the price of tuition we would be getting heat.”

“Yale isn’t very good at being a landlord,” she added.

The University was unavailable for comment at time of publication.

Sein Lee ’24, who lives in Silliman College, said she has recently faced temperatures as low as 55 degrees due to a lack of heating. Lee filed a work order that was later terminated; She and two other students reported being told that heat in their buildings would not be turned on until Oct. 15.

Upon calling facilities about her situation, Lee was told to try buying warmer clothes.

State law requires that residential buildings be heated to at least 65 degrees. Colder temperatures, it states, are “injurious to the health of the occupants.”

Lee described her situation as outrageous, noting that portable space heaters are prohibited in living spaces at Yale, except when issued in emergency situations.

Zaharaa Altwaij ’25, who lives in the basement of Silliman and said her bed is adjacent to a window, wrote to the News that she has fixed a blanket between her window and screen as temporary insulation.

“My roommate and I have been waking up several mornings feeling congested which sets a bad mood for the rest of the day,” Altwaij wrote to the News. “I have been doing all of my homework under my covers because everywhere else in the suite is even colder.”

The University’s four power plants generate and distribute heating, chilled water for air conditioning and electric power.