GNSD Upcoming Courses
German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch is offering exciting courses, many of which meet Liberal Education (LE) requirements! All courses are taught in English unless otherwise noted.
For a complete listing of our departmental courses, try our custom Schedule Builder filter.
Questions? Contact our Director of Undergraduate Studies Ben Bigelow ([email protected]).
Fall 2026 Electives
Have you always wanted to know more about Anne Frank? Then this course is for you! Look closely at film, comic strip, and stage adaptations of her diary and read other Dutch Holocaust testimonies.
Course Listing for DTCH/JWST 3635
Like almost everywhere, public television is under fire in Germany too. What are the charges? Investigate the heated political debates on public television in Germany, zoom with a news anchor, understand public television's funding and watch famous news, tv-shows and films.
Taught in German
Through film, art, literature and historical case studies, we'll explore how the modern cultures of Germany, Austria and Switzerland have been shaped by debates (and anxieties) about gender, sex, and sexuality.
Europe in the Middle Ages! Devastating raids, bold voyages to the end of the world, extreme piety, extreme bigotry, and religious wars. All that against the background of an incredible explosion of great literature: narrative prose that, poems about love pangs and chivalric exploits, great philosophy, and the life of Martin Luther. Everything will look and sound remote in time but familiar in spirit.
This course has several objectives: to deepen students' historical knowledge of the Holocaust and to introduce students to debates about politics of memory and memorialization, the artistic representation of the Holocaust and the instrumentalization of Holocaust memory.
Explore the powerful intersection of environment, literature and culture in this course on ecology and ecocriticism in German Studies.
Discuss societal control mechanisms spanning from premodern forms of incarceration to modern technologies and ideologies. Scrutinize the emergence of conspiracy theories and their portrayal in fiction and media and how they intersect with themes of power and resistance.
Europe is constantly associated with whiteness, yet Black people have existed in Europe for centuries. While Afro-Europeans remain at the margins of these nations, they find avenues to survive and thrive in the face of racism and microaggressions. Learn the long history of Black Europe and the contemporary experiences of Afropeans today.
The names of Thor, Odin, Loki, Freya, and Baldr are known even to those who have never studied the religion and culture of the Middle Ages. Two books containing those myths have come down to us. Both are called The Edda. One is The Poetic Edda, the other bears the title The Prose Edda. The poems and the prose tales partly overlap. The originals were recorded in Old Icelandic. We will, naturally, read them in English.
Familiarize yourself with the cultural history of ghost stories, Gothic fiction, folk horror, and horror cinema in the Nordic region by studying media narratives about vampires, witches, trolls, and other monsters.
Follow the struggle of Leo Tolstoy through three novels (The Cossacks, Anna Karenina, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich), think and talk about life, art, justice, love, mercy, faith, and death.
Explore the journey from ancient pagan myths to Christian-era traditions, analyzing how these stories shape Russian identity and explanations of life's mysteries. Classical literature, film, music and art!
Russian literature from about 1000 A.D. to mid-19th century; emphasizing writers of the first half of the 19th century.
Language Courses
