University of Pittsburgh logo

Cultures and Languages

Xenophobia in Modern Europe

This course will examine Europe's post-war xenophobic, racist and exclusionary policies.  We will use memoirs, photo-journalism, film and interviews to understand recent discrimination against refugees, guest workers, Jews, linguistic and religious minorities.  We will also put the question into scholarly context, as we examine how historians, sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists try to understand the way in which Europeans construct the categories of "us" and the "others".

COMBINED SECTION:

PS 1348

Japanese Literature and the West

A critical study of modern Japanese works and selected modern Western literary materials with special emphasis on intensive analysis by means of modern Western criticism. The course is designed to encourage the student to examine significant similarities and differences between Japanese and non-Japanese materials and to judge the content from an oriental as well as a Western perspective.

Roman Art

Roman art served as the funnel through which the principles of Greek art passed into European culture, but the principles were transformed in the process of transmission.  The course will trace the beginnings and subsequent development of the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Italy from the period of the kings, and the middle years of the empire (ca. 150 A.D.).

Cross-Listing HAA 1130

Behind Bars: Cross-Cultural Representation of Prison

This course examines cultural works produced in and about prison in the 20th century, addressing the function of art within the context of incarceration.  In structure the course is composed of three parts: prison writings and criminal culture in America, memoirs from the forced-labor camps of the soviet gulag, and narratives of holocaust concentration camps. This structure allows for a comparison of cultures-- American, Russian, and European--as well as identities-- racial, gender, and religious.

African American Experience Sports

This course examines blacks in sports. It focuses on sport as a microcosm of the larger society and also addresses sport's relationship to politics, economics, race relations, and South African apartheid. It looks at the history of blacks in sports as well as three aspects of sports that appear to be racially biased; position allocation, performance differentials, and rewards and authority structure.

Elementary Ukrainian 2

This is the second semester of first-year Ukrainian language. Ukrainian language is the language of the largest country in Europe. The course starts with a review and subsequent reinforcement of grammar fundamentals and core vocabulary pertaining to the most common aspects of daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on the development of students' communicative skills (oral and written) on such topics as the self, family, studies and leisure, travel, meals, and others. Students will be able to write about things he/she likes to do by using familiar sentence patterns.

Marx and Marxism

Having recently passed the 150th anniversary of the publication of capital volume 1, we recognize that our world has changed a great deal since its publication.  Yet, in reviewing many of these changes, it is not overstated to say that the works of Karl Marx have provided the transformational impulse.  Who was this person, Karl Marx?  Why is it that in this post-cold war world his writings continue both to inspire and threaten contemporary readers?  How have those inspired by Marx further developed his ideas to constitute the discourse of Marxism?  These are some of the questions that this