Honors in Russian and East European Studies
Both Russian and East European Studies majors should consider applying to our Honors Program.
Criteria for admission normally include an overall GPA of at least 3.25 and a major GPA of at least 3.50 by the beginning of the sixth semester, as well as the completion of Russian 305 or Russian 306 courses. We also require Russian majors to complete at least one literature course in translation by the end of the sixth semester.
Russian and East European Studies majors need to present strong evidence of an interdisciplinary focus in courses taken and in their proposed topic of research.
If you are interested in writing a senior thesis, we encourage you to speak with a professor in the Russian department or a member of the REES Committee during the fall of your junior year. Students are accepted into the program by invitation.
Recent Honors Theses
Spring 2017
- Sarah Chatta, “The Vagrant: Where the Soviet Love of Bollywood Began”
- Ian Gilchrist, “The Underground Soviet: Shaping Soviet Culture in the Leningrad Metro”
- Walker Griggs, “Inadvertent Naturalists: Turgenev, Asakov and Russia’s New Ornithology”
- Oliver Okun, “Night Thoughts: Existentialism and Russian Romantic Poetry”
- Harald Miller, “Taking Pale Fire Less Seriously: Humdrum Potterings and Commonplace Allusions”
- Lily Posner, “‘A Dream Deferred’: Olga Berggolts and Disillusionment in the USSR, 1945-1954”
Spring 2015
- William Watkins, “Four Lives in One: The Autobiographical Prose of Ruth Zernova”
- William Wise, “Science and Medicine in Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Kazus Kukotskogo”
Spring 2013
- Matthew Davis, “Translating Chris Ware’s Lint into Russian”
- Isabella Natale, “God’s Creations: Zinaida Gippius and Her Devil”
- Magdalena Newhouse, “Translating the Siberian Soul: Alexander Vampilov’s Last Summer in Chulimsk”
Spring 2010
- Zachary Rewinski, “Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's Oblique Responses to the Epidemic of Chernyshevskian Philosophy”