Consider taking a course with The Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies (CENES) in W2025 Term 2!
CENES is excited to welcome students into 2026 with a variety of course topics where there is something for everyone, whether you are a fan of theory, subjects relevant to today’s current geo-political environment, film, literature, music, culture, history, and more. We will also be offering various courses that can fulfil requirements for a BA in Arts (i.e., literature), or a major/minor in German, Modern European, Nordic, and Slavic and Eastern European Studies.
Questions about CENES courses? Email our Undergraduate Program Assistant, Ashley Samsone, at cenes.undergrad@ubc.ca
CENES Course Recommendations for Winter Term 2
CENS_V 201 201: The Cultures of the Black Sea Region
2025W T2 Tues/Thurs 11:00am – 12:30pm, Multi-access
Instructor: Florian Gassner
This course explores the conflictual cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century to the present. We will investigate the historical roots of present-day conflicts, such as the fight for political stability on the Balkans, the struggle for Ukrainian lands, and the latent state of war in the Caucasus. Classes will be dedicated to lectures on and discussion of films and literary texts that reflect on these issues.
CENS_V 202 202: Changing Climates: Catastrophe and Gender, Humans and Animals
2025W T2 Tues/Thurs 11:00 – 12:30pm, In-Person
Instructor: Gaby Pailer
This course focuses on aspects of catastrophe and gender, humans and animals in a range of works from central, eastern, and northern European literatures from late medieval to modern times. It opens with mythologies of creation and catastrophe and discourses of eco-criticism in feminist and indigenous perspectives. The course readings fall into four modules, treating a wide range of narrative prose works (fiction and non-fiction) that deal with seismic upheavals, plague epidemics, apocalyptic and dystopian visions, ecological, technological and social disaster, nuclear accidents and warfare.
GMST_V 229 201 / GMST_V 347 201: Displacement, Exile, Flight and Migration
Image: “Demonstration, Hamburg, Germany, 2016-05-14” by Rasande Tyskar, CC BY-NC 2.0 (flickr).
2025W T2 Mon/Wed 2:00pm – 3:30pm, Hybrid
Instructor: Markus Hallensleben
Taught in Hybrid Format with in-person lectures on Wed, 2-3:30pm
This course aims to introduce to the current themes and historical settings of displacement, exile, flight and migration from a practical decolonial and convivial point of view. We will critically discuss topics such as diasporic and national belonging, asylum and integration politics, multiculturality and European cultural identity in Germany. We will not only look at the representation of refugees in literary texts, but also in mass media. All readings are in translation and focus on contemporary transnational Germanophone narratives of belonging and migration. While the beginning of the course covers political exile and German immigration politics from a historical perspective, the second part focuses on the “refugee crisis” and the “Welcome Culture” from 2015 up to the present developments.
All course material is available in English translation.
GMST_V 341 201: Germanophone Literature before 1900 – Nineteenth-Century Social Media (in English)
2025W, Term 2, Tues/Thurs 9:30am – 11:00am, In-Person
Instructor: Ilinca Iurascu
How did nineteenth-century publics engage with the German-language periodical press? What topics and contents did newspapers, journals and magazines offer, who read them and how? How did scandals and fake news participate in the making of the German public sphere alongside scientific and philosophical debates? This course explores the theme of nineteenth-century social media and periodical literature against the background of the cultural and political developments of the period. We will read literary texts and journalistic materials in translation, examine archival documents and talk about the production and consumption of news in German-speaking Europe and North America. Lectures and materials in English.
GMST_V 346 201: Tales of Social and Self Transformation
2025W Term 2, Mondays/Wednesdays 11-12:30, In-Person
Instructor: Thomas Kemple
How do cultural forces shape individual desires, and how do each of us resist or adapt to social change? Reading world-shaking fictional writings and thought-provoking non-fiction works from first half of the 20th century (including Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke), our course will consider the many ways in which science, technology, capitalism, and colonialism have transformed our very sense of who and what we are in the modern world.
GMST_V 424 201: Time and Terror – On Extreme Chronopolitics
2025W T2 Tues/ Thurs 3:30pm – 5:00pm, In-person
Instructor: Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
The course will explore how societies organize and impose the collective experience of time and history under extreme conditions. Topics include:
- Theories of multiple times: Kairos, Chronos and Chronocenosis
- “You had no history”: Cognitive Temporal Warfare
- Ruptures and Singularities: Time(s) of Revolutions
- Fascist Chronopolitics (“The Nazi Chronobscene”)
- Breaking Times: The Rise of Accelerationism
NORD_V 337 201: Nordic Cinema – Romance Hazards: An Investigation of Love, Family & Madness from Ingmar Bergman to Lukas Moodysson
2025W T2 Mon & Wed 2:00pm – 3:30pm, In-person
Instructor: Karin Filipsson
The aim of this course is to introduce students to (mostly) contemporary Nordic film and to explore the multifaceted aspects of Nordic cinema. NORD 337 examines themes like social structures, gender, race, and queer equity, environmental concerns, the concept of the auteur, “the Swedish sin”, transnationalism, post-migrant “immigrant”-film and stylistic analyses of individual works and genres in general. We will discuss cinematic features such as the use of music, nature, and composition.
NORD_V 414 201: Doing Culture: Legislation and Cultural Production under the Nordic Model
Photo: Sonja Iskov/Ritzau Scanpix
2025W T2 Mon/Wed/Fri 10:00pm – 11:00am, In-Person
Instructor: Ann-Kathrine Havemose
NORD 414 takes a critical look at the “happiest countries in the world” as we investigate how the Nordic Model, nation branding and legislation on childhood, immigration and gender affect the way the Nordic peoples are doing and creating culture as we try to answer the questions:
- What does ideas like “Nordic exceptionalism” offer debates about immigration and integration?
- What does it mean to be a “competent child”, and how do you raise an individual to become a “good democratic citizen”?
- How does Greenland define itself and why is it so difficult to break with Denmark?
SLAV_V 242 201: Revolutions of the Mind: Russophone Literature in the Age of Upheaval
2025W T2, M/W/F, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Instructor: Dariya (Dasha) McEwen
What happens to literature when history enters its most violent convulsions? From the twilight of empire to the terror of Stalinism, from underground artistic rebellions to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the uneasy freedoms of the post-Soviet years, this course traces a century in which language itself became a battlefield. We follow Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and Central Asian authors who wrote in Russian while resisting—or reinventing—the empires that shaped their lives. Their stories confront censorship, exile, surveillance, and the violent remaking of society, yet answer with radical experimentation, dark humour, and startling honesty. Here, literature is never just literature: it is survival, resistance, prophecy, and the last refuge of the human voice when history turns dangerous.
