sa
Flying University for Ukrainian Students
June 2024 Call for Applications
Flying University for Ukrainian Students (FUUS) assists students
whose lives have been impacted by the war.
Online courses in English will be conducted pro bono by distinguished professors from American colleges and universities. Participating students can:
The courses will take place in June 2024 as online seminars taught in English for undergraduate students in the humanities and social sciences. Classes will consist of approximately 12 students. Participation required of students includes active engagement in discussion, analysis of readings, and the writing
of a short essay. Students who complete course requirements will receive a certificate of completion.
Students can apply only by completing the electronic form here
Application Deadline: May 25, 2024
For more information about the program, please visit our website: www.flying-university.org
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS & SCHEDULE
Feminism and Borderlands
Class meetings by Zoom on June 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17:00 - 18:30 Kyiv
Prof. Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Ithaca College
This course explores the influential work of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist and scholar from Texas, whose seminal writings have shaped discussions on feminism, ethnicity, and queer identity. Our primary text, “Borderlands/La Frontera,” written nearly 50 years ago, stands as a landmark work of feminist theory. In this course we will carefully read this remarkable book — a combination of history, poetry, essay, and autobiography — and consider its continuing relevance, focusing especially on how it speaks to Ukraine today. Each day we will focus on a particular theme in the text, tracing its meanings from Anzaldúa’s time to the present: Borderlands identity (and life between Russia and Europe); Language (and Ukrainian language politics); Sexuality (and queer liberation movements); Landscape (and war and climate change); and Poetry (and auto/theory and forms of experimental criticism).
Foundations of Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies
Class meetings by Zoom on June 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, 19:00-20:30 Kyiv
Prof. David Halperin, University of Michigan
This course will focus on the reading and discussion of three texts that are often considered to be sources, foundations, or inspirations for the field of Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies, a field which emerged in the decade after they were published: Gayle Rubin’s classic essays, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), perhaps the first text by an anthropologist to employ the word gender, and “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984), sometimes credited with being the first work in queer theory, and excerpts from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (1976), a powerful manifesto for the definition of sexuality as a historical and political reality rather than as a biological or natural one. A careful reading of these texts will provide the student with a grounding in the field of Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies.
Contemporary Psychological Issues in Human Sexuality
Class meetings by Zoom on June 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21, 17:30-19:00 Kyiv
Prof. Darryl Hill, College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
This course will be a short overview of selected topics on the psychology of sexuality from an intersectional perspective. There will be five modules, each with a focus: sexual desire (especially intersectional approaches to asexuality), sex and gender variations (focusing on so called "Not Gay" heterosexuals and genderqueer), sex and disability (exploring "crip sexuality"), sexual disorders (an intersectional critique of the "Sexual Dysfunctions" section of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders 5), and sex therapy (particularly sex and relationship therapy with LGBT clients). The course takes an active learning approach: we will read recent research or listen to interviews with researchers and critically explore their findings.
Women, Gender, and Social Movements in Modern U.S. History
Class meetings by Zoom on June 10, 11, 13, 14, 17:00-18:30 Kyiv
Prof. Jennifer Klein, Yale University
A course on U.S. women’s social and political movements from World War II through the 20th century. In addition to women’s activism, we will consider gender politics more broadly construed. The course begins with questions of economic citizenship, labor organizing, and “women’s rights” opened up by World War II. We will then examine the gendered impact of McCarthyism and the 1950s Red Scare. From the Right, we’ll address conservative women’s organizing in the 1950s around civil defense, anti-communism, and maintaining racial segregation. The course turns to gender and the Civil Rights movement; the welfare rights movement of the 1960s-1970s; the politics of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; and an article on transnational women’s activism against the Vietnam War. For the 1970s, we’ll consider masculinity and the “crisis” of the working class. At the same time, new women’s labor coalitions emerged around public sector and service jobs, care, and immigration. We look at different strategies, tactics, and ideologies women used for organizing and movement building—across the political spectrum. We address the possibilities and limits of solidarity. How did gender cohere or unify grassroots movements? What are the various ways in which ethnicity, race, and class have been bases and resources for organizing and coalition building? How have the legacies of colonialism, war, and global migration created the conditions for particular forms of political activism? We’ll interrogate how disputes over gender, sex, and family were interwoven with major transformations of the national polity itself.
Sex and Gender in Twelfth Night
Class meetings by Zoom on June 24, 25, 26 and 27, 19:00-20:30 Kyiv
Prof. Julia Lupton, University of California, Irvine
Shakespeare’s romantic masterpiece Twelfth Night features a shipwrecked young woman dressed as a boy who falls in love with the man who employs her while stealing the heart of the woman he loves. All is “straightened out” at the end, thanks to the appearance of a twin brother, but the central courtships of the play explore a diversity of gender identities and sexual orientations. Meet Antonio, the homosexual pirate; Viola, who dresses as a “eunuch”; Olivia, who falls for Viola in her page’s uniform; and Orsino, who’s not sure who or what he wants. Learn about original staging practices in Shakespeare’s age, when all parts were played by boys and men, and how modern directors address queer themes in the play. Experience the power of Shakespeare by reading the play out loud and discussing key passages and themes. And get a glimpse into a production in the making, with shots and clips from a rehearsal at the University of California, Irvine.
Queer Ecologies: Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Environment in Literature and Culture
Class meetings by Zoom on June 17 , 18, 19, and 20, 19:00-20:30 Kyiv
Prof. Jeffrey Santa Ana, Stony Brook University
Queer ecology upends and resists heterosexist concepts of nature and the natural, drawing from a diverse array of disciplines, including the natural and biological sciences, environmental justice, ecofeminism, and queer studies. At its heart, queer ecology deconstructs various hierarchical binaries and dichotomies that exist particularly within Western human notions of nature and culture. In this seminar, we will discuss prose texts (fiction and nonfiction), films, and videos that feature a variety of modern and contemporary representations of human and nonhuman or more-than-human relations in the context of race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. A queer ecologies critical lens will help us reimagine individual and societal relations to nature, biology, and sexuality. Our goal will be to produce new critical understandings through the lenses of ecocriticism and queer theory as we read and discuss the cultural works for our class.