Core Curriculum

This core course is devoted to a close reading of some of the major works of the philosophical tradition from ancient thinkers to contemporary ones. Students learn how to read, understand, and analyze philosophical texts. The focus is on short, complete works. Students see how great philosophers are in conversation with each other across the centuries, as well as with us today.

The course aims to give students a sense of the historical contingency of ideas, but also of the common concerns that have animated thinkers in different times and places.

The first section of Great Books focuses on ancient and medieval times. Each week consists of one lecture and one reading seminar. The lecture introduces the author, his/her philosophical context, as well as his/her main philosophical theses and arguments.

The reading seminars concentrate on reading short passages from the books (2-3 pages per seminar). The goal of the seminars is to teach students how to do a close reading and analysis of a philosophical text. Every two weeks, there will be an in-class test designed to test students' abilities to read and understand texts.

The course is designed to develop students’ English language proficiency levels in all four domains of language (reading, listening, speaking, and writing). The primary goal of the course is to teach communicative competence, and an essential aspect of this competence is the correct use of grammar.

Students review the grammatical forms of English in specific communicative contexts. The course emphasizes vocabulary enrichment by using different learning strategies. A learner-centered, activity-based approach gives students a clear sense of progression. The course aims to provide extra language learning to develop students’ ability to use English effectively for further study using English as the medium.

The success of the course depends on students’ active participation in all class activities and homework assignments. The students are expected to be independent learners and to look for study and practice opportunities outside of class.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: The Continuous Aspect. Phrases with “Name” Describing Habits. Personalities. Idioms for People
• Week 2: Hypothetical Conditional Past. Verb Patterns. Opinion Collocations. Introducing Opinions. Idioms of Opinion
• Week 3: Crime Collocations. Introductory It. The Perfect Aspect. Social Issues. A Problem-Solution Essay. Secrets Idioms. Modal Verbs and Related Phrases
• Week 4: Future Forms. Predictions. Prepositional Phrases. Cleft Sentences. Collocations
• Week 5: Future in the Past. Proverbs. Ellipsis and Substitution. Descriptive Writing. Collocations with “Time”. Discussing Ideas
• Week 6: Tenses for Unreal Situations. Art Adjectives. Adverbials. Ideas. Ranting/Raving. Express Yourself
• Week 7: Inversion. Collocations. Comparative Structures. Negotiating. Preparation for the Test Session
• Week 8: Revision. Final Test

This course focuses heavily on digital fluency as a set of knowledge and skills that are necessary for the safe and effective use of digital technologies and Internet resources in various subject domains. Digital fluency is based on the ability to solve various problems with the help of information and communication technologies.

Throughout the course, students learn to use and create content with digital technologies, including searching and sharing information, interacting with other people in a digital environment, analyzing and visualizing various types of data. The emphasis is made on understanding the concept of Big Data and gaining the skill set necessary to work with various data-driven pipelines starting from simple ones, involving work with Google Spreadsheets and basic ETL processes, to more complex ones, introducing students to the basics of data engineering and data science.

The course comprises 8 workshops devoted to exploration and demonstration of capabilities to various digital tools and discussion of the possibilities and shortcomings of these tools in multiple scenarios followed up by 8 practical seminars with the emphasis on practical skills that students can hone via different assignments related to the digital environment.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Team-Based Work in Digital. Google Ecosystem and Google Services Practice
• Week 2: Digital Culture in Communication. Discord. Slack
• Week 3: How Big Your Big Data Actually Is? Etl-Processes. Data Presentation
• Week 4: Data Studio
• Week 5: Agile, Scrum, Teamwork. Trello
• Week 6: What Is Miro and Why It’s Important
• Week 7: SEO and NLP
• Week 8: Assembling and Presenting the Final Project

This course introduces students to the phenomenon of academic writing: what it is, how we do, and how we evaluate it. Students start by getting acquainted with different types of existing academic texts (including reports, survey papers, empirical research papers, master’s dissertations and doctoral theses) and learning how to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in terms of focus, literature review, research design and methodology, discussion, conclusion and references.

Students gain an understanding of how to cite and reference academic works in their own writing. They get to know how to appropriately and effectively use a wide range of vocabulary and grammar in their own academic writing. Students become familiar with ways of providing and discussing qualitative and quantitative data, sharing opinions and ideas, and reporting others’ opinions and ideas;acquire expertise on how to present arguments, describe issues, evaluate, and arrive at conclusions. They learn how to structure academic writing in terms of basic concepts such as abstract, introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, conclusion and references. Finally, students have an opportunity to practise academic writing by composing a short academic paper of their own.

The course makes use of formative assessment in the form of peer review and summative assessment in the form of instructor-graded assignments to examine theirprogress and ability to implement practically their newly-acquired skills. After completing the course, students are capable of creating their own academic texts in English at a standard worthy of publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Academic Writing — What and Why? Introduction
• Week 2: Structuring Academic Writing
• Week 3: Academic Vocabulary
• Week 4: Providing and Discussing Data
• Week 5: Opinions and Ideas
• Week 6: Functions of Academic Writing
• Week 7: Academic Writing Conclusion
• Week 8: Academic Writing Practice

A city like a human being has its DNA. It can be traced in its history, architecture, political, economic and technological development. Unlike humans, cities are not mortals. The question rises: how do cities evolve and survive? Saint Petersburg is a city with a long history. It passed through many developments that even included its renaming in various periods of time. Nevertheless, the city still is regarded as a cradle of Russian culture and one of the most controversial environments.

The City as a Text course aims at applying knowledge and skills that students obtain in their educational trajectory employed for looking at the different layers of SPB constitution in historical perspective: arts, literature, architecture, technological, political and economic development. Students try to reconstruct the DNA of the city. We employ three major techniques in our analysis: mapping, observing, and listening.

Mapping the environment, observing the people and objects in the space, and listening by collecting sound evidence and interviews with people in the specific environment. At the end of their academic endeavor, students have to present their final projects where they show the model of Saint Petersburg DNA as it stands in 2022 and explain its relationship with Saint Petersburg 1703. This course is partially carried out in the Russian language.

As an opportunity to reflect on their studies in Year One at SAS, this course allows students to choose a specific topic or problem that grabbed their interest and explore it in more depth. The object of the course is to prepare a seven-minute final presentation, in English, developing an analytical take on an issue or question that has arisen from first-year classes. Students are required to connect their topic with themes, ideas, and insights from the other courses they have taken at SAS.

As well as an exercise in thinking about their educational trajectory and choice of major, TFY is designed to improve students’ research and presentation skills. Alongside learning how to devise, frame, and deliver a presentation, students will learn critical skills in revising and reflecting on the readings they have done throughout the year.

The course consists of a total of 16 meetings. The meetings are either lectures, seminars/workshops at SAS, or online seminars via Zoom. The final week (week 8) is devoted to student presentations. The lectures are joint events for all students, whereas seminars, online seminars, and mock presentations take place in small groups (see detailed course schedule). The final presentations are public events for all SAS students, faculty, and staff.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Introduction to the Course & Disciplined Minds
• Week 2: Topic Sentence
• Week 3: Peer Review
• Week 4: Close Reading
• Week 5: Essays & How to Present
• Week 6: Peer Review
• Week 7: Mock Presentations
• Week 8: Final Presentations

Life and Matter aims at teaching fundamentals of biology and physics to SAS students from all disciplinary horizons – knowledge from biology and physics that any academically trained person should possess. We believe we can provide the students with a unified approach to two natural sciences that are reputed to be very different and very vast in scope, by making this course theory-oriented.

The most profound way to engage with scientific problems is by studying them through the lens of the main conceptual frameworks that emerged in physics and biology over the years. In physics, it is conceivable to discern a logic in the historic evolution of concepts and theories; it is this logic we aim to convey in this course.

Biology, the scientific study of life, has always been shaped by the contemporary world view and unified by the genetic theory of evolution. We shall follow the development of its logic and research tools in a cultural context from creationist thinking to the up-to-date view of humans as dominant parts of the biosphere and the Earth system.

By using this theory-based approach, we attempt to equip the students with conceptual tools that should allow them to engage with theoretical physicists and biologists, as well as with physics and biology problems that they may encounter in their daily life or research.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Discussion about the Similarities and Differences between the Natural and Social Sciences
• Week 2: The Rise of the Mechanical View
• Week 3: Organisms as Programmed Machines: 1. The Mechanistic View of an Organism
• Week 4: Decline of the Mechanical View
• Week 5: Homeostasis and Regulation: Experimentation
• Week 6: Genetics, Evolution and Ecology: The Switch to Thinking about Populations
• Week 7: Fields and Relativity
• Week 8: Mechanisms of Evolution: 1. Darwin’s Ecological Theory versus the Genetic Theory of Evolution

Interpreting Artworks is a semester-long course focused on developing the basic skills required for the close analysis of individual artworks, buildings, and monuments from diverse cultures and eras. This course is not a conventional art history survey. Emphasis is placed on examining key concepts and issues of interpretation, instead of artistic styles or periods.

A key learning goal of this course is to provide students with the confidence to engage confidently with art, the visual, and the built world on their own terms. The primary aim of this course is to cultivate in students an appreciation and critical understanding of art that will enrich their lives for years to come. The course also provides a foundation for further study of art, culture, media, and history.

Students will develop their skills in analysis and using language to describe visual and spatial experience through a series of weekly modules focused on the interpretation of individual artworks. Classes will consist of weekly lectures paired with seminars.

While the first semester is more historical in focus, the second semester will engage primarily with modern and contemporary art. Across two quarters, students study a diverse range of artworks — from more traditional painting, sculpture, and architecture to more recent artworks that challenge conventional ideas about art. By the end of the course students will be equipped with the basic interpretive skills for understanding, decoding and evaluating art in its many forms and contexts. As they will see, this can only be gained through a sustained and detailed engagement with specific works of art.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Words/Images, Objects, Spaces
• Week 2: “The Richard Mutt Case” (1917)
• Week 3: The Parthenon, 438 BCE
• Week 4: The Ghent Altarpiece, 1432
• Week 5: The School of Athens, 1509-11
• Week 6: Art of Tobolsk. Part 1
• Week 7: Art of Tobolsk. Part 2
• Week 8: Gianlorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25
• Week 9: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
• Week 10: Fiona Pardington (and Pierre Marie Duoutier), Ahua: A Beautiful Hesitation, 2010 (1837)
• Week 11: A.P. Lobanov's “Self-Portrait”
• Week 12: Numismatics
• Week 13: Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1984
• Week 14: Mapping Relationships
• Week 15: Museum Visits
• Week 16: Final Essay

We live in a global world that is increasingly dependent on technology, driven by scientific progress. In response to human needs and desires, the technological outcome has created constantly changing products and services impacting on our lives both positively and negatively.

Addressing this, the purpose of this course is to provide an introductory knowledge to the nature of science besides to human, social and economic aspects of science and technology. The main characteristic of these pillars and their interactions as a double-edged sword is to be discussed in terms of different subjects including -but not limited- to ethics, democracy, and sustainability.

Students start with a review and practice of the scientific investigation and scientific knowledge to better engage with the complex interactions of science and technology. The relevant terms, concepts, and methodologies arepresented. It is followed by the introduction of scientific communities, composed of diverse networks of interacting scientists and their positions including a range of contexts and concerns including ethics.

The course incorporates broader dimensions into this framework to introduce the societal interactions with science and technology. These include progress and problems in selected domains such as pharmaceuticals, medicine and environment. A special emphasis will be given on the impact of life science related technologies. Especially the possibilities of genetic engineering technologies, such as genome editing will be discussed in terms of emerging concerns such as somatic versus germline interventions as well as applications for treatment versus enhancement. The advantages and risks of these interventions and applications arepresented in the context of ethical considerations.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Introduction
• Week 2: Scientific Communities and Their Interactions. Scientific Knowledge
• Week 3: Science, Technology and Society. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Biotechnology
• Week 4: Science, Technology and Society: Economic Growth and Development. Case Studies. Economic Impact of Human Genome Project
• Week 5: Science, Technology and Society, Special Topic: The Plastic Pollution and the Gender Bending Chemicals. Instructions for Experiment Reporting. Credibility
• Week 6: Genetics, Genetic Engineering and Society.Post-genomic Risks. Genetics, Genetic Engineering and Society. Genome Editing. Genetics and Democracy
• Week 7: Science, Technology and the Future: Using Genetics for Social Science
• Week 8: Technology Assessment. Ethical Standards. Active Tutorial

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to several interconnected global issues to gain a better understanding of the nature of contemporary international affairs. Taking inspiration from international relations, international political economy, and history.

The course aims to familiarize students with topics that they can apply in other academic fields or their work. A key question that this course tries to answer is how the international community can overcome Collective Action Problems. A Collective Action Problem is a social dilemma in which all individuals are better off cooperating, but it is in nobody’s immediate interest to cooperate. students explore this question in the context of several topics, ranging from geopolitical tensions, culture war, climate change and sustainability goals, and the double-edged sword feature of technology.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: The Untruth of Fragility and Us vs. Them
• Week 2: Prejudices Against Other Prejudices
• Week 3: Quebec Secession
• Week 4: Yugoslavia Secession
• Week 5: Loss of Biodiversity and Diminishing Natural Resources
• Week 6: Climate Change: New Globality
• Week 7: Nuclear Technology: It Can Help to Cook Food, but Can Also Burn Alive
• Week 8: Biotechnology: Public Lobbying and Activism

The aim of this core course is to familiarize students with various literary genres, develop their ability to understand and appreciate literary texts and introduce them to some of the great works of world literary tradition. This is not a survey course that would attempt to cover dozens of classical literary works essential to world literary canon; instead, the aim of the course is to develop intellectual skills and predispositions which would prompt students to continue reading literature and derive inspiration, insights, and enjoyment from it for the rest of their lives.

For successful course completion, the students are required to read all literary texts. The course is divided into 4 modules. Each module is divided into 2 weeks, each week includes 1 lecture and 1 seminar, totaling up to 8 lectures and 8 seminars for the whole course. Each module will be taught by a different SAS professor.

The course is an exciting journey that will help students to study creativity using a wide range of creativity tools. You shouldn’t be an artist or creative genius to be creative. The goal of this course is to explore innate abilities and enhance creative skills to become more creative and able to generate ideas. Understanding and using a wide variety of tools and techniques can help a student to discover new solutions for challenges in life.

Design Thinking is an innovation process that helps to discover unmet needs and opportunities and create new solutions.In the course students discuss different styles of thinking, how to examine information from different viewpoints in order not to be stuck with existing patterns but to create new ones. The course is designed to break through mental blocks and unlock the mind for creative thinking.

The course is divided into 8 weeks. Each week different creative tools and techniques will be introduced. The course consists of interactive lectures and seminars with challenging activities, group work, regular Knowledge Checks and a final assignment.

The final assignment is a group work at idea generation on one of the suggested topics. Two peer reviews for every final presentation are necessary. The aim of peer reviews is to engage into each process as many students as possible, to assess whether peers have understood the creativity tools and techniques as well as principles of divergent and convergent thinking.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Introduction to Principle of Creativity
• Week 2: Creativity Tools
• Week 3: Thinking Styles
• Week 4: Morphological Analysis
• Week 5: TRIZ
• Week 6: SCAMPER
• Week 7: Preparations for the Final Assignment
• Week 8: Final Presentations

Successfully completing undergraduate research projects in English is an essential part of the SAS Degree. When applying for fellowships, internships, further study opportunities and jobs, independent research can distinguish SAS students from other applicants. While a well-researched and competently presented fourth-year thesis will impress graduate school admission and scholarship committees, employers will also regard the completion of a major project in English as evidence of substantial self-discipline and accomplishment. Building on ideas, theories, and methodologies from previous study at SAS, students produce a thesis on a topic that has already been defended in Y3Q4 in the previous academic year and that fits within the remit of the specific major.

The research must: 1) be focused on the analysis of a specific object/phenomenon; 2) employ a specific methodology or theory related to the field; and 3) build upon existing scholarly literature related to the topic. The thesis must be between 8,000 to 10,000 words (not counting the title page, abstract, table of contents, footnotes, bibliography, and any appendices). A template will be provided. Individual arrangements regarding longer word count are considered on a case by case basis, and it is the student’s responsibility to initiate the procedure with the agreement of both the major leader and the supervisor. A template will be provided.

The thesis will include: an introduction, a review of existing literature related to the topic, a clearly stated methodology, the main exposition of the essay arranged in either sections or chapters, a conclusion that summarizes key findings, a bibliography, and any necessary supplementary material (images, appendices, etc.). The research essay must follow the Chicago Manual of Style footnote and reference system. The research seminar helps students to navigate through all stages of the fourth-year research project. While the seminar only meets four times in Q1 and Q2 and eight times in Q3, it is cumulatively equivalent to four or five elective courses in terms of the amount of independent work expected of a student in developing, researching, writing, and presenting their work.

This seminar provides students with guidance in developing their topic, executing their research, writing up findings, polishing the final draft for submission, and preparing for the oral defense of the research. The seminar also provides a forum for peer support, professional development, and discussion of issues related to students’ research.

Course Calendar

• Quarter 1: Justifying the Research: Focus on Data, Evidence and Questions
• Quarter 2: Expanding the Research: Focus on Analysis, Argumentation, Thesis
• Quarter 3: Writing and Defending the Research: Focus On Writing, Revising, Editing

Effective communication skills are a must-have in today’s information-driven, global society. Being able to listen, read, write, speak and present oneself is highly important for graduating students who are only planning on entering the workforce. The objective of this course is to introduce students to different communication strategies and familiarize them with the communication techniques that they will have to use after graduation when looking for a job or applying for a scholarship and/or graduate studies.

Weekly Themes

• Week 1: Develop Your Career Plan
• Week 2: Create an Effective CV
• Week 3: Understand a Job Offer and Make the Most of Your Application
• Week 4: Prepare Your Application for Graduate Studies
• Week 5: Presentation Design and the Art of Visual Storytelling
• Week 6: Speaking in Public
• Week 7: Master Your Presentation on the Day
• Week 8: Resolve Conflicts at Work