Chernobyl: From Soviet Utopia to Global Apocalypse

4 credits · Undergraduate

The course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster through the history of the late Soviet utopian project of "atomic cities" and the intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic responses that the catastrophe generated in post-Soviet Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian societies. We will examine the environmental, social, and ecological aftereffects of the disaster and analyze its many representations in fiction, film, oral history, iconography, photography, and other media. The course will explore such topics as late Soviet urban and technological utopias; public health policies; the disaster's impact on ecology and climate; the appropriation of disaster narratives and the emergence of disaster tourism; and media coverage, censorship, and official cover-ups.