Teaching
Darra’s courses at Williams include Feasting and Fasting in Russian History and Twentieth-Century Russian Art and the Birth of Abstraction.
Feasting and Fasting in Russian History
This course uses the methodology of food history to explore the broader historical, economic, and artistic conditions that gave rise to Russian culture. We will examine culinary practice as well as the social context of cooking and eating in Russia. In order to elucidate the important interplay between culture and cuisine, we will discuss such issues as the domestic roles of women and serfs, the etiquette of the table, the role of drinking and temperance movements, and the importance of feasts and fasts in the Russian Orthodox Church calendar. Short stories, memoirs, and cookery books will provide insight into class and gender differences, cooking techniques, and the specific tastes that characterize Russian cuisine. This class will present Russian culture from a predominantly domestic point of view that originates from the wooden spoon as much as from the scepter.
Twentieth-Century Russian Art and the Birth of Abstraction
Such revolutionary artistic movements as Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism profoundly influenced the development of twentieth-century art throughout the Western world, just as the 1917 Russian Revolution upset the world's political balance. This course will investigate Russian art within a cultural framework and explore the relationship between artistic production and politics. We will begin with a brief overview of important developments in Russian art that prefigured the twentieth-century artistic revolution: the introduction of icons from Byzantium, the founding of St. Petersburg and the rise of Western- style portraiture, and the fin-de-siecle movements that united painting with music and ballet. However, the focus of the course will be 1910-1930, when radical innovation was the order of the day and revolutionary ideas sparked entirely new conceptions of art. We will then look at the Socialist Realist style of the Stalin era, Soviet dissident art, and Moscow conceptualism, ending the semester with an exploration of current trends in post-Soviet Russian art.