Category: Archive courses

This course will center on the question, how is culture used to articulate resistance? We will look at some of the rich history of political cultural production in Latin America, the Caribbean, and diaspora used by social movement actors as voices of resistance and opposition. Specifically, we will focus on music, murals, graffiti art, popular theater, testimonies, memory activism, and fictional writing as means of conveying revolutionary activism and committing marginalized voices to the historical archives. We will look at examples from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the diaspora.

This course will examine the emergence of new forms of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Rome in the seventeenth century and the historical contexts and cultural ideals that informed these changes across diverse media. Particular attention will be given to the stylistic experimentation and competition that characterizes much of the century and its implications for understanding issues of religious and artistic reform, concepts of idealism and naturalism, and the contested relationship between word and image. Class sessions will emphasize discussion of course themes and readings and close visual analysis of works.
Learning Outcomes of the Course:
You will gain familiarity with the painting, sculpture, architecture, and ephemeral arts of seventeenth-century Rome and with the themes which have structured scholarly inquiry into these works.
You will build skills of visual analysis, critical reading, and evaluation of scholarly arguments in art history.
For those who choose the research track option, you will gain experience in the practice of art historical research and writing, including analysis of previous literature on a topic (“the state of the question”) and strategies for formulating original arguments.

 

In recent years, colour studies has emerged as a new interdisciplinary field in the humanities and social sciences  and has been taken up by a number of film and media scholars from Tom Gunning to Sarah Street and Scott Higgins. While earlier research in film has focused on the introduction and development of colour film cinematography, from silent era tinting and toning to later processes like Agfacolor, and Technicolor, more recent work has focused on color media’s aesthetic, material and philosophical histories and its relationship with other art forms, from painting to advertising. This  advanced seminar will introduce you to these technological and material histories but also engage with phenomenology, aesthetics, spectatorship and race, read in and through colour media. How does colour function narratively, abstractly and affectively?

How do our optical and neurological capacities shape our perception of color? How does color cinematography and lighting intersect with questions of race and representation? How have writers, philosophers and film and media scholars, from Kant to Benjamin, and from Rudolf Arnheim to Giuliana Bruno, among many others, thought about color?  This seminar will introduce you to this rich intermedial and interdisciplinary field and encourage you to develop your own research into film & media topics and colour.

Recommended Films to watch may include: La Cucaracha, Willie Wonka, The Wizard of Oz, Three Caballeros, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Pleasantville, Blue, Imitation of Life, Once Were Warriors, The Aviator, Touki Bouki, Gabbeh, Münchhausen, The Holy Mountain, Raise the Red Lantern, 2046 and a wide selection of animation shorts.

Analysis of Dramatic Texts

Foundations in Performance Studies

Foundations in Performance Studies: This course focuses on the emerging “knowledge formation” of performance studies. It includes discourses concerning the relationship between text and practice; performance as a reflection of society, a witnessing to an experience, or a challenge to social structures or ways of knowing; emerging ideas of audience reception theory; and so forth.

By the end of the course, students will have

1.  a basic comprehensive knowledge of some of the “canonical” theorists and texts associated with performance studies,
2.  a knowledge of several recent case-studies to which these theories can be applied for deeper understanding, and
3.  a knowledge of the ways in which meaning is produced through both textual and performative discourses.

This course takes a key area of concern in Black studies: What does it mean to be a human being? “Blackness,” as a modern social category, signifies the contradictory condition of being human while at the same time being the position of doubted humanity.

To examine this question – what does it mean to be Black and human? – some scholars have focused on the topic of “liberal humanism” and the discourses that constitute the proper subject of western modernity as the universal center of knowledge and power in the economy and politics. As scholars have observed, liberalism humanism, with its ideology of the free, self-possessive individual, continues to define what being human means in social, cultural, and political life. At the same time, legal and customary freedom and protection that liberalism promises to everyone equally are unequally defined.

Thus, liberal humanism’s contradictions – “liberty for all” yet unending bondage, “universal suffrage” yet routinized disenfranchisement – has prompted two related questions for scholars of Black studies: How has Black life been lived and experienced within the contradictory rationality of liberal humanism? And: How have Black subjects conceptualized alternative modes of being human? More specifically, what ways of being, knowing, and perceiving have been endemic to Black life?

In this course, we will consider how Black scholars and cultural producers have theorized Black life and subjectivity through ontological “forms” that reveal alternatively human possibilities. Thus, Black “flesh,” “animality,” “objecthood,” and “non-being,” in addition to the conventional categories of liberal humanism, will guide our consideration of Black studies as an intellectual project that elaborates on the historical possibility of alternative humanisms produced before and through settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and slavery’s long afterlife.

 

This course considers aesthetics as sensory experience. Taking our lead from the Ancient Greek αἴσθησις (sense perception, sensation, perception), we will consider how media technology – digital images, film, music, television, video, film – effect sensory perception and are affected by sensory perception.  The emphasis will be on key terms in contemporary scholarship of media aesthetics – affect, embodiment, attention – as well as concepts once considered peripheral to the study of aesthetics – boredom, atmosphere, cuteness.

This seminar mixes canonical and foundational figures such as Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan with emerging scholarship from Byung-Chul Han and Sianne Ngai.