ENROLL

Richard Keiser

In this course students will engage race and other forms of identity (including class and disability) using both social scientific and humanistic approaches to examine how the process of building place in the U.S. has historically meant discarding lives, excluding communities, and maintaining caste. Subtopics include: Art's impact on gentrification, POC suburbanization, Disposable lives in America, Apartheid from architectural design, and Comparative memoir.

Elizabeth McKinsey

Through cultural manifestations--literature, painting, movies, radio, historic preservation, and music--we will trace progress from shock and despair to hope in the ‘30s and see how Americans of all races and classes coped with the disruptions and opportunities of economic cataclysm, political shifts, new social programs and expectations, and technology. Materials will include texts on the New Deal, labor, the Great Migration and race relations; fiction, essays, and plays by Steinbeck, Nathaniel West, James Agee, Thornton Wilder, Meridel LeSueur, Hurston, and Wright; popular movies and music; and photography, painting, Art Deco, and the 1939 World’s Fair.

Michael Kowalewski

"If you remember the Sixties, you weren't there."  We will test the truth of that popular adage by exploring the American youth counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the turbulent period of the late sixties. Using examples from literature, music, and film, we will examine the hope and idealism, the violence, confusion, wacky creativity, and social mores of this seminal decade in American culture. Topics explored will include the Beat Generation, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, LSD, and the rise of environmentalism, feminism, and Black Power. 

Extra Time Required

Candace Moore

This seminar aims to develop students into savvy critical theorists of television, knowledgeable about the field, and capable of challenging previous scholarship to invent new paradigms. The first half of the course surveys texts foundational to television studies while the second half focuses primarily on television theory and criticism produced over the last two decades. Television Studies covers a spectrum of approaches to thinking and writing critically about television, including: semiotics; ideological critique; cultural studies; genre and narrative theories; audience studies; production studies; and scholarship positioning post-network television within the contexts of media convergence and digital media. 

Prerequisite: Cinema and Media Studies 110 or instructor permission

Deborah Appleman

Prerequisite: 100 or 200-level Educational Studies course

Extra Time Required

Peter Balaam

From its famous opening line to its apocalyptic close, Melville’s lofty and profane romance of the whaling-industry is gripped by the myths and marked by the traumas of race. Exploring its black-and-white thematics and racialized characters in nineteenth- as well as twenty-first-century social and political contexts, this course takes Melville’s stupendous book as an anatomy of "whiteness" as a racial construct in U.S. cultural history.

Elizabeth McKinsey

Brooke Okazaki

We all watch movies, whether it’s in a theater, on television, a computer, or a smart phone. But we rarely listen to movies. This class is an introduction to film music and sound and how it changed based on technological and stylistic developments from the silent era to the present day. Throughout the term, students will watch, speak, and write about a variety of films in order to develop literacy in theories of film music and sound. Class assignments including quizzes, cue charts, and short essays will culminate in a final project that may take the form of an analytical term paper or creative project designed by the student in consultation with the instructor. An ability to read music not required.

Extra Time Required

Andy Flory

Andy Flory

A survey of rhythm and blues from 1945 to 1975, focusing on performers, composers and the music industry.

Not open to students who have taken MUSC 132

Kristin K. Lunz Trujillo

We live in an age marked by attacks on democratic institutions, suspicion of expertise, and a general sense that facts are disposable in the face of inconvenient truths. This course will examine misinformation and anti-intellectualism in the past and today, how and why people adopt misinformation and conspiracy theories, the political effects of the post-truth era, and what mitigates the spread of misinformation. Through readings, discussions, and investigative projects, students will both advance their knowledge on the topic and learn to better evaluate information and evidence. This course focuses on the United States but occasionally includes a comparative and/or non-U.S. perspective.

Elizabeth F Dolfi

Passions, pleasures, ecstasies, and desires bear on religion and sexuality alike, but intersections and tensions between these two domains are complicated. This course wagers that bringing the hotly contested categories “queer” and “religion” together will illuminate the diverse range of bodies, activities, and identities that inhabit both. The course explores religion and sexuality in Modern Western thought, erotic elements in religious texts and art, and novels and narratives of religious belief and practice in queer lives. The course combines concrete cases with theoretical tools that queer and feminist scholars have used to analyze religious and sexual communities, bodies, and identities.

Michael McNally

Annette Nierobisz

The American employment landscape continues to shift rapidly. In this course, we explore how social statuses such as gender, race, social class, age, and disability impact different types of workers who find themselves also challenged by work overload, new technologies, downsizing, and an unstable economy that mandates a reconsideration of retirement goals. Both ethnographic and statistical accounts inform our study of the academic field called, “Sociology of Work, Occupations, and Organizations.” While reviewing course material you will concurrently investigate a career of personal interest, learning what your “dream job” encompasses and how it functions in the contemporary world.

Prerequisite: The department strongly recommends that Sociology/Anthropology 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above

Andrew Carlson

This class is an examination of significant artists who use theatre as a tool for envisioning and enacting social change. We will study the justice-making strategies of a variety of artists, including Augusto Boal, Cherríe Moraga, Anna Deavere Smith, among many other contemporary artists whose work continues to shape American society.  We will also examine influential methods of using theatre for social change, including documentary theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, theatre for young audiences, and theatre in prisons. The class will include a number of guest artist visits from people making work in the field. The final project will be an original theatrical creation that uses the strategies studied in class to address a contemporary social issue.  

Extra Time Required