Course Offerings

Have you yearned to start a novel, a collection of related short stories or narrative essays, a memoir, or a series of poems? This cross-genre, seminar-style course is designed for students who want to pursue larger, more advanced creative writing projects. Students will submit project proposals for discussion and approval, and then present significant installments of writing at regular intervals during the semester. Revisions will be required along with student-professor individual conferences. Readings will be used as guiding examples, and required reaction papers will be tailored to individual projects. May be taken twice for credit. This course must have faculty approval in order to be registered.

This course provides a survey of the media and its function in today’s society. It introduces students to the basic concepts and tools necessary to think critically about media institutions and practices. In addition to the analysis of diverse media texts, the course considers wider strategies and trends in marketing, distribution, audience formation and the consequences of globalization. By semester’s end, students will understand the basic structures of today’s media and be able to provide advanced analysis that weighs the social and political implications of its products.

This course aims to introduce students to the study of fashion, considered as a multidisciplinary field of analyses. At the intersection of theory and practice, and relying on the key texts of historians, art historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and geographers, this course will examine the relationship between fashion and body, identity, art, industry, media, class, culture, subculture, gender, sex, time, space, religion and politics. With an emphasis on experiential learning and drawing on visual and film sources, on historical and contemporary examples for discussion, this class will provide students with the possibility to question the future of the fashion industry by studying the social and environmental impact of fashion and the role of social change that fashion can play.

In this digital tools training course, students will learn skills, gain hands-on experience, and think critically and ethically about a range of contemporary digital tools for research, creative, and practical purposes in the fields of Communications, Media, and Cultural Studies. Students will acquire facility with and conceptual understanding of online publishing, search engines, privacy protecting tools, digital storytelling, and tools for data management, cleaning, and visualization, among others. As researchers, we will learn about finding quality information online, the ethics of gathering and protecting research data, and the fair and legal use of online content. Readings and lectures will interrogate the different ways in which digitization and datafication affect us as networked users, creators, citizens, and consumers, focusing on unequal access to information retrieval and creation, biases in Machine Learning, surveillance and tracking through datafication, algorithmic culture, and AI. The course prepares students to work with digital tools while critically and responsibly engaging with them.