To register for an Independent Study with Hampshire College faculty you need to communicate the faculty member's name to your Registrar's office along with your Course Request and Instructor Permission form.

To register for an Independent Study with Hampshire College faculty you need to communicate the faculty member's name to your Registrar's office along with your Course Request and Instructor Permission form.

What is presence on stage? And how does an actor manifest it? In this course, you'll explore acting through a hands-on, ensemble-based approach that is grounded in listening. The course begins with an exploration of the many stories that you carry, hear, and express through movement. We will then move to theatrical language, developing skills of text analysis and character development.

Home is where we live in every sense, but "Home" is more than the physical structure we reside in: it is also the psychological, societal, emotional, and even the mythical. In this course, we will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction and explore the importance of these spaces, be they physical or metaphysical, to the construction of "home" and more importantly, how these terms, whether we accept them wholly, shun them entirely, or experience via travel and immigration, dictate to us and others a sense of self and identity via our own writing.

Proceeding from the premise that the ideas behind a successful artwork should be intimately related to its materials, this course will investigate three of the most significant characteristics of digital media. We will work with a wide variety of tools that allow for the creation and manipulation of various media, including bitmap and vector images, 2D animation, and sound. Students will create a series of conceptually based digital artworks, culminating in an interactive multimedia final project.

Design Fundamentals: This is an introductory level design class focusing on understanding problem, generating ideas and developing practical elegant solutions. We will begin with a series of guided activities and projects, with the course culminating in a final independent project. Students will become familiar with a range of basic design tools and skills, such as drawing, computer aided design, model making, and prototype in materials such as cardboard, metal and plastic. Throughout the course students will work toward improving visual communication skills and the ability to convey ideas.

From James Baldwin's recounting of being in prison in Paris to Joan Didion's recollections of 1960s Hollywood and beyond, many great writers have used the personal essay to illuminate universal or cultural truths, moving from the minutiae of daily life to insights and observations about the human condition. This course will explore this dynamic literary genre, considering how different forms and structures (i.e., the braided essay, the lyric essay, etc.) shape the stories we tell about our lives and experiences--stories about power, place, and identity.

This is a creative writing workshop in which students will read and create comics, with an emphasis on comics rooted in autobiographical stories and/or narratives of displacement. Because comics are primarily a visual medium, as much time will be spent considering the visual and artistic choices of the creators as discussing their thematic elements. The same is true for your own work, which will be workshopped for its visual as much as written inventiveness. It doesn't matter if you cannot draw well! Lots of "professional" comics artists are limited in their visual skills.