This course invites students to train in contemporary dance technique and build collaborative performance through the lens of multiplicity. When we move, are we just one body or are we more? The body is capable of moving and organizing itself in myriad ways. Our bodies carry our histories, influences, our knowledge of ourselves, and our ties to one another. In the studio and beyond, we will engage dance as a method to embrace and move with our unique capacities and histories. And we will experiment with movement as a way to find new neural pathways and possibilities.

Stand up, sketch comedy, satirical news, and memes: How do these and other humor-related cultural forms allow us to speak the unspeakable, to challenge and/or uphold the status quo, and to consolidate community? What are the limitations of these cultural forms? In this discussion-based and writing-intensive course, students will grapple with humor's many social functions, and consider the extent to which humor is an effective means of addressing wars, white supremacy, rape culture, presidential power, and other weighty issues.

In the late 19th century, when cities first became home for millions rather than thousands of people, many writers became fascinated with how people behave differently when part of a crowd or a "mass." What is the attraction of being part of a crowd? In the 20th century, the phenomenon of the crowd has become central to modern life, as people joined crowds in many circumstances: mass political movements, strikes, concerts, parades, protests, sporting events, rallies, religious gatherings.

This course focuses on African popular music. It examines musical genres from different parts of the continent, investigating their relationships to the historical, political, and social dynamics of their respective national and regional origins. Musical idioms like highlife, soukous, kwaito, afrobeat, hiplife, and afrobeats will be studied to assess the significance of popular music as a creative response to social and political developments in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

Every culture bears unique sensibilities to sounds. People cultivate distinctive ways of hearing, understanding, and relating to them. These sensibilities are also re?ected in the processes of sound- and music-making. Different instruments are devised to encapsulate distinctive cultural values not only acoustically but also visually in their material forms. This course aims to explore diverse music cultures of the world through the lens of organology (the study of musical instruments). We examine a wide range of sound-making devices in their current sociocultural and historical contexts.

This seminar will examine the history of US immigration from the founding of the American nation to the great waves of European, Asian, and Mexican immigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the more recent flows from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In addition to investigating how these groups were defined and treated in relation to each other by the media, we will consider the following questions: Who is "American"? How does the American Dream obscure US settler colonialism and slavery?

This course will focus on the role of electronic and computer technology in shaping musical thought, production, and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Because of the hybrid nature of this work, the term 'electroacoustic music' seems apt. We will engage the musical, technical, and aesthetic issues of electroacoustic music, broadly construed to include the classical avant-garde, electronica, DJ culture, and sound art. Listening examples will be drawn from a broad range of these genres and styles.

In an age of increased movement of people across the globe, this seminar focuses on past and present experiences of (im)migrants, which have inspired a number of recent and contemporary novels, feature films, documentaries, memoirs, and theoretical debates about cultural identity, place and displacement.

Introduction to Writing: This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation.

Increasingly, it would seem to be the preference of readers in our neo-narrative age, age of biography and memoir, age of the talk show: an appetite for story. For narrative. But the lyric poet might just as easily say that every narrative poem obscures a lyric and suspends time. What happens when a poem is more concerned with "how something felt" than "what happened"? In this course, participants will investigate such questions, as well as the lyric poem at various levels of craft and technique.