An introduction to the programming language R and how it can be used for statistical analysis and visualization of data. Students will learn how to write basic R programs that can read, write, and manipulate data. They will make use of R functions for executing common statistical analysis and learn how to display the results using graphs and charts. Through a series of projects, students will get experience with writing their own functions, learn how to make use of R documentation and how to extend their own knowledge of the language.

This course will focus on basic Stanislavski techniques: concentration, imagination, relaxation, objective/action, and beats/scene analysis. Each student will apply these concepts to one open scene, one monologue and one realistic contemporary scene.

This course is for all who stay to the end of the credits, purchase soundtracks, and argue over who should have won the Oscar for Best Score, along with anyone else interested in the undervalued importance of music to the general effect of a motion picture. We will explore and discuss the myriad ways in which these two media interact. The course will focus on classic scores by Herrmann, Morricone, and Williams, as well as the uses of pre-existing music in films of Kubrick and Tarantino.

The screenplay is a unique and ephemeral form that exists as a blueprint for something else: a finished film. How do you convey on the page a story that will take shape within an audio-visual medium? The screenwriter must have an understanding of both the language of narrative film as well as the general shape and mechanics of film stories. This advanced course will cover dialogue, characterization, plot, story arc, genre, and cinematic structure. We will analyze scenes from fictional narrative films -- both short and feature length -- and read the scripts that accompany these films.

This class explores African approaches to performance, premised on the interdisciplinarity of theater in many African societies. We take our inspiration from centuries of apprentice-style artist training in some indigenous West African societies. The evolution of oral and popular performance traditions into literary theater has also necessitated a similar trend in the training of the modern actor. The primary object of this class is to be able to embody a plethora of idiomatic expressions.

A survey of world performance history, including: the evolution of human language and consciousness; the rise of oral, ritual, and shamanic performance; religious and civic festivals; and imperial theater practices that position the stage at the dangerous intersection of religious worship, public taste, royal patronage, and government censure. Understanding performance as both artistic practice and social institution, this course emphasizes the role performance has played in changing audiences and as a cultural and political force in various societies.

With corporations using our data to anticipate our desires and counterterrorism units tapping into our communications, we are increasingly embedded in a surveillance society. This course considers practices of surveillance across media platforms, from smartphones, fitness trackers, and baby monitors to the biometric technologies that determine who may cross borders. We will explore how different governments, corporations, and individuals use new media to surveil others, as well as the ways racism and transphobia are inscribed in surveillance practices.

Anthropologists have made films since the origins of the discipline and have long debated the role of film in the production of knowledge about others. This course explores the history, evolution, critiques, and contemporary practices of ethnographic film. We will consider key works that have defined the genre, and the innovations (and controversies) associated with them; we will engage documentary, observational, reflexive, and experimental cinema; and we will consider Indigenous media as both social activism and cultural reproduction.

This course explores Italian theater from the 1700s to today with particular attention to social mobility, women's rights, politics, and class conflict. Authors include classics such as Goldoni, Pirandello, DarioFo, Franca Rame, Dacia Maraini, Eduardo De Filippo, and more.

Yue Opera, an all-female art that flourished in Shanghai in 1923, resulted from China's social changes and the women's movement. Combining traditional with modern forms and Chinese with Western cultures, Yue Opera today attracts loyal and enthusiastic audiences despite pop arts crazes. We will focus on how audiences, particularly women, are fascinated by gender renegotiations as well as by the all-female cast. The class will read and watch classics of this theater, including Romance of the Western Bower, Peony Pavilion, and Butterfly Lovers.