The development of production design, art direction and costume design for film from its theatrical beginnings in the early twentieth century to the present. Students will engage in an investigation of the field through research projects that will include written work, story board design and visual presentations.

An examination of the gothic--a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity--in American literature and culture, with an emphasis upon issues of race and gender. Topics include slavery and the gothic; gothic sexuality; Southern, Northern, and national gothic; freakishness and grotesquerie; and visual gothic. Focus on fiction, with some film and photography. Authors, filmmakers, and artists may include Alcott, Arbus, Browning, Crane, Dunbar, Dunn, Elmer, Faulkner, Gilman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, McCullers, Morrison, O'Connor, Oates, Parks, Poe, Romero, Turner, and Wood.

This course offers an historical survey of film theory, from the work of its earliest authors and practitioners at the birth of the 20th century (who first struggled to define the medium), to those who are working still to elucidate the place of the cinema in relation to new media in its ever-evolving and ever more complex place in culture. As a way of focusing the discussion of the various theoretical positions, we will watch and discuss films that represent that most modern of phenomena--the city.

This course provides a foundation in the principles, techniques, and equipment involved in video production. Students will make several short videos over the course of the term as well as one final piece. We will develop our own voices while learning the vocabulary of moving images and gaining production and post-production skills. In addition to technical training, classes will include critiques, screenings, readings, and discussion.

This course teaches the basic concepts, vocabulary, and critical skills involved in interpreting film. Through readings and lectures, students will become more informed and sophisticated observers of the cinema, key examples of which will be screened weekly. While the focus will be on the form and style of narrative film, documentary and avant-garde practices will be introduced. The class will also touch upon some of the major theoretical approaches in the field.

This seminar provides an introduction to natural language processing, the discipline of getting computers to understand human language. We will cover core ideas and algorithms relevant to both speech processing and text processing, with emphasis on applications in human-computer natural language interaction. Students will design and complete an open-ended final project.

An introduction to the issues involved in orchestrating the use of computer resources. Topics include operating system evolution, file-handling systems, memory management, virtual memory, resource scheduling, multiprogramming, deadlocks, concurrent processes, protection, and design principles. Course emphasis: understanding the effects of operating system design on computer system performance. This course is programming intensive.

How does Mapquest find the best route between two locations? How do computers help to decode the human genome? At the heart of these and other complex computer applications are nontrivial algorithms. While algorithms must be specialized to an application, there are some standard ways of approaching algorithmic problems that tend to be useful in many applications. Among other topics, we will explore graph algorithms, greedy algorithms, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and network flow.