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.

Affect theory offers a varied and rich critical language to explore how emotion circulates within and among human bodies-and nonhuman ones as well. If emotions operate through bodily changes and chemical exchanges, then animals and nonhumans might similarly be seen as bodies replete with affective materials in motion and at rest. In this course we will read through an array of affect theory from cognitive science, animal studies, and posthumanist debates on the affect of objects.

Setting their historical novels in the Middle Ages, contemporary Arab writers such as Radwa Ashour, Jurjy Zaydan, Gamal al-Ghitani and Bensalem Himmich have reflected into the past the problems of present Middle-Eastern societies. Writing from Egypt, Lebanon and Morocco, they revisited with nostalgia the extraordinary medieval heritage of the Arab-Islamic world, educating their readers while taking them on journeys to Medieval Andalusia, to the last years of the Baghdad of the caliphs, and to Cairo on eve of the Ottoman conquest.

This course will consider the critical intervention of #SurvivedAndPunished, and the idea of "survivor defense as abolitionist praxis." Using principles and case studies from feminist and critical race action research, we will investigate the concepts of transformative justice, carceral feminism and anti-violence alongside the binaries of deserving/undeserving and good-victim/non-victim criminal. How does this relate to the corrective notions of rehabilitation, redemption and restitution?

Latina/o/x Studies in Action explores university/college-community partnerships and civic engagement with/in Latina/o/x communities in the United States. Drawing from the field of Latina/o/x Studies, the course explores and interrogates "traditional" academic understandings of knowledge production, research, and service learning. Focusing on questions of power, inequality, and social change, this course will examine how university/college-community partnerships can be based on reciprocity, exchange, and the centering of community assets, needs, and voices.

As much as German culture is riddled with extreme examples of persecution and nationalism, the presence of those deemed non-German, such as Black Africans, African Americans, Jews, and Muslims, shaped cultural expression and cultural exchange. In this seminar we explore the expression of otherness as portrayed in literature, film, and art from the eighteenth through twenty-first Centuries. Drawing from critical race theory, critical ethnic studies, and gender studies, we consider work by non-Germans as well as the representation of others in German canonical and popular cultural production.

A frame of mind typically refers to a mood or perspective. However, such dispositions also reflect a certain regulation of thought and thus behavior. In other words, something "frames" our minds in the first place. This course explores these ideas by interrogating the history of commonplace assumptions regarding issues such as freedom, race, prison, sexuality, government, and insanity. Authors include Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Said, Ann Laura Stoler, and others.

A survey of philosophical, scientific, and theoretical approaches to the relation between cognition and representation. For as long as we have told stories, we have thought about how they work in conjunction with the mind. This course charts the many ways in which cognitive theory has shaped literary studies over the ages. How does fiction reflect the way we think? How in turn does it shape how we behave? What happens in the brain and body when we read?

In 2014, Time magazine declared the "Transgender Tipping Point" as a popular moment of transgender people's arrival into the mainstream. Using a queer and trans* of color critique, this course will unpack the political discourses and seeming binaries surrounding visibility/invisibility, recognition/misrecognition, legibility/illegibility, belonging/unbelonging and aesthetics/utility.

Using case studies such as the Eugenics Movement, Jonestown, and the Kennedy Assassination, this course will examine how distrust of the government, originally motivated by logical concerns, has transformed the way people think about power in the postmodern era. The class will explore the difference between rational questioning of authority and blind distrust that leads to questionable claims. Through topics such as the War on Drugs, this class shows how the powerful are able to use biases and public fears to carry out their own, often counterproductive, measures.