This course will provide an opportunity for Division II students in film/video, photography and related media that wish to pursue their own work, creating at least one completed new project for inclusion in the Division II portfolio. Each student will be required to present his/her work to the group several times during the semester. The members of the workshop will provide critical, technical and crew support for one another. Team projects are supported as long as each participant has a distinct and responsible role in the making of that work.

From a never ending creative engagement with the Blues legacy of African American music, jazz composers have reshaped the possibilities of composition and improvisation from the early 20th century till the present moment. The class works on two concurrent tracks. We will look at the way these composers engage with the blues sensibility and with improvisational forms within their compositional approaches, taking a wide historical view. We will also work each week on a series of shared compositional assignments.

This labor-intensive studio is for students who have taken a movable artists books studio or equivalent and as a result are capable to undertake advanced independent work in this area. Students will propose their own independent movable book projects and respond to prompts given in class. Research into historic and contemporary examples of paper engineering and movable books will inform our inquiry.

The bioapparatus is a term coined by two Canadian media artists, Nell Tenhaaf and Catherine Richards, to cover a wide range of issues concerning the technologized body. This course will explore the relationship of the mind and body to technology in contemporary art and culture. We will consider the resonance and currency of the bioapparatus in relation to the cyborg, the posthuman, bionics, and transgenics.

No issue in the comparative history of religion dramatizes the challenges of cross-cultural study of religious mysticism more than the problem of mysticism. Is the mystic a kind of lone ranger of the soul whose experience reveals and confirms the transcendental unity of all religions, or are the experiences of mystics entirely predetermined by the mystics' respective contexts of history, tradition, language, and culture? What is the relation between the mystic's "interior" experiences and what he or she writes about them?

Jordan Peele's famed movie, "Get Out," introduced the "sunken place" as a new way to name the angst of racism. But he's not the first to try to confront this nether region or the horror of its intellectual burdens. This course examines the "sunken place" and its stories over time. The sunken place suggests emplacement, geography and materiality and quite a bit of horror. We'll seek to understand where it is, when it is, or how it is and most importantly, how to get out.

Is music raced? How do musical sound, image, performance, and even performer become racialized? How does music speak to, reflect, reproduce, reinforce, and/or contest race and racism? How do individuals use music to express their ethnic/racial identity? Such questions hint at the undeniable yet ineffable influence of race on the American musical imagination. This seminar will consider the fraught intersection of race, power, and desire in contemporary popular music (hip hop, electronic dance music, rock, pop, punk, R&B/soul, world music, etc.).

More than 70 years after the end of World War II, the mass atrocity of the Holocaust continues to provoke a tremendous amount of responses. Scholarship, literature, film, memorials, and museum exhibitions continue to proliferate, and there are now well over 50,000 video interviews with survivors. In this course we will explore the difficulties of grappling with the Holocaust, and of representing mass violence.

This course looks at ten iconic Mexican and Chicano objects with profound cultural, social, and historical implications. Objects from Mexica to muralismo, modernismo to globalization, span ancient times to present day, high art to popular culture, in what is now known as Mexico and the United States. The objects will be experienced in person, through virtual site visits, and in slides. Defying a culture constantly propagating the rushed assimilation of images, we engage in slow and meaningful looking allowing consideration of materiality and technique.

This course explores the notion of sustainability in architectural design theory and practice. We first study the key tenets of the sustainable design discourse, and then how these tenets materialize in the practice. Then, we examine sustainable design against social issues such as inequality and marginality. This is a theory seminar that should provide a strong basis for a critical engagement with the practice of sustainability in the design field. We study our topic through class discussions, site visits, and analytical exercises.