Historically, settler states and imperial regimes have disenfranchised and dispossessed racialized Others by constructing ideological frameworks that justify and obscure the ongoing violence of the colonial process. Through a close examination of film, television, music, and digital media, this course will explore how contemporary US popular culture fabricates and disseminates imperialist fantasies and settler mythologies.

In this course, students will learn to evaluate and interpret images by considering their social and cultural function and examining their potential to create meaning and communicate ideas. Students will consider how they currently create and consume images, and thereby explore the influence of images on their lives.

What is ultimately or fundamentally real? What is the nature of being? Is reality ultimately physical or nonphysical? Is it one or many, visible or invisible, discrete or diffuse, eternal or temporal? Philosophers have offered the wildest and most varied answers to these questions. Today, metaphysical debates continue to rage within philosophy, cultural theory, and social theory. In this course, we will survey a range of metaphysical theories - from the ancient to the contemporary, and from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. The texts will be difficult but deeply rewarding.

Home is where we live in every sense, but "Home" is more than the physical structure we reside in: it is also the psychological, societal, emotional, and even the mythical. In this course we will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction and explore the importance of these spaces, be they physical or metaphysical, to the construction of "home" and more importantly, how these terms, whether we accept them wholly, shun them entirely, or experience via travel and immigration, dictate to us and others a sense of self and identity via our own writing.

This course is designed to introduce students to key issues in film studies, focusing on the history of American cinema from 1895 to 1960. We will pay particular attention to the "golden age" of Hollywood, with forays into other national cinemas by way of comparison and critique. Screenings will range from actualities and trick films, to the early narrative features of D. W. Griffith, to the development of genres including film noir (Double Indemnity), the woman's film of the 1940s (Now, Voyager), the western (Stagecoach) and the suspense film (Rear Window).

This course is designed for any student curious about design in motion: choreography. It will introduce theories and processes of movement composition and choreographic analysis. We'll work with movement prompts and structured improvisations to discover ways to generate movement, and to compose it into set forms. We'll question expectations about what dance, or a "good" dance is, and push to broaden movement preferences. In the process students will hone skills in perceiving, describing and interpreting compositional strategies in choreography.

"Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal." exhorts T.S. Elliot. This course connects the reading and writing processes so that they are reciprocal and reinforcing. Every week we will alternate between reading a mosaic of U.S. American short fiction and analyzing the ways in which these narratives make their point, and practical writing exercises in order to build linguistic, literary and cultural skills. During the final month, you will workshop your own narratives, fiction or non-fiction, allowing you to give and receive feedback on the process and products of your practice.

In this introductory-level course we will explore the genealogies of underground, alternative, independent, and radical comics in the United States since the 1960s, focusing on how unconventional comics relate to ideas about popular culture, underground cultures, and politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Course readings will include comics in a number of short formats (comic books, minicomics, one-panel cartoons, and webcomics), as well as critical, historical, and theoretical readings. We will make extensive use of the digital Underground and Independent Comics Database.

Before James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Beyonce even, there was Phillis Wheatley, Lucy Terry, John Marrant, etc. There were 18th century black writers telling stories. We will read a variety of writing-such as poems, sermons, narratives, letters-and examine closely how these early writers use and manipulate language, tell stories and rethink what we mean by reading in order to make better sense of their experiences in the world because of or in spite of enslavement (or freedom).

This is an introductory course for students who would like to explore their interest in documentary practice. Through a combination of screenings, lectures, readings and technical workshops, we will explore a critical/historical overview of this genre and incorporate our knowledge and experience to produce individual or collaborative projects in a variety of "modes of representation." Projects need not be restricted to a particular medium; in fact, students will be encouraged to explore the ways in which film, video, and/or animation can be utilized together.