This course features intensive work on French grammar, with emphasis on the acquisition of basic active skills (speaking, reading, writing and vocabulary building). We will be using the multimedia program, Totem, which employs only authentic French, allowing students to use the language colloquially and creatively in a short amount of time. Three hours a week for explanation and demonstration, plus small sections with French assistants. This course prepares students for FREN 103. For students without previous training in French.

This course features intensive work on French grammar, with emphasis on the acquisition of basic active skills (speaking, reading, writing and vocabulary building). We will be using the multimedia program, Totem, which employs only authentic French, allowing students to use the language colloquially and creatively in a short amount of time. Three hours a week for explanation and demonstration, plus small sections with French assistants. This course prepares students for FREN 103. For students without previous training in French.

Independent Reading Courses.

Fall and spring semester.  The Department.

(Offered as ENGL 462, FAMS 462, and ARHA 462)  In recent years, curating has taken on an increasingly central role in the production of contemporary media cultures.  As the practice of selecting, organizing, and presenting cultural artifacts for public exhibition, curating often determines the sorts of media forms audiences have access to and the frameworks through which those media forms are interpreted.  Curating requires a facility with a wide variety of skills, from historical research to critical analysis, communication, administration, and creative thinking.  Yet i

(Offered as ASLC 436 and FAMS 422) This course is an introduction to contemporary Japanese popular culture through focused study of a particular theme. This semester we will concentrate on the apocalypse, among the most prominent themes in postwar Japan. Many would trace its origins to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for Japan is the only country in history to have been attacked with nuclear weapons, but we will examine a broader cultural matrix in this course, which will allow us to address questions of technology, human agency, utopia, dystopia, and spectacle, among other topics.

(Offered as ENGL 384 and FAMS 382)  As one of our most dominant, even omnipresent media forms, television is something most of us experience every day.  But Television Studies scholarship does not always take on the question of “experience” as a central part of its analysis.  This course will take experience as the central component of our study.  The first unit of the course will consider phenomenological approaches to television criticism, centering on those elements of televisual form that delineate an experience different from other media.  Our secon

(Offered as THDA 353 and FAMS 345)  In this advanced course in the techniques of creating performance, each student will create and rehearse a performance piece that develops and incorporates original choreography, text, music, sounds and / or video. Improvisational and collaborative structures and approaches among and within different media will be investigated.  The final performance pieces will be presented in the Holden Theater. 

Offered as SPAN 240 and FAMS 324)  Latin American documentary filmmaking in the twenty-first century has been enjoying a renaissance marked by a shift away from the highly political social documentaries of the second half of the twentieth century towards more reflexive modes of representation that explore the relationship between filmmakers and their subjects in ways that profoundly alter both.  In this course, we will first discuss several canonical social documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, and then proceed to discuss documentaries of the twenty-first century from Argentina (A

(Offered as GERM 360, ARCH 360, EUST 360 and FAMS 316) What is performance? What constitutes an event? How can we address a phenomenon that has disappeared the moment we apprehend it? How does memory operate in our critical perception of an event? How does a body make meaning? These are a few of the questions we will explore in this course, as we discuss critical, theoretical, and compositional approaches in a broad range of multidisciplinary performance phenomena emerging from European--primarily German--culture in the twentieth century.