This seminar examines some recent developments in cultural sociology and contemporary social theory. The first part of the class asks: How do we imagine social things? The second part of the class reviews the history of social theory with a focus on the multiple crises of the modernity narrative, and various attempts to resolve these crises. The final third of the class poses the question of how to analyze culture and do social theory.

From the Black Lives Matter movement to debates about immigration and a color-blind America, race and ethnicity are at the forefront of contemporary public discourse. In this course students will be introduced to the various sociological perspectives and theoretical frameworks used to understand racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Racial and ethnic identities remain an important aspect of how people view themselves and others.

While influenced by Augustine's warning that worldly inquiry could endanger the pilgrimage of the soul, medieval literature contains many instances of curious looking. Exploring the medieval desire to know, this course considers how the period's tendencies toward spiritual and metaphysical thought are balanced against its fascinations with the observable world. We will study the ways allegories, travel narratives, romances, and dream visions intersect with natural philosophy, historiography, cartography, and architecture.

An exciting array of dance technique classes for the intermediate to advanced dancer in a variety of styles, taught by guest artists from the New England area.

This course focuses on the integration of dance technique, performance and improvisational research to expand students' embodied awareness, range of motion, and performance skills as contemporary dancers.

This course will discuss women who have made a seminal contribution to the way we see and experience the visual world through design and material culture including the performing arts, film, fashion and couture, the decorative arts, gardens and interiors. Students will familiarize themselves with the work of Coco Chanel and her female contemporaries, Gertrude Jekyll, Zaha Habib, Irene Sharaff, Loie Fuller, Sonya Delaunay, Lyubov Popova, Margaret Macdonald, and Eileen Grey as well as many other groundbreaking luminaries.

A seminar on three major early modern dramatists--Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton--focusing on the range of genres, characters, conflicts, and aspirations explored in their plays. These playwrights, along with their contemporary Shakespeare, shaped the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century theatre into a site for performing authority and conquest, national and individual identity, trickery and carnival, desire and sexuality, and complex unfoldings of revenge.

What are the functions that dance serves in society? How does the dancing body signify cultural values? How is dance a vehicle for the articulation of cultural identities? This course attempts to answer these questions from the perspective of dance anthropology and, on occasion, dance history. We will analyze documentaries and texts that illustrate the diverse manners in which dance ethnographers and historians approach the study of dance as a cultural expression.

This course examines the evolution of tragedy in classical Athens from choral performance to sophisticated drama through the contributions of the three most important tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Attention is given both to the political context in which the plays were performed and to the dramatic effects employed by the playwrights that made the stage an influential medium of powerful artistry.

This course will continue developing the choreographic tools introduced in Elementary Composition, including phrasing, formal design and counterpoint. The context for this work will be sound, sound design, music and musical composition in relation to choreography. Beginning with simple experiments in listening and moving, voice work, rhythm, syncopation, and counterpoint/polyphony, students will go on to explore and develop short choreographic projects inspired by four different musical traditions: Minimalism, Classical/Baroque, Pop/Contemporary, and Sound Collage.