This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We'll analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays in the humanities and natural sciences and follow with a personal essay and a piece of short fiction. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion; students will also meet individually with the instructors.

While students work on their Division III portfolios and exhibitions, the class will come together around all questions big and small, surrounding students' capstone projects. Classes will include focus on installation, writing, publicity, curating, post-Division III realities, and exhibition strategies. Students will be expected to work approximately 10 hours a week outside of class time in addition to regular Division III workload. We will also take one field trip to NYC on a Friday later in the semester.

Contemporary art, theory, and culture invite reflection on the status of aesthetic desire. Broadening and renewing aesthetics, theorists situate aesthetic desire and distaste in practices of commodification and their rhythms of novelty and obsolescence. Exploring the politics of art and culture, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists highlight pleasures, ambivalences, and oppressive facets of aesthetic phenomena.

This is a composition course that will also survey the history, theory, and practice of electro-acoustic music. The course will introduce the musical, technical, and theoretical issues of electro-acoustic music, broadly construed to include the Classical avant-garde, Electronica, DJ culture, Re-mixes, Ambient, etc. Digital recording, editing, and mixing will be covered using the Audacity and ProTools programs. Students will also work with sampling techniques using Ableton Live and mixing skills with ProTools. Other topics to be covered include basic acoustics and synthesis techniques.

Investigating works of literature, art, architecture, sound, performance and film, alongside selected texts in philosophy and critical theory, this class will probe the enduring question: "What is Art?" We will debate concepts such as authenticity, appropriation, imitation, forgery, and dissidence. Is art the product of the gifted intellect, instinct and talent, or of practice and tradition? Or, does the creative process require radical thinking and an avant-garde? Is art intentional, or can it be found in the everyday or even the natural world?

The global media landscape has undergone significant changes in just over a decade. In this course we will examine how US and international media sources are covering the Middle East. Some questions we will explore are: How did US entertainment and news media respond to the attacks of 9/11? How do US media represent the daily lives and political struggles of Arabs and Muslims? What has been the political and social impact of Middle East-based channels with a global reach like Al Jazeera?

This course examines classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s-1950s, focusing on the parallel genres of melodrama and film noir. These genres shared a production context (the Hollywood studio system at its height), an emphasis on gender (for melodrama in the form of the "weepie" or woman's film, and for film noir in its depiction of hard-boiled masculinity and the femme fatale), and an engagement with the pressing social and political issues of the era.

Recycled Images: "Through the disorderly fund which his knowledge places at his disposal, the allegorist rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece, and tests to see if it fits together-that meaning with this image or this image with that meaning.

Beginning with Christopher Small's book of the same name, "Musicking," this course will consider music as a an action that relates us to the world.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Tania Bruguera (1968- ). We will contextualize the work and the working approach of aforementioned artists and their contemporary's. The goal of this course is to explore more advanced problems in studio arts, with emphasis on the 'everyday life' and its entire complexity. Thematic assignments are designed to have students create and review works on an advanced level. Students will have to work in response to texts, films and work of other artists.