Cities are dynamic landscapes informed by myriad economic, political, social, environmental, and cultural processes. This course delves into the forces of urbanization and examines how cities have been investigated, built, experienced, and lived in throughout history and around the globe. By accenting a geographic perspective and drawing upon an array of theoretical ideas and empirical examples, this class grapples with the fascinating complexities of the urban context.

This course surveys the major geographic regions of the world in terms of environmental features and resource distributions, economic mainstays, population characteristics, cultural processes, social relationships, and patterns of urbanization and industrial growth. In addition to these topical foci, we use various sub-fields of geography to animate different regions. This approach provides a sense of depth while we also pursue a breadth of knowledge about the world.

We will read plays by Shakespeare, watch films based on those plays, and study the plays, the films, and the plays-as-films. 'Shakespeare' comes first, of course, both historically and as the source/inspiration for the films. Yet each film has its own existence, to be understood not just as an 'adaptation,' but also as the product of linked artistic, technical, and economic choices.

Component course for Film Studies. In this course we go behind the scenes and behind the screens of anthropological films, museum exhibitions, 'small media' events such as television, and publications such as National Geographic Magazine, to explore the social contexts of image production, distribution, and interpretation. Focusing on visual activism and ethics, we consider how popular portrayals of our own society and of others' both shape and are shaped by hierarchies of value in the material world.

This course examines contemporary Asian American film and visual culture through the lens of cultural recovery, self-invention, and experimentation. Focusing primarily on film and photography, we will explore issues of race and visuality, Hollywood orientalism, memory and postmemory, and racial impersonation and parody. Students will engage with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches. Artists may include Nikki S. Lee, Margaret Cho, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jin-me Yoon, Justin Lin, Binh Dahn, Richard Fung, Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, and Alice Wu.

This course will examine the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the afterlife of Hitchcock in contemporary U.S. culture. We will interpret Hitchcock films in a variety of theoretical frames, including feminist and queer theories, and in historical contexts including the Cold War. We will also devote substantial attention to the legacy of Hitchcock in remakes, imitations, and parodies.

We will learn by making work as well as by researching, reading, and watching films related to our projects. We will begin with brainstorming, research, script or documentary proposal writing, and pre-production. Each student will develop a script or in-depth proposal to begin. As we move into production, we will review and deepen our knowledge of camera, lighting, sound, and editing principles and techniques.

This introductory course offers a survey of major directions in film theory, written by those writers and artists interested in ascertaining the medium's basic nature, its proper form, and its function as an art form and cultural force.

This course offers an historical survey of the cinema as a developing art form and a means of communication. We will examine the history of this international medium from its 19th-century beginnings through the mid-20th century. The national and thematic focus of the course shifts through the semester. For example, we will focus on U.S. film in studying the earliest developments in film technology and narrative, and on Soviet and French films to study the formal and social experimentation of the 1920s.

A study of ten to twelve plays and their film adaptations. Plays are drawn from a range of periods and genres, and films are chosen to show the scope of adaptive approaches from filmed play to radical re-imagining. The course will include readings on the theory and history of theatre-to-film adaptations. Playwrights will likely include Christopher Marlowe, John Gay, Oscar Wilde, Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and David Henry Hwang.