How many times has Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) been referenced in film and/or advertising and what makes it recognizable? How do artists such as Barbara Kruger use the strategies of advertising to create high art? How else have high and low culture merged and reverberated? Why have van Gogh, Klimt, and Mondrian become source material for fashion designers, tattoo artists, and even liquor makers? Why do art historians and archeologists figure so frequently in popular novels and other non-academic media?

The rigors of academia mandate that we write in one form or another for most of the first 21 years of our lives. After that we write to get jobs and to keep them, we write to engage in the commerce of our culture, and we write to communicate with others and with ourselves. This last genre is perhaps the least practiced but among the most important since writing is a process that helps us make meaning. Writing is both a verb and a noun; it represents our best thinking and helps us arrive at it.

What difference does it make to read Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of Anna Karenina or Constance Garnett's? The King James Bible or the New English version? The fact that multiple translations exist implies that translation, like any form of writing, involves a series of choices. The goal of this course is to examine the possibilities translators face, the factors that motivate and influence their decisions, and the resulting effects of those decisions, so that you as translators can develop your language, literary and cultural skills.

This is a performance-oriented course, culminating in a concert at the end of the semester. Each student will be challenged to develop his or her skills as an ensemble musician and as a soloist. Our goal is to create a dynamic performance ensemble. Full attendance is crucial to this work. We will look at this seminal body of music from diverse angles, both in historical context and in contemporary re-imaginings. We will work to meet its technical challenges and to internalize its essence, so crucial to the African-American musical tradition.

Contemporary Caribbean-U.S. Latino/a fictions portray authors and protagonists caught in a bind. They face the pressures of assimilation into mainstream American culture. On the other, they are all bound to a language other than American English and to memories of the lands of origin. Due to the proximity of these birthplaces (Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico) to New York, Miami, Chicago, protagonists and authors often idealize la familia as the source of identity and salvation. How are these predicaments resolved? What mechanisms of desire and denial are projected?

Moving nimbly between dance history and film theory, big mainstream movies and small experimental films, this course is an exploration of the choreographic in cinema. We will trace the history of the dance film form from its earliest manifestation in the silent film era, through the historic avant garde, musicals and music videos to contemporary short dance films, showing how the combination of dance and film produces cine-choreographic practices that are specific to the dance film form.

Mind in the Material World will draw on texts from Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. We will examine the fundamental distinction between mind and matter as it is initially proposed by Descartes and later challenged by Leibniz; the argument against the existence of matter as it appears in Berkeley; skepticism about the very nature of substance, whether material or spiritual, as it occurs in Locke and Hume; and, finally, the conceptions of mind, particularly as this concerns rationality and selfhood, which are developed by each of these thinkers.

Constructed as almost a mythic fiction by its own major novelists and historians and stereotyped in the popular media, the US "South" is also a set of multiple stories told by former slaves and slave holders, by women and men working in factories and mines, fields and homes. Through analysis of fiction, autobiography and some films, together with reference to debates in the current historical scholarship, this course introduces you to South(s) of starkly contrasting geographies and economies.

This course is an examination of the emergence, development, and dissolution of European modernist art, architecture and design. The course begins with the innovations and collisions of early twentieth century art, in response to the growth of modern urbanism, industrialist production, colonialist politics, and psychological experimentation, and ends with the cooptation of modernist radicalism in the wake of World War II.

How do narratives function? What are the basic elements that combine to create a "good story"? This course will address these and other questions in an effort to provide students interested in reading and writing short fiction, film and theatrical scripts with the fundamental skills necessary for analyzing and creating successful narratives.