One test of our ecological knowledge is whether we can successfully apply it to create or restore ecosystems that have been damaged or destroyed. As we take on the role of restoration ecologists this semester, we will use principles and methods of ecology, conservation biology, hydrology, soil science, and related disciplines to learn about the theory, practice, and politics of ecosystem restoration. This course emphasizes fieldwork, interdisciplinary teamwork, and ecological planning to evaluate and design restoration projects in our surrounding communities and regional landscapes.

This course applies concepts from political ecology to study how governance, broadly defined, works in relation to the environment. Using case studies of international environmental issues, we will explore how people make decisions about the environment in a policy realm. We will discuss the role of various agents, such as governments, scientific bodies, and nongovernmental organizations, in the decision-making process. We will reflect on who has access to decisions; how scientific data is used; how environmental ideas become powerful; and how policies are legitimated.

This course will focus on portrayals of women in nineteenth through mid-twentieth century America, particularly in the context of nature and landscape. We will explore how women, often objectified in visual images of the period, appropriated established devices or developed new images and structures to represent womanhood in their own terms. Texts will include selected poetry, sketches, autobiographical essays or memoirs, short stories, novels, paintings, films, and photography.

This course teaches the basic concepts, vocabulary, and critical skills involved in interpreting film. Through readings and lectures, students will become more informed and sophisticated observers of the cinema, key examples of which will be screened weekly. While the focus will be on the form and style of narrative film, documentary and avant-garde practices will be introduced. The class will also touch upon some of the major theoretical approaches in the field.

This course will survey the rise of the motion picture as both subject and mode in art since 1960. The development of video art, from monitor and installation to projection and flat screen, opened up new channels for performance and sculpture. But the rising presence of 16mm film in galleries (Tacita Dean) as celluloid disappears from movie theaters amplifies a trend that also includes artists as feature filmmakers (Julian Schnabel and Cindy Sherman), Christian Marclay's use of cinema's past in The Clock (2010), and Matthew Barney's reliance on the Guggenheim as set and cinematheque.

This course is an investigation of the intersections between film and religion. In it, we will examine how the cultural phenomenon of religion is represented in film and how religion, understood critically and theoretically, can be a useful means to interpret film.

A study of such representative films from Germany's 'Golden Age' as Wiene's Expressionist film noir, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Lang's sci-fi classic, Metropolis, and psycho-thriller, M., Murnau's Dracula film, Nosferatu, and Pabst's prostitution study, Joyless Street. Emphasis on investigating historical and sociological background; influence of Expressionist theater; advent of sound; the 'New Woman'; genesis of horror, action, and utopian film; influence on New German Cinema and contemporary popular culture.

In this class, we will take skills and insights gained in introductory production courses and develop them over the length of the semester through the creation of one short documentary project, 10 minutes long. We will explore the ethical questions and ambivalence inherent in this medium, seeking complex answers to difficult questions about representation and the often blurry lines between fiction and non-fiction. We will watch documentaries each week, films that introduce us to new ideas and information both in their content and in their form.

(In English)This seminar offers an interrogation of the ways in which Latinas and Latinos are represented in the cinema. We will explore early portrayals of Latinas and Latinos in film history and then move onto contemporary cinema with a focus on race, class, gender and sexuality in these representations. Employing multiple aesthetic and disciplinary approaches we will analyze commercial films alongside independent films with particular attention to the market-driven and political mandates of these projects.

With the rest of the world, in 1995 filmmakers from the whole African continent met in Ouagadougou, to celebrate the Century of world cinema. This also gave African filmmakers an opportunity to reflect on their 30 years of film practice. Today, only a year after most former French colonies in Africa have celebrated the 50th anniversary of their independence, African cinema is also entering its fifties. This course will introduce students to a half a century of African cinema with a special attention to its history and its search for survival and self identity within world cinema.