What techniques do people in your field use when trying to be creative? What techniques are used in science? In the various arts? How do you know any of these techniques are effective? Students will try out creativity techniques for individuals and groups that have come from inventors and artists as well as the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and engineering. As students engage with these techniques, they will begin to formulate a sense of the psychological and neural dynamics involved in being stuck and creativity getting unstuck.

This course will cover intermediate topics that pertain to the production of visual imagery with the tools of three-dimensional computer graphics (CG). Lectures, readings, and homework assignments will explore subjects including organic shape modeling, character articulation, character animation, extensions to the basic shading and lighting models, and procedural animation. Students will be expected to complete individual projects and participate in group exercises that explore CG as both a standalone medium and as an integral part of modern film/video production.

It is here that dancers deepen, diversify and challenge their performance abilities in dance. Intermediate and advanced level dancers will work intensively with a guest artist in the creation and performance of a dance to be presented in the Hampshire Winter Dance Concert in February 2014, or the FCDD Faculty Concert in March 2014. In class students will study the artist's unique style, collaborate in creating and composing the movement, and hone their interpretation and performance skills.

The notion of "ethnic identity" has been central to minority writing and filmmaking in the US, where a number of artistes from marginalized groups have recurrently attempted to represent "authentic" and "real" (im)migrant experiences and cultures. In contrast, other minority writers and filmmakers have emphasized the fictive and constructed nature of identities as well as the exclusions produced by quests for ethnic authenticity.

An exploration of the "African-New World Diaspora" through critical and creative texts-written and visual "narratives"-some fictional, some factual, some theoretical. Inquiries include: What is this thing called the "African Diaspora?" What does it name? What are its meanings? What can these meanings make us see, hear, remember, imagine, theorize , translate, try to transform? What does the "African diaspora" offer as intellectual category, as encounter, endeavor, future promise? How are "diasporicities" produced, practiced and experienced?

A study of fiction and critical writings by and about black women. We will engage problems of racialized gender, identity, class, race, power, politics, sexuality, narrative voice, and constructions or articulations thereof. Inquiries include: What value has been placed on black women's writing-and more broadly, their lives, labors, loves, and loss. How have black women been historically defined? How have they sought to define themselves in and through their writing?

This year-long course will dwell on "world cinema" as a concept that is generative while studying film history but also one that needs to be interrogated. We will examine how and why cinema has been "global" from the very beginning, becoming a popular form of entertainment simultaneously in several countries, making worlds visible, and staging intercultural encounters.

Students often approach the field of psychology with a desire to both understand themselves and to help alleviate the suffering of others. Many are also motivated by a desire to work towards social justice. Yet psychology and the mental health disciplines, along with their myriad forms of inquiry and intervention, are inextricably entangled with current social and political arrangements.

Few human beings have had as much impact upon the world as Siddhartha Gotama Shakyamuni, known to us as the Buddha. Who was this man, what sort of world did he inhabit and shape, and what body of work did he leave behind after a lifetime of teaching? These are some of the questions addressed in this course. Beginning with challenges of interpretation and literary sources, we attempt to glimpse the man behind the many layers of legend and myth and to understand his motivations and agenda.

This introduction to feminist theory will focus on the last half-century of feminist thought, with some exploration of earlier foundational texts. We will consider issues of essential, constructed, intersectional, and performed understandings of subjectivity and trace feminist theory's interactions with race, class, materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructuralism, post-colonialism, and queer theory, as well as delving into recent work in feminist epistemology, technoscience, and affect theory.