Rather than just showing you how to "take good photos," this course will challenge you to investigate, through practice, how photographic images "make" meaning. Project-based assignments allow for developing personal content while advancing technical skills. Lab sessions will introduce current digital workflow practices including image capture, color management, digital darkroom software techniques, asset management and archival inkjet printing.

Spoken by the largest number of Jews for the longest period of time in the most countries all over the world of all Jewish languages, Yiddish is the key to understanding Eastern European Jewish life. This course will provide an introduction to Yiddish language and culture. Students will develop basic speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills in Yiddish, using textbook materials, original texts, audio-visual sources, and group work emphasizing student participation. The course will also introduce students to the history of the Yiddish language and the breadth of Yiddish culture.

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 instructor.

This course provides initial preparation for work in drawing, sculpture and other media in the visual arts. Students will develop their ability to perceive and construct visual images and forms across a range of subject matter. Projects will address both the two-dimensional picture plane and three-dimensional space from an array of observed and imagined sources. Multiple media will be used to explore the body, found and imagined objects, collage, and structures in nature and the built environment. The practice of drawing will be defined broadly to invite a diverse response.

This course will explore the possibilities and purposes for writing about live performance. Students will read different styles of criticism and arguments about the critic's role in contemporary theatre. At the heart of the course is attendance at six live theatre performances. Upon seeing the performances, students will be expected to write reviews and often have opportunities to speak to and interview the artists involved.

In this course fundamental sculptural ideas will be introduced in relation to the development of fabrication skills in a range of media including clay, wood, plaster, steel, and concrete. Student generated imagery in sculpture will foster discussions around representation, abstraction, the body, technology, public art, and installation art. Readings, image lectures, visiting artists and group critiques will further establish a creative and critical environment for the development of independent work in three dimensions.

This course introduces the third mostly widely used language in the United States and Canada. It is intended to give an overview of both the language and the culture of the deaf community. Emphasis will be focused on learning basic grammatical structure as well as developing receptive and expressive signing skills using in everyday conversation, also being able to give a skit in American Sign Language. Cultural aspects of the Deaf community will be shared through readings, videotapes/DVDs and class discussion.

What is presence on stage? And how does an actor manifest it? This course examines the work of the actor through a hands-on, experiential approach, focusing on the body, voice, and imagination. Inspired by the work of Constantin Stanislavski and his students, we begin with exercises in physical and emotional presence. We then move to the study of action, and how one directs energy outward on stage, using both improvisation and acting exercises as learning tools.

The age-old search for the Divine, the Sacred, the Great Spirit, the Source, the Goddess, the Ancestors, among other names, has been the subject of countless literary texts, whether it is the Buddhist-inspired poetry of the Beats, the gothic Catholicism of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, the visions of Black Elk, the confessions of Augustine. In this analytical and creative writing course we'll examine varieties of spiritual experience as they are represented in both past and present literature, including poetry, fiction, memoir, and biography.

This course is for 3rd-semester tudents whose Division II's include fiction-writing. Taking up the concepts of 'mystery,' and 'imagination,' this course will ask students to take inspiration from their Division II as well as their inner worlds. We will ask: how can imaginations be invigorated by openness to new topics? What does it mean to 'imagine' a fictional world? What role does 'mystery' play in both reading and writing fiction? How can writing communicate a writer's inner world as well as reshape and sharpen the mind's eye?