Why has the graphic novel (or, more accurately, the graphic narrative) become such a prominent international medium for witnessing narratives, war memoirs, journalism, and travelogues? Is there something about the medium of comics that befits such subject matter, and such international reach? This course will address these questions by looking closely at graphic narratives from several sites around the world, including the work of Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, Keiji Nakazawa, Kyle Baker, and others.

Comparative Literature is an exacting discipline that studies literature across boundaries of culture, geography, and language. This course will focus on textual analysis and critical reflection on the important acts of reading and writing, in relation to other disciplines and cultural media like history, politics, film, journalism, and art. Theoretical approaches to interpretation will be stressed. Texts will be in English, although when possible, students will be encouraged to read works and view films in the original.

In his 1794 letters, Friedrich Schiller describes a culture-building process that issues in an ethical and political form of play and freedom. His last letter engulfs this so-called aesthetic state in paradoxes. How does philosophy from German idealism through the twenty-first century address these tensions, such as those between liberation and constraint, sociality and autonomy, universality and particularity? Do current constellations of aestheticized politics realize "aesthetic states" by other means?

This pro-seminar will give students the opportunity to develop an in-depth, independent research paper on a woman artist, architect, or designer working in the 20th or 21st century-from any place or region of the world. The course will begin by collectively considering the work of modernist, post-war, and contemporary women artists who are known for their experimentation and for working in multiple modalities-including painting, sculpture, performance, installation, books arts, video, film, photography, architecture and design.

Is music raced? How do musical sound, image, performance, and even performer become racialized? How does music speak to, reflect, reproduce, reinforce, and/or contest race and racism? How do individuals use music to express their ethnic/racial identity? Such questions hint at the undeniable yet ineffable influence of race on the American musical imagination. This seminar will consider the fraught intersection of race, power, and desire in contemporary popular music (hip hop, electronic dance music, rock, pop, punk, R&B/soul, world music, etc.).

Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) is a dynamic system for describing, classifying and understanding human movement. Developed by Rudolf Laban, an important scholar and visionary in the field of movement studies, LMA addresses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of movement.

This course will focus on installation and performance in conversation with diverse media: video, digital, audio, photo, film, and the plastic arts. The thematic focus of the seminar will critically engage issues of technology, vision, and site. Also of importance is the nature of video as electronic technology and the relationship of immediacy that it has with both performance and installation. This is a rigorous theory/practice workshop class designed specifically for upper division students.

The century in which Greek drama was developed-twenty-five centuries ago-was for Athens a century of war so like our own that General George C. Marshall, as Secretary of State, once said "I doubt seriously whether a man (sic) can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens." The same may be said of a less international issue: not how and where best to wage war, but how and where best to recover from it.

This course will examine the art, architecture, and design of Europe and U.S. in the aftermath of the physical destruction and psychic devastation of World War II and the Holocaust. For many artists, architects and designers in the 1940s and 50s, it was essential that they address the sense of helpless tragedy that confronted and confounded them. After the war, this nihilistic vision infected and transformed the once-utopian visions of modernity.

The "journey" is arguably the most compelling narrative frame. The history of narrative prose and poetry could be written around the varieties of journeys: quests, military expeditions, crusades, pilgrimages, grand tours, sentimental journeys, explorations, trail blazing and ordinary walks. One person's heroic adventure, of course, is another's involuntary migration, kidnapping, or enslavement. In literature, film and in critical theory, these terms are ambiguous and must be analyzed within carefully drawn cultural and material parameters.