In Greek, the term "Ekphrasis" means "to describe, to point out, to explain" and is associated with the desire to turn that which is visual into words. How do text and image reflect and depend on each other? For centuries, these two modes of representation have enjoyed fruitful yet difficult paths of communication and mutual questioning/interrogation. This course will touch on various issues that emerge from the rhetorical collaboration between text and image. Beginning with G.E.

From Kurukshestra to the Swat Valley and from Troy to Baghdad, the experience of war shaped and shattered lives as much in the ancient world as it does in our own and in much the same ways. This course will examine and compare the accounts of war and its wounds-visible and invisible-as well as the forms of healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness that are to be found in epic and dramatic literature, as well as philosophical and religious writings, ancient and modern.

This seminar will examine the history of US immigration from the founding of the American nation to the great waves of European, Asian, and Mexican immigration during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the more recent flows from Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. In addition to investigating how these groups were defined and treated in relation to each other by the media, we will consider the following questions: Who is an "American?" Has the definition shifted over time? How do contemporary political debates about immigration compare with those from previous eras?

Music informatics has become an indispensible part of musical studies and now extends to other disciplines in the humanities and sciences. The symbolic representation of music, its retrieval, and its dissemination have radically transformed the musical landscape. The ways in which we gather, listen to, study, and compose music rely heavily on digital and symbolic representations of sound/music.

This is a composition course that will also survey the history, theory, and practice of electro-acoustic music. The course will introduce the musical, technical, and theoretical issues of electro-acoustic music, broadly construed to include the Classical avant-garde, Electronica, DJ culture, Re-mixes, Ambient, etc. Digital recording, editing, and mixing will be covered using the Audacity and ProTools programs. Students will also work with MIDI-controlled digital synthesizers and sampling using Ableton Live and ProTools.

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 2013. In class students will study the artist's unique style, collaborate in creating and composing the movement, and hone their interpretation and performance skills.

This course will examine youth culture and performance. We will explore these topics through an integrated approach, focusing on the dynamics between educational, socio-cultural, and developmental perspectives. This course will emphasize field methodology, requiring students to conduct an independent, ethnographic project that researches some aspect of youth and performance. Readings will explore the intersections of scholarship across identity, popular culture, music, youth studies, educational studies, and ethnography.

Contemporary art, theory, and culture invite reflection on the status of aesthetic desire. Returning to the aesthetic and departing from autonomy theory, writers on material culture situate aesthetic desire and abjection in practices of commodity consumption and production and their dynamics of novelty and obsolescence. Accounts of the politics of art and culture by feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists point not only to the pleasures, ambivalences, and oppressive dimensions of aesthetic dispositions, but also to the uncanny conversions they wreak.

A critique and discussion-based seminar for Division III Visual Art concentrators this class will focus on the process and progress of art making. Students will be encouraged to think about their work in the larger context of their disciplines, society, place and history. Students will articulate their ars poetica orally through presentations and in writing artists statements, bios, art resumes and work documentation.

This class is intended to be about, to further, your own work, what it is, what you plan with and through it, what you want it to be, both as it relates to your beginning Division Three projects, as well as to your general orientations as image-makers and-thinkers. It will be primarily up to you, therefore, to generate your visual production for the class - the work for it, that is to say, should extend from your own motivations and inspirations.