The purpose of this course is to introduce the history, art, and techniques of designing sets for theater and film. Students will learn how sets have been created in the past, how a designer approaches a script, how a designer's work supports the director's vision, how it illuminates a production for the audience, and what methods and techniques are used in the execution of the process. Students will have the opportunity to exercise their visual imaginations, through the creation of designs for a script.

This course introduces students to the history, art, and techniques of designing costumes for stage and narrative film. Students will learn how a designer approaches a script, how the designer's work supports the actors' and the director's vision and how it illuminates a production for the audience. Students will have the opportunity to develop their visual imaginations through the creation of designs for stage and film scripts. They will engage in play analysis, research, collaborative discussion, sketching, drawing, rendering, and other related techniques and methodologies.

The purpose of this course is to help the actor discover a full awareness of their body so it can be used as an effective tool in creating and performing stage combat. Through a series of classroom exercises and performances this course will focus on giving students a strong foundation in stage combat techniques, including basic martial training, unarmed combat, quarterstaff, and sword and dagger/shield work. Students must be comfortable analyzing scenes of violence from contemporary film and stage and be prepared to work in a highly physical setting.

This course traces the history of television in the United States from its invention to the present, including how U.S.-based television has circulated globally. In addition to looking at how the medium was developed and regulated as a technology, we will analyze the aesthetic and thematic content of television across the medium's history and within particular genres (sitcom, drama, reality, etc.), exploring how television has represented aspects of U.S. society including race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class.

A study of some of Shakespeare's plays emphasizing the poetic and dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and close, careful reading of the language. Eight or nine plays.

This course offers an overview of the history of sound cinema in Latin America, from its Golden Age to the contemporary period. We address key cinematic movements and aesthetic traditions, including Golden Age Mexican Cinema, Cinema Novo, Third Cinema, and New Latin American Cinema. The course also explores significant political, cultural, and economic changes that have altered the Latin American cinematic landscape in recent decades.

A survey of world performance history, including: the evolution of human language and consciousness; the rise of oral, ritual, and shamanic performance; religious and civic festivals; and imperial theater practices that position the stage at the dangerous intersection of religious worship, public taste, royal patronage, and government censure. Understanding performance as both artistic practice and social institution, this course emphasizes the role performance has played in changing audiences and as a cultural and political force in various societies.

Yue Opera, an all-female art that flourished in Shanghai in 1923, resulted from China's social changes and the women's movement. Combining traditional with modern forms and Chinese with Western cultures, Yue Opera today attracts loyal and enthusiastic audiences despite pop arts crazes. We will focus on how audiences, particularly women, are fascinated by gender renegotiations as well as by the all-female cast. The class will read and watch classics of this theater, including Romance of the Western Bower, Peony Pavilion, and Butterfly Lovers.

This course offers a broad introduction to the history, politics and aesthetics of Latin American cinema through some of its most influential films. We address the revolutionary styles of agit-prop, Neo-Realism and Third Cinema, as well as Hollywood-style melodrama. The course also familiarizes students with the basic terminology, concepts and approaches of film studies.

An examination of the gothic -- a world of fear, haunting, claustrophobia, paranoia, and monstrosity -- in U.S. literature and visual culture. Topics include race, slavery, and the gothic; gender, sexuality, and the gothic; regional gothic; the uncanny; cinematic and pictorial gothic; pandemic gothic. Authors, artists, and filmmakers may include Dunbar, Elmer, Faulkner, Gilman, Hitchcock, Jackson, Kubrick, LaValle, Lovecraft, McCullers, Morrison, O'Connor, Parks, Peele, Poe, Polanski, Romero, and Wood.