All Courses

  • 2021SP - RESRCH IN DISCIPLNS 01:355:201:T4

    During the semester this course will examine fashion as a form of communication, as a way to use clothes to communicate points of views and ideas in a larger social context. This means that we will look not only at the use of fashion and clothing today, but its historical development and its importance in establishing social hierarchy, gender roles, class and political expression past as well as present. The final goal of the course is a research paper, in which  students develop a topic using both primary and secondary sources to analyze and critically assess their given subject, ending the semester as a blossoming expert in their chosen subject matter.The new twist this semester is that all this is  remote, via Zoom meetings twice a week.  This is a learning curve for us all, so there will be lots of trial and tribulation as we figure out how to run a research seminar with participants from around the world.  I hope you are ready for the exploration. I look forward to seeing you Tuesday JANUARY 19TH. 

  • 2021SP - LANG OF ADVERTISING 01:615:215:90

    Persuasive messages compete for our attention, our buying power, and even our votes, often by conveying meanings that are not part of the literal message. This course examines advertising strategies from a linguistic perspective, focusing on how sounds, sentence structures, and meanings are used in persuasive messages.

  • 2021SP - STUDIES IN CHAPS 16:082:594:01

    This cultural heritage seminar course explores the history and material culture of the memorialization of individuals, social groups, and historic events through time, cultures, and landscapes. Our course material will include local, national, and global case studies and examples drawn from the fields of cultural heritage, cultural resource management, historic preservation, archaeology, anthropology, history, art history, death studies, landscape architecture, and the contemporary world. Why and how do we choose to remember/memorialize some individuals and events over others? What does the form and design of cemeteries, monuments, and monuments reveal about communities, culture, politics, and cultural/historical memory? Which memorial sites and spaces stay secular – and which become sacred ground? How are material objects and art spaces used in acts of grief, memory, and commemoration? How and when do acts of memorialization become vehicles for mediating and reinterpreting the past? How and why do some sites associated with the dead and historic events become contested ground while others are forgotten? What is the role and purpose of “dark tourism” and studies of “negative heritage” as part of remembering and forgetting in the contemporary world?

  • 2021SP - INTRO TO PAINTING 21:080:251:01

    This course is designed to introduce you to the fundamentals of studio painting while preparing your development towards a professional contemporary creative practice. Painting is both material and conceptual, a language embracing a diverse range of forms, from flat chromatic monochromes, to hard-edged geometric abstraction, and the skillful construction of pictorial depth that takes the viewer beyond the painting’s physical surface. Working in your home ‘studio’ you will complete a range of experimental and technical exercises. Through practice and research, you will learn painting tools, materials, supports, and develop a deeper understanding and ability to manipulate tone and colour to wide-ranging effect. The focussed, practical experiences in this course will be both rigorous and experimental to provide you with an understanding of painting’s specific processes and creative possibilities, enabling you to create both representational and abstract paintings. In a stimulating and supportive learning environment you will share your work with class peers and develop skills for giving and receiving feedback. The class will learn about the practices of contemporary painters, and will be encouraged to virtually visit galleries and collections worldwide to give insight into the versatility of the medium and inform your individual creative development.

  • 2021SP - READING LATINX LIT: Undocumented Subjects 21:352:232:01

    Latinx literature, or literature by writers of Latin American origin from the colonial period to the present, gives to modern thought the concept-metaphor of the "border," to refer to contact zones that define and situate humans in identifiable and interactive locations. Latinx writers imaginatively represent the experience of these borders, which signify more than geopolitical perimeters of nation states to address borders of race, gender, sexuality, language, class, and first and third worlds. This section of the Gen Ed course, Reading Latinx Literature, focuses on literature by and about undocumented arrivants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In these texts it is possible to see how U.S. citizens depend upon undocumented subjects materially--as these immigrants harvest and process fruits and vegetables, cook and deliver food, wash dishes, care for children and elderly, clean offices and homes, and write--but also theoretically, as the defining limit of "citizen-ness." We will consider representations of the relations of citizens to non-citizens, a group that today constitutes eleven million or so "undocumented" residents of the United States, the vast majority of whom are migrants from Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America. We aim not to verify who these people are, what they want, nor what they do, for all access to truth and the real are mediated by language. Rather, we aim to learn to read structures of power, discursive formations and figurative language that represent these relations. Through these texts we glimpse an uncommon, yet indispensable angle: that of the undocumented subject reflecting critically on their own process of subjection. In this course we will engage in reading and writing on questions such as: How have Latinx authors and filmmakers represented undocumented migrant subjects and their attempts to stop deportations and detentions? What alternatives to the "detention industrial complex" do Latinx writers imagine? How do these texts position themselves with respect to white "American" traditions, African-American and Asian-American? How do undocumented and formerly undocumented Latinx writers narrate these scenes of their subjection, i.e. becoming subject to U.S. citizenship regimes and, at the same time, gaining a voice through them? What literary strategies do undocumented and formerly undocumented Latinx writers draw upon to represent the subjective experience of policies of exclusion? If, as Harvard-based social scientist Samuel Huntington claims, nonassimilating Latinx migrants threaten to alter the very "foundation" of U.S. values, how do Latinx writers re-define the foundations of American culture and values? What is the after-life of state terror (both foreign and domestic), for those marked by or still caught in the U.S. immigration apparatus? What is the relationship between racialized policing, the prison-industrial complex, and migrant detention? How do Latinx migrant subjects respond to, remember and narrate memories of state violence? How does the literature of undocumented migration reframe national self-representation? How do representations of undocumented migration prompt us to rethink naturalized categories of U.S. citizenship, especially if we consider how citizenship is constituted through the exclusion of the non-citizen? How does citizenship status intersect with categories of race, class, gender/sexuality in these texts, and specifically, how do these writers relate to racialized categories of Blackness and Asian-ness? What genres and forms do the undocumented subject find available and/or best suited for self-representation? What geographies do undocumented subjects inhabit? Latinx literature takes pains to represent the subjective states and intergenerational trauma that this immigration subjection regime provokes, but of course, many different writers in the United States address and experience the violence of the immigration regime. So why Latinx literary representations? How do Latinx literary representations like Anzaldúa or Villavicencio's differ from non-Latinx representations, like American Dirt or the essay by Harvard-based schoolar, Samuel Huntington? Necessarily interdisciplinary in scope, our readings and assignments will address history, memoir, novels, poetry, a play and a film.

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