Examines the transformative impact of various kinds of media on culture, politics, communication, and education.

What happens when a play leaves the page and enters the body?

This course treats drama not only as literature to be read, but as an event to be performed, embodied, and experienced. Combining close reading with theatrical practice, students will move between seminar and studio, learning how meaning in drama emerges through voice, gesture, space, and collaboration. Through scene work, students will learn techniques of character development, objective-setting, and interpretation. At the same time, we will examine how plays engage urgent questions of identity, ethics, and social life, including illness and care, memory and trauma, and the structures that shape human experience.

No prior acting experience is required: only a willingness to experiment, collaborate, and take creative risks.

The decade regarded as “New Hollywood” (roughly 1967-1976) features a new generation of young American filmmakers who created bold and transformative films that arguably saved American cinema. New Hollywood Now leverages the era’s scrappy spirit into an energetic classroom experience through an unprecedented collaboration with longtime Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, whose years of experience facilitating public film dialogue will enrich our classroom space with cinephilic zeal and invaluable stories. Blending Mankiewicz’s firsthand accounts of these artists and films with our rigorous screening and reading schedule, this course explores New Hollywood’s contemporary resonance through traditional study and lived practice. Supported through generous grants from the School of Literature, Media and Communication and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, New Hollywood Now foregrounds the vitality of revisiting the archives, telling stories about the past, and appreciating how these stories—cinematic and personal—transform American and cinematic futures. Incorporating oral histories, film reviews, student reflections, group projects, and scholarship, this course shows why movies—and why these movies especially—matter. Through studying New Hollywood Now, what can we learn about how we or how film remembers? How can cinema contain and create the myths that bond communities, shape relationships, and define us? 

This course offers an introduction to the historical development and cultural impact of various forms of media print, radio, television, film, and interactive electronic applications.

Origins and development of contemporary popular music, including rock, trap, hip-hop, and other emerging and established forms.

This course introduces students to workplace document genres to develop visual and verbal skills in critical analysis and document development.

This course introduces students to workplace document genres to develop visual and verbal skills in critical analysis and document development.

This course introduces students to workplace document genres to develop visual and verbal skills in critical analysis and document development.

This course introduces students to workplace document genres to develop visual and verbal skills in critical analysis and document development.