Catalogue 2018-2019 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Media Studies Program
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Director: Giovanna Borradori;
Steering Committee: Peter Antelyes (English), Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy), Lisa Brawleya (Urban Studies), Heesok Chang (English), Colleen Ballerino Cohenb (Anthropology), Robert DeMaria (English), Wenwei Dub (Chinese and Japanese), Thomas Ellman (Computer Science), Dara N. Greenwood (Psychology), Thomas E. Hill (Library), William Hoynes (Sociology), M. Mark (English), Molly Nesbit (Art), Justin Patch (Music), Ronald Patkus (Library), Thomas Porcello (Anthropology), Matthew B. Schultz (Learning, Teaching, and Research Center), Cindy Schwarza (Physics and Astronomy), Shane Slattery-Quintanillaa (Film), Eva Woods Peiró (Hispanic Studies);
Participating Faculty: Peter Antelyes (English), Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy), Lisa Brawleya (Urban Studies), Paulina Bren (International Studies), Heesok Chang (English), Colleen Ballerino Cohenb (Anthropology), Lisa Gail Collins (Art), Robert DeMaria (English), Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase (Chinese and Japanese), Wenwei Dub (Chinese and Japanese), Eve Dunbar (English), Thomas Ellman (Computer Science), Dara N. Greenwood (Psychology), Thomas Hill (Library), William Hoynes (Sociology), Hua Hsu (English), Michael Joyce (English), Sarah R. Kozloff (Film), Amitava Kumar (English), Judith Linn (Art), Brian R. Mannb (Music), M. Mark (English), Mia Mask (Film), Molly Nesbit (Art), Leonard Nevarezab (Sociology), Justin Patch (Music), Ronald Patkus (Library), Hiram Perez (English), Thomas Porcello (Anthropology), Peipei Qiu (Chinese and Japanese), Harry Rosemanb (Art), Jeffrey Schneider (German Studies), Matthew B. Schultz (Learning, Teaching, and Research Center), Cindy Schwarza (Physics and Astronomy), Shane Slattery-Quintanillaa (Film), Andrew Tallon (Art), David Tavárez (Anthropology), Silke von der Emdea (German Studies), Eva Woods Peiró (Hispanic Studies).
a On leave 2018/19, first semester
b On leave 2018/19, second semester
ab On leave 2018/19
The Media Studies Program encourages the understanding and critical evaluation of new and old media technologies, the centrality of media in global and local culture, social life, politics and economics, and the contemporary and historical impact of media on individuals and societies. As defined by the Program, “media” includes all forms of representational media (oral/aural, written, visual), mass media (print, television, radio, film), new media (digital multimedia, the Internet, networked media), their associated technologies, and the social and cultural institutions that enable them and are defined by them.
The Program emphasizes several interrelated approaches to the study of media: multidisciplinary perspectives derived from the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences; the historical study of various forms of communication and the representation of knowledge; theoretical and critical investigation of how media shape our understandings of reality, and the dynamic interrelationship of media industries, cultural texts, communication technologies, policies, and publics; examination of global, as well as non-Western, indigenous, and oppositional media forms and practices; and practical work in media production and the use of media technologies.
Because the Media Studies concentration incorporates courses originating within the program as well as a wide range of courses from other programs and departments, students wishing to concentrate in Media Studies should consult with the Program Director as early as possible to design their course of study in consultation with a faculty adviser who will be drawn from the Program Steering Committee. Prospective majors will submit a “focus statement” outlining their interests, objectives, the proposed course of study, and a tentative senior project. The proposed course of study should be rigorous, well-integrated, and feasible in the context of the College curriculum. Focus statements should identify specific courses and provide a narrative explaining the linkages across departments/programs and curricular levels among the proposed courses, as well as their relevance for the proposed senior project. Focus statements will be evaluated by the Program Director, in consultation with the Program Steering Committee.
As the Steering Committee occasionally requests revisions of focus statements in consultation with the prospective major adviser and the program director, students who plan to spend one or both semesters of their Junior year studying abroad should submit their focus statement no later than the Friday following October break of their sophomore year. Students who intend to take courses at another domestic institution during their junior year should submit their focus statements no later than the Friday of the first week of classes of the spring semester of their sophomore year. All other students should submit their focus statements no later than March 1 of their sophomore year.
Advisers: Students will consult with the program director to select an adviser from the steering committee or participating faculty.
Major
Media Studies: I. Introductory
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MEDS 160 - Approaches to Media Studies Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
This course explores concepts and issues in the study of media, attentive to but not limited by the question of the “new” posed by new media technologies. Our survey of key critical approaches to media is anchored in specific case studies drawn from a diverse archive of media artifacts, industries, and technologies: from phonograph to photography, cinema to networked hypermedia, from typewriter to digital code. We examine the historical and material specificity of different media technologies and the forms of social life they enable, engage critical debates about media, culture and power, and consider problems of reading posed by specific media objects and processes, new and old. We take the multi-valence of “media”—a term designating text and apparatus of textual transmission, content and conduit—as a central problem of knowledge for the class. Our goal throughout is to develop the research tools, modes of reading, and forms of critical practice that help us aptly to describe and thereby begin to understand the increasingly mediated world in which we live. Justin Patch, Thomas Porcello (a); Paulina Bren (b).
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MEDS 184 - Star Wars: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death in a Galaxy Far, Far Away Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In a September 19, 1944 article for the French resistance newspaper, Combat, Albert Camus wrote, “Revolution is not revolt. What carried the Resistance for four years was revolt––the complete, obstinate, and at first nearly blind refusal to accept an order that would bring men to their knees. Revolt begins first in the human heart. But there comes a time when revolt spreads from heart to spirit, when a feeling becomes an idea, when impulse leads to concerted action. This is the moment of revolution.” The theatrical release of Star Wars in 1977 was itself a revolutionary cultural moment––one that invites a closer examination of why and how this franchise has enjoyed such wide-ranging cultural impact and longevity. Together, we examine the rhetoric of conquest and empire, freedom and rebellion in the Star Wars canon by situating the films in a theoretical context at the crossroads of postcolonial studies and media studies. You have the opportunity to design and conduct your own research-based, multimodal writing projects that consider representations of the intersections between Imperialism, revolution, and identity politics on the one hand, and form, rhetoric, and the cultural implications of various Star Wars media objects on the other. Matthew Schultz.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Would you like to see a more just and humane world? The SJQ courses engage you from the very start of your Vassar studies in thinking about the relationship between power and social change. A set of public lectures that address the nature of social justice accompany SJQ courses.
Two 75-minute periods.
Media Studies: II. Intermediate
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MEDS 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 214 ) An exploration of the intersections among language, form, genre, and medium, this course aims to deepen your appreciation for and understanding of multimodal authorship. To do so, we focus our critical gaze upon one of the more experimental periods of textual production: literary modernism. Together, we consider selections of poetry, short fiction, the novel, woodcut narratives, autobiography, letters, manifestos, essays, and film produced by a diverse range of authors such as Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, Mu Shiying and Mikhail Bulgakov, Max Ernst and Zora Neale Hurston––as well as more canonical figures like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Our discussions center on the ways in which writing emerges from its immediate historical contexts, and also how genre and medium look beyond their present moment, revising models inherited from the past and anticipating future forms of expression. Ultimately, this course helps us to better analyze and construct arguments about distinct types of texts through the sustained practice of close critical reading and recursive writing, and to sharpen our ability to facilitate dialogue about complex ideas and various modes of communication. Matthew Schultz.
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MEDS 217 - Studies in Popular Music
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 217 and MUSI 217 )
Recommended: one unit in either Music, Sociology, or Anthropology.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 218 - Chinese Popular Culture Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as CHIN 218 ) The course analyzes contemporary Chinese entertainment and popular culture. It provides both historical coverage and grounding in various theoretical and methodological problems. Topics focus on thematic contents and forms of entertainment through television, radio, newspaper, cinema, theatre, music, print and material culture. The course also examines the relations between the heritage of traditional Chinese entertainment and the influences of Western culture. All readings and class discussions are in English. Wenwei Du.
Prerequisite(s): One course in language, literature, culture, film, drama, or Asian Studies, or permission of the instructor.
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MEDS 250 - Exploratory Media Practices Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course instructs students in a varied set of practical media skills in order to interrogate and possibly transform the uses to which they are habitually put. It grounds a creative reflection on the relation between theory and practice through the critical use of production technologies. Each semester is devoted to a topic or a question to be explored through three distinct kinds of media “making.” These techniques include graphic design, literary journalism, sound recording, book production, the digital still image and its sequencing, the moving image and post-production techniques, computer graphics and physical computing, user interface design. Students will compose a formally sophisticated, rhetorically inventive “essay” in three medium specific idioms. They will also be asked to determine how the three exercises go together, how they work as interlocking parts of a transmedia narrative or ensemble.
Topic for 2018/19a: Investigating critical media practice in the production of multi-media artifacts including sound, video and interactive 3D environments. Course work is organized around the concept of “mapping” as a metaphor for many kinds of media production. The course also addresses themes of preservation and waste; memory and forgetting; inclusion and exclusion. Thomas Ellman.
Prerequisite(s): MEDS 160 or permission of the instructor.
Two 2-hour periods.
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MEDS 254 - Emotional Engagement with Film
1 unit(s)
(Same as FILM 254 and PSYC 254 ) While movies engage our emotions in psychologically significant ways, scholarship on the psychological allure and impact of film has existed primarily at the interdisciplinary margins. This course aims to bring such scholarship into the foreground. We begin with a careful examination of the appeal and power of narrative, as well as processes of identification and imagined intimacy with characters, before taking a closer analytical look at specific film genres (e.g., melodrama, horror, comedy, action, social commentary) both in their own right and in terms of their psychological significance (e.g., why do we enjoy sad movies? How do violent movies influence viewer aggression? How might socially conscious films inspire activism or altruism?) In addition to delving into theoretical and empirical papers, a secondary goal of the course is to engage students as collaborators; brainstorm and propose innovative experimental methods for testing research questions and hypotheses that emerge in step with course materials. Dara Greenwood and Sarah Kozloff.
Prerequisite(s): For Psychology majors - PSYC 105 ; for Film majors - FILM 175 or FILM 210 ; for Media Studies majors - MEDS 160 .
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 256 - American Television History Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as FILM 256 ) This course surveys the history of television in the United States from the 1940s to the present. It examines the social and industrial significance of television and its impact on issues such as class, race, gender, consumerism, and national identity. We investigate changes in televisual aesthetics and narrative paradigms and the ways that television responded to significant cultural, political and technological changes in American society. Throughout the semester we draw upon a range of critical frameworks including media industry studies, genre theory, and celebrity studies as we address topics such as the attempts to develop alternate models of broadcasting, networks’ efforts to bolster television’s cultural status, media convergence, and the formal characteristics of different television genres. Screenings include I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Orange is the New Black. Alex Kupfer
Prerequisite(s): FILM 175 or FILM 210 for students registering for FILM 256. MEDS 160 for students registering for MEDS 256.
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
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MEDS 258 - Studies in Sound
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 258 ) This course familiarizes students with the emerging field of sound studies. We spend the first eight weeks exploring the different facets of sound culture: histories and ethnographies of listening; theories of sound capture and reproduction; the political economy of recording media (particularly the MP3); the experience of the modern American soundscape. We conclude with case studies of contemporary sonic experiences: “glitch”-based digital music and the aesthetics of failure; new developments in sonic weaponry; art and activism that “listens” to drones and the US-Mexico border. Hua Hsu.
Prerequisite(s): 100-level course work within the multidisciplinary programs, or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 260 - Media Theory Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course aims to ramify our understanding of “mediality”—that is, the visible and invisible, audible and silent contexts in which physical messages stake their ghostly meanings. The claims of media theory extend beyond models of communication: media do not simply transport preexisting ideas, nor do they merely shape ideas in transit. Attending to the complex network of functions that make up media ecologies (modes of inscription, transmission, storage, circulation, and retrieval) demonstrates the role media play not only in the molding of ideas and opinions, but also in the constitution of subjectivities, social spheres, and non-human circuits of exchange (images, information, capital). Texts and topics vary from year to year, but readings are drawn from a broad spectrum of classical and contemporary sources. Giovanna Borradori.
Prerequisite(s): MEDS 160 or permission of the instructor.
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MEDS 263 - Anthropology Goes to the Movies: Film, Video, and Ethnography
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 263 ) This course examines how film and video are used in ethnography as tools for study and as means of ethnographic documentary and representation. Topics covered include history and theory of visual anthropology, issues of representation and audience, indigenous film, and contemporary ethnographic approaches to popular media. Colleen Cohen.
Prerequisite(s): Previous coursework in Anthropology or Film or Media Studies or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods, plus 3-hour preview laboratory.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 264 - The Metropolitan Avant-Gardes Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 264 and URBS 264 ) Radical prototypes of self-organization were forged by the new groups of artists, writers, filmmakers and architects that emerged in the early twentieth century as they sought to define the future. The course studies the avant-gardes’ different and often competing efforts to meet the changing conditions that industrialization was bringing to culture, societies and economies between 1889 and 1929, when works of art, design, and film entered the city, the press, the everyday lives and the wars that beset them all. Molly Nesbit.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 , or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods and one weekly film screening.
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MEDS 265 - Modern Art and the Mass Media: the New Public Sphere Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 265 and URBS 265 ) When the public sphere was reset during the twentieth century by a new order of mass media, the place of art and artists in the new order needed to be claimed. The course studies the negotiations between modern art and the mass media (advertising, cinema, TV), in theory and in practice, during the years between the Great Depression and the liberation movements of the late 1960s–the foundation stones of our own contemporary culture. Neither the theory nor the practice has become obsolete. Molly Nesbit.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 .
Two 75-minute periods and one weekly film screening.
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MEDS 266 - Indigenous and Oppositional Media
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 266 ) As audiovisual and digital media technologies proliferate and become more accessible globally, they become important tools for indigenous peoples and activist groups in struggles for recognition and self-determination, for articulating community concerns and for furthering social and political transformations. This course explores the media practices of indigenous peoples and activist groups, and through this exploration achieves a more nuanced and intricate understanding of the relation of the local to the global. In addition to looking at the films, videos, radio and television productions, and Internet interventions of indigenous media makers and activists around the world, the course looks at oppositional practices employed in the consumption and distribution of media. Course readings are augmented by weekly screenings and demonstrations of media studied, and students explore key theoretical concepts through their own interventions, making use of audiovisual and digital technologies. Colleen Cohen.
Two 75-minute periods, plus one 3-hour preview laboratory.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 268 - After 1968: the Activation of Art
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 268 and URBS 268 ) This course studies the emancipation of the visual arts after 1968, here and abroad, together with the political and philosophical discussions that guided them. Theory and practice would form new combinations. The traditional fine arts as well as the new media, performance, film, architecture and installation art are treated as part of the wider global evolution creating new theaters of action, critique, community and hope. Molly Nesbit.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 -ART 106 .
Two 75-minute periods and one weekly screening.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 271 - Visual Urbanism
1 unit(s)
(Same as URBS 271 ) This course examines correspondences between the emergent metrop-olis and practices of urban spectatorship. We approach the moderniza- tion of vision as an aspect of capitalist urbanization, as we engage the shifting media forms that have refracted and regulated modernity’s urban conditions from the mid-19th century to the present: camera obscura, magic lantern, window display, crime photography, film noir, snapshot, broadcast television, billboard, hand-held video, SimCity, Google earth, CCTV, immersive VR. Issues we investigate include: the increasing predominance of visual culture in urban everyday life; the distracted attention of the urban spectator as a mode of modern subjectivity; the role of the visual in shaping both official and vernac- ular understandings of the city; the use of city image and urban brand in urban development; the merging of physical and information space as urban landscapes become media-saturated environments; urban surveillance and the use of the visual as a vector of modern political power. Throughout, we approach urban visibility as a fiercely ambiva- lent force: both a source of spectacle and a tool to render legible the hidden powers that structure urban everyday life. Readings include works by Roland Barthes, Jonathan Beller, Walter Benjamin, Guliano Bruno, Susan Buck-Morss, Christine Boyer, Rey Chow, Elizabeth Currid, Jonathan Crary, Guy Debord, Anne Friedberg, Eric Gordon, Tom Gunning, Miriam Greenberg, Frederic Jameson, Rem Koolhaas, Kevin Lynch, W.T.J. Mitchell, Venessa Schwartz, William White, and Raymond Williams. Lisa Brawley.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 280 - Social Psychological Approaches to Mass Media: Understanding Content, Motivation, and Impact Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as PSYC 280 ) This course is designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of “media psychology,” which applies social scientific theory and methodology to the study media use, content, and impact. We first review theoretical contributions from both Communication Studies and Social Psychology before moving into a range of “hot topics” in the field (e.g., violent media, persuasion and advertising, news, politics, representations of social groups, social media). Along the way, we consider: psychological processes relevant to media use and impact, individual differences that motivate selective exposure and reception, the positive and negative effect that media may have on our attitudes and behaviors, and the complexities of developing and executing media effects research. Dara Greenwood.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 is required. MEDS 160 is recommended but not required.
Two 75-minute periods.
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MEDS 281 - The Comics Course Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 281 ) An exploration of topics in comics history, theory, aesthetics, and politics. Subjects and texts may include: women’s diary comics (Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary and Gabrielle Bell’s July 2011), conflict comics (Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde), graphic horror and representation (Charles Burns’s Black Hole), race and representation (Jennings’ and Duffy’s The Hole: Consumer Culture, Volume 1), genre and gender (Wonder Woman from origins to contemporary permutations), meta-comics (Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan), comics and the culture of children (Schulz’s Peanuts, Jansson’s Moomin, and Barry’s Marlys), comics and sexuality (Carol Swain’s Gast, Bisco Hatori’s Ouran High School Social Club, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home), disability comics (the Oracle series, Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye, and Allie Brosch’s “Hyperbole and a Half”), and comics and silence (Shaun Tan’s The Arrival). Readings also include materials in comics studies, media studies, and literary studies. Peter Antelyes.
Two 75-minute periods.
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MEDS 282 - Media Industries: Fox and Disney Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as FILM 282 ) This course explores the history of Twentieth Century-Fox and Fox Broadcasting Company from its emergence in the 1910s to its present day position as one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. In light of Disney’s recent acquisition of most of Fox’s assets, about one-third of the class is also be devoted to the history of Disney as a way of considering the relationship of independent producers to major studios as well as the changing conceptions of collaboration and convergence. The course uses Fox and Disney to examine changes in aesthetic paradigms, storytelling techniques, and the ways that media industries engage with important cultural, political and technological changes in American society. Throughout the semester, we draw upon different critical frameworks including media industry studies, genre and auteur theory, and celebrity studies and apply these to a series of historical case studies. Screenings include Sunrise, M*A*S*H, Deadpool, My Darling Clementine, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, In Living Color, and Star Wars. Alexander Kupfer.
Prerequisite(s): FILM 175 or FILM 210 for students registering for FILM 282. MEDS 160 for students registering for MEDS 282.
Two 75-minute periods accompanied by film screenings.
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MEDS 285 - The Book in America Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 285 ) This course examines the history and influence of books and printing in American society from earliest times to the present. We touch on a range of topics, including the place of books in the colonial era and the new republic, the spread of printing technologies in the 19th century, the emergence of large publishing houses and rising rates of literacy, the role of libraries, bookstores, and book clubs, modernist publishing, the rise of the paperback, the work of private presses, artist’s books, and the effect of recent technologies on reading. Along the way we consider questions relating to the production, dissemination, and reception of texts. The Archives & Special Collections Library serves as a laboratory for the course. Guest speakers and one or more field trips enhance our study of key topics. Ronald Patkus.
Two 75-minute periods.
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MEDS 286 - Cult TV and Its Audiences Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as FILM 286 ) The course examines the historical and cultural development of “cult” television in the US and the UK, and the ways in which cult television shows become celebrated cultural touchstones. We pay particular attention to the ways in which cult television shows transform audiences into communities as well as what it means to be a part of such a community. Building on the idea of fan communities, we consider the implications of audience-championed cult narratives as they are reshaped into fan-fiction and other performances of identity and community. We also examine how cult shows blur the line between “cult” and “camp”, impact programming strategies, spawn fan movements, and influence media convergence. We further explore the recognition and cooptation of cult programs and the mainstreaming of cult audience behavior. Screenings include Doctor Who, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Arrested Development, and Star Trek. Alex Kupfer.
Prerequisite(s): FILM 175 or FILM 210 or MEDS 160 .
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
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MEDS 287 - Toy Stories: Histories, Narratives, and Theories of Toys and Play Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as GERM 287 ) This course explores the development of the modern toy industry, beginning with the rise of mass-produced toys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We examine the history of a range of iconic toys and games—for instance, Lego blocks, Barbie dolls, and Monopoly—within the wider discursive context that helps give them meaning. This includes not only advertisements, but also literary and cinematic texts ranging from the fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nutcracker and the King of Mice, to the Toy Story series and recent Lego films. We ask how toys and games propagate norms such as those of gender and ethnicity, and how narratives about toys and play promote but also subvert such values. Of special concern is the discovery and development in both literary and psychological texts of the concept of imaginative or make-believe play, and the ways in which toy makers lay claim to promoting this kind of play. In addition to analytic essays, assignments include drafting a concept for a new toy or board game. Elliott Schreiber.
Two 75-minute periods.
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MEDS 288 - Ideologies of Pop Culture: Consuming East Asian ‘Cool’ Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 288 and CHJA 288 ) This class examines the transnational flows of cultural products across East Asia (Japan, Korea and China). It begins with a strong grounding in relevant theoretical frameworks from linguistics and anthropology. With these theoretical tools in hand, we investigate processes of production, distribution, transmission and consumption of core cultural products including music, dramas, language, and food. Locating such products within broader political discourses, e.g., government-backed ‘soft power’ efforts, we explore how cultural products become vehicles of often normative ideologies, and concurrently analyze how contemporary youth across East Asia become active participants in cultural production through new and emerging consumption practices. Some of the topics covered include: the consumption of Korean idol performances in Japan, the localization of Japanese anime and drama narratives into Korean and Taiwanese contexts, the flow of media performances between China and Taiwan, the representation of foreign language students in language learning textbooks and the performance of ‘foreign-ness’ in media products. This class emphasizes the application of critical cultural theories to the analysis of new and emerging media products and includes one large project and opportunities for group field work. This course has no prerequisites.
Judit Kroo.
Two 75-minute periods.
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MEDS 290 - Field Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
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MEDS 298 - Independent Study Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
Media Studies: III. Advanced
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MEDS 300 - Senior Project Preparation Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
The Senior Project may be a full-length thesis or a (multi)media project. During the fall semester, students carry out the following independent work under the supervision of the Program Director and participating faculty: formulating a project topic; identifying suitable faculty advisors; writing a project proposal and bibliography; presenting the proposal at a poster event; and developing a work plan. The program faculty.
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MEDS 301 - Senior Project Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Students carry out the Senior Project during the spring semester, under the supervision of their two project advisors. All students present their projects at a public symposium at the end of the semester. The projects become part of a permanent Media-Studies archive. The program faculty.
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MEDS 302 - Adaptations
1 unit(s)
(Same as CLCS 302 and ENGL 302 ) If works of art continue each other, as Virginia Woolf suggested, then cultural history accumulates when generations of artists think and talk together across time. What happens when one of those artists switches to another language, another genre, another mode or medium? In the twenty-first century we may reframe Woolf’s conversation in terms of intertextuality—art invokes and revises other art—but the questions remain more or less unchanged: What motivates and shapes adaptations? What role does technology play? Audience? What constitutes a faithful adaptation? “Faithful” to what or whom? In this course we consider the biological model, looking briefly at Darwin’s ideas about the ways organisms change in order to survive, and then explore analogies across a range of media. We’ll begin with Virgil’s Georgics; move on to Metamorphoses, Ovid’s free adaptations of classical myths; and follow Orpheus and Eurydice through two thousand years of theater (Euripides, Anouilh, Ruhl, Zimmerman); painting and sculpture (Dürer, Rubens, Poussin, Klee, Rodin); film and television (Pasolini, Cocteau, Camus, Luhrmann); dance (Graham, Balanchine, Bausch); music (Monteverdi, Gluck, Stravinsky, Birtwistle, Glass); narratives and graphic narratives (Pynchon, Delany, Gaiman, Hoban); verse (Rilke, H.D., Auden, Ashbery, Milosz, Heaney, Atwood, Mullen, Strand); and computer games (Battle of Olympus, Shin Megami Tensei). During the second half of the semester, we investigate other adaptations and their theoretical implications, looking back from time to time at what we’ve learned from the protean story of Eurydice and Orpheus and their countless progeny. M. Mark.
One 3-hour period.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 310 - Senior Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Special topics course for all senior Media Studies majors, providing a capstone experience for the cohort. This course is taught in the fall semester each year.
The capstone seminar for Media Studies aims to consolidate our majors’ core coursework in theory and praxis with an eye to giving them useful tools for the critical making of their senior projects. Taking the human hand as our guiding metonymic thread, we read a wide array of ancient and modern texts that interrogate the relationship between thinking and grasping, drafting and dwelling, making (poiesis) and touching (aesthesis), manual and intellectual labor, authenticity (the handmade) and reproducibility (the ready-to-hand), the human and the inhuman, the material and the virtual. We devote particular attention to the reemergence of the hand in our contemporary moment: the era of screen capitalism. The rise of artisanal foods and spirits, the popularity of bespoke design in the creative economy, the use of critical design in oppositional media interventions, the expanding adoption of design thinking in universities and corporations: these assorted trends seem to point to a renewed focus on making in our culture. What do these dexterous ventures have to tell us about our media ecology? about our relationship to the recycled stories, images, and objects we live with? about our “reality hunger” and dreams of transformation? Class assignments incorporate design methods that accentuate process: immersive listening, collaboration, prototyping, failing, testing, and more. The pedagogical goal of the seminar is not to provide students arts-and-crafts skills, but to activate their preferred creative-critical medium of expression - for example, writing - in an expanded field of possibilities, one that is mindful of our embodiment, our being-with-others, and our irreducible desire for something new. Giovanna Borradori.
Prerequisite(s): MEDS 250 or MEDS 260 .
One 2-hour period.
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MEDS 340 - Seminar in Continental Philosophy Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as PHIL 340 ) Topic for 2018/19b: Frames of the Invisible. Politics of Photography. The transformation of textual into visual culture and the retooling of the cellular phone as a camera have given photography a new political role. From the self-immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia that unleashed the Arab Spring to the images of police brutality in the United States, photographs have mobilized grass root movements of political resistance against atrocity and oppression. The thesis of this seminar is that our visual culture is governed by a “regime of visibility” that regulates the background of what is represented. The snapshots and the photographs taken by ordinary people possess the unique power of eluding this “staging apparatus.” We discuss these images as performative statements of moral outrage and appreciate how they expose both patterns of dispossession and the uneven distribution of human suffering across world populations. This enables us to question whether the ethics of photography, and especially of photographs of human rights abuses, should not be directed at what is shown within the photographic frame but rather at the active and unmarked delimitation that lies beyond it, which limits what we see and what we are able, and unable, to recognize. Texts by Walter Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Vilem Flusser, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, and Jacques Derrida, and images by Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Peres, and Sophie Ristelbueber. Giovanna Borradori.
One 3-hour period.
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MEDS 351 - Language and Expressive Culture Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 351 ) This seminar provides the advanced student with an intensive investigation of theoretical and practical problems in specific areas of research that relate language and linguistics to expressive activity. Although emphasizing linguistic modes of analysis and argumentation, the course is situated at the intersection of important intellectual crosscurrents in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that focus on how culture is produced and projected through not only verbal, but also musical, material, kinaesthetic, and dramatic arts. Each topic culminates in independent research projects.
May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.
Topic for 2018/19b: Sound. This seminar centers on the examination of acoustic, perceptual, and cultural dimensions of aural phenomena. Linguistics is one focal area of the course, in which we pursue both qualitative and quantitative analyses of paralinguistic and prosodic features (pitch, intonation, rhythm, timbre, formants), acoustic phonetics, and especially issues of sound symbolism (onomatopoeia, iconicity, metaphor, and synaesthesia). Additional topics of discussion include relationships between sound structure and social structure as investigated by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, the cultural history of sound (as encoded in regulatory practices such as public noise ordinances, as well as in architectural and technological designs), and the emergent field of “sound studies.” Thomas Porcello.
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 150 or ANTH 250 or permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
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MEDS 352 - The City in Fragments Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as URBS 352 ) In this seminar, we use the concept of the fragment to explore the contemporary city, and vice versa. We draw on the work of Walter Benjamin, for whom the fragment was both a central symptom of urban modernity and a potentially radical mode of inquiry. We also use the figure of the fragment to explore and to experiment with the situationist urbanism of Guy Debord, to address the failure of modernist dreams for the city, and to reframe the question of the “global” in contemporary discussions of global urbanization. Finally, we use the fragment to destabilize notions of experience and evidence—so central to positivist understandings of the city—as we make regular visits to discover, as it were, non-monumental New York. Readings include works by Walter Benjamin, Stefano Boeri, Christine Boyer, Guy Debord, Rosalyb Deytsche, Paul Gilroy, Rem Koolhaas, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Lacquer, Saskia Sassen, Mark Wigley, and others. Lisa Brawley, Heesok Chang.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
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MEDS 356 - Culture, Commerce, and the Public Sphere Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 356 ) This course examines the culture and politics of the public sphere, with an emphasis on the changing status of public spaces in contemporary societies. Drawing upon historical and current analyses, we explore such issues as the relationship between public and commercial space and the role of public discourse in democratic theory. Case studies investigate such sites as mass media, schools, shopping malls, cyberspace, libraries, and public parks in relation to questions of economic inequality, political participation, privatization, and consumer culture. William Hoynes.
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MEDS 364 - Seminar in Twentieth Century and Contemporary Art Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 364 ) Topic for 2018/19a: The World Picture. What defines a world? Increasingly the work of art is asked to take on this question, which has been the province of philosophy for centuries. This year the seminar looks at the way contemporary art has taken the idea of the world picture apart to produce a set of critiques and alternative visions so that the organization of the world’s aspects can be better considered. The question that haunted the twentieth century, what is a self? or, to put it slightly differently, what is a subject? has been transformed. The new questions turn on redefinitions of collectivity, or what is currently called self-organization. They do not aspire to become a mass culture. Molly Nesbit.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
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MEDS 366 - Francophone Literature and Cultures Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as FFS 366 ) Topic for 2018/19a: Ciné-vérité? Narratives and French and Francophone Documentary Film-Making. The Francophone world has a rich and varied documentary film tradition ranging from René Vautier’s “Afrique 50”, the first anticolonial film, to Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1955), Marcel Ophüls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969), Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: la mort du prophète (1990), Anne-Laure Folly’s Femmes aux yeux ouverts (1994), Jean-Marie Teno’s Chef! (1999), Nicolas Philibert’s Etre et avoir (2002), Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), Moussa Sene Absa’s Yoole, le sacrifice (2010), and Nadia El Fani’s Même Pas Mal (2012). This seminar explores different genres of Francophone short- and feature-length documentaries including works of the historical, social and political varieties, the ‘essai documentaire’, and the ‘auto-documentaire.’ We use this palette of audio-visual essays as a springboard both to examine the specificities of this genre’s form and the ways they interrogate the burning issues they seek to analyze, and to gauge the extent to which they frame – and perhaps even define – the French and Francophone cultures they depict. Patricia-Pia Célérier.
One 2-hour period.
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MEDS 370 - Seminar in Architectural History Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 370 and URBS 370 ) Topic for 2018/19b: The City and the Stage: Theater, Film, and Architecture in the Short Twentieth Century. This seminar studies the connections among theater, film, and architecture in global urban environments, from 1914 to 1991. The performance and exhibition spaces of modernity simultaneously shaped and were themselves shaped by societies and communities in their search for different forms of constitution (liberal democracy, fascism or communism), and shared identity (with or without their race, gender, sexual, and religious biases), real or imagined. Stages and cities, as sites of expression, representation, and construction of the world at the heart of what Jacques Rancière calls the Aesthetic Regime of Art, deserve to be examined in detail—in their specific locations and materialities—considering them as multitude of places, and not merely as empty containers of theater, film, or public life. Readings include political and media theory from Kracauer or Benjamin to Deleuze or Rancière, as well as related theory and contemporary debates on the design of playhouses, movie palaces, and even architecture and urban planning since the rise of film until its digital transformation. The seminar studies dramatic works in the context of their imagined places, as well as their actual places of production and exhibition (studios, sets, streets, screens, or movie theaters). Weekly screenings and a case study field trip to New York city, archives, and stages. Travel expenses are funded by the Department. Eduardo Vivanco.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period plus outside screenings.
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MEDS 376 - Computer Games: Design, Production and Critique
1 unit(s)
(Same as CMPU 376 ) Investigates all stages of the game development process, including conception, design, physical and digital prototyping, implementation and play-testing, among others. The course emphasizes the integration of formal, dramatic and dynamic game elements to create a specific player experience. The course also examines various criteria and approaches to game critique, including issues of engagement, embodiment, flow, and meaningful play. Course work includes a series of game development projects carried out in groups, along with analysis of published games and readings in critical game-studies literature. No previous experience in media production or computer programming is necessary. Thomas Ellman.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 379 - Computer Animation: Art, Science and Criticism Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 379 , CMPU 379 , and FILM 379 ) An interdisciplinary course in Computer Animation aimed at students with previous experience in Computer Science, Studio Art, or Media Studies. The course introduces students to mathematical and computational principles and techniques for describing the shape, motion and shading of three-dimensional figures in Computer Animation. It introduces students to artistic principles and techniques used in drawing, painting and sculpture, as they are translated into the context of Computer Animation. It also encourages students to critically examine Computer Animation as a medium of communication. Finally, the course exposes students to issues that arise when people from different scholarly cultures attempt to collaborate on a project of mutual interest. The course is structured as a series of animation projects interleaved with screenings and classroom discussions. Thomas Ellman, Harry Roseman.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Two 2-hour periods.
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MEDS 380 - Special Topics in Media Studies
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 381 - Ideas, Sound, and Story: Podcast Production Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 381 ) This is a course on narrative audio production that focuses on the study and production of various nonfictional genres in the American podcasting landscape, including audio documentaries, investigative reporting, confessionals, art pieces, storytelling for academic purposes, and others. Students learn the craft of audio production from getting tape, tape-logging, writing for audio, story and tape-editing, and sound-tracking. Students complete various technical assignments, and submit a final 10-minute piece, with regular progress graded throughout. In order to model the highly competitive nature of the podcasting production space today, students must be highly-motivated, highly-organized, and grading is very rigorous, with the highest of standards and strict deadlines. Barry Lam.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
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MEDS 382 - Decolonizing Digital Culture Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HISP 382 and LALS 382 ) Digital media are ubiquitous. Through them we communicate, inform ourselves, organize our lives, watch one another, self-soothe and invent ourselves. Digital media are both central to struggles for social justice and at the same time, in the hands of corporate and state agents, weapons against these struggles. This course explores how the history, physical infrastructure, political economy and symbolic and affective meanings in media-scapes across Latin America, the Caribbean, Mexico and Spain are crucial for understanding digital culture and its impact on us. Topics studied include Indigenous digital culture; digital literacy; fake news; social media and social movements; gendered, racialized and classed identities in online communities; (dis)embodiment; the networked self; and border surveillance technologies. We analyze a range of media texts including novels, films, theoretical essays, manifestos, archives and multi-media born-digital content. Taught in Spanish. Eva Woods.
Prerequisite(s): HISP 216 and one course above 216.
One 2-hour period.
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MEDS 385 - Media and War
1 unit(s)
Senator Hiram Johnson’s 1917 remark “The first casualty when war comes is truth” is often repeated. But the processes through which (mis)information and images circulate in wartime are less well known. This course explores the role of popular media in the production and circulation of knowledge about war. Drawing on both news and entertainment media, we examine how war is represented and remembered in various media, including newspapers, photographs, radio, television, film, and online. Through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, we explore topics such as the practices of the war correspondent, strategies of news management by military planners, the relationship between media images and public attitudes toward war, media as a propaganda tool, and the role of popular media in constructing and contesting national myths and memories of war. William Hoynes.
Prerequisite(s): MEDS 160 or permission of the instructor.
Not offered in 2018/19.
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MEDS 399 - Senior Independent Work
0.5 or 1 unit(s)
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