Catalogue 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Media Studies Program
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Director: Giovanna Borradori;
Steering Committee: Peter Antelyesab (English), Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy), Lisa Brawley (Urban Studies), Colleen Ballerino Cohena (Anthropology), Robert DeMariaa (English), Wenwei Du (Chinese and Japanese), Thomas Ellmanab (Computer Science), Dara N. Greenwood (Psychology), Sophia Harvey (Film), Thomas E. Hill (Library), M. Mark (English), Molly Nesbita (Art), Justin Patch (Music), Ronald Patkus (Library), Thomas Porcello (Anthropology), Matthew B. Schultz (Learning, Teaching, and Research Center), Shane Slattery-Quintanillaa (Film), Eva Woods Peirób (Hispanic Studies);
Participating Faculty: Peter Antelyesab (English), Giovanna Borradori (Philosophy), Lisa Brawley (Urban Studies), Paulina Bren (International Studies), Heesok Chang (English), Colleen Ballerino Cohena (Anthropology), Lisa Gail Collins (Art), Robert DeMariaa (English), Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollasea (Chinese and Japanese), Wenwei Du (Chinese and Japanese), Eve Dunbarb (English), Thomas Ellmanab (Computer Science), Dara N. Greenwood (Psychology), Sophia Harvey (Film), Thomas Hill (Library), William Hoynes (Sociology), Hua Hsuab (English), Michael Joyceb (English), Sarah R. Kozloff (Film), Amitava Kumarb (English), Alexander Kupfer (Film), Judith Linn (Art), Brian R. Mann (Music), M. Mark (English), Mia Mask (Film), Molly Nesbita (Art), Leonard Nevarez (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 Schwarz (Physics and Astronomy), Shane Slattery-Quintanillaa (Film), David Tavárez (Anthropology), Silke von der Emde (German Studies), Eva Woods Peirób (Hispanic Studies).
a On leave 2019/20, first semester
b On leave 2019/20, second semester
ab On leave 2019/20
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. Prospective majors will submit a “Focus Statement” outlining their interests, objectives, the proposed course of study, and a tentative plan for a 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 who, in consultation with the Program Steering Committee, will grant the prospective major admission to the Program.
As the Steering Committee occasionally requests revisions of Focus Statements in consultation with the Focus Statement Adviser and the Program Director, students who plan to spend one or both semesters of their Junior year 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).
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 184 - Star Wars: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
According to Fred Botting, author of Gothic, “Postmodernism, emerging as a global aesthetic style at the end of the 1970s and associated with the wider transformations of modernity, seemed particularly hospitable to the resuscitation of gothic forms and figures.” The theatrical release of Star Wars in 1977 marked one such occasion. The film’s revolutionary blend of science fiction and fantasy is built upon a foundation of gothic tropes and devices from the dysfunctional families and Mephistophelean tempters of the 18th century to the Inquisition prisons and revolutionary anxieties of the 19th century. How might our contemporary understanding of the Star Wars canon develop if we view it through this critical lens that highlights psychological violence, transgression, and excess as a way of unbalancing the hierarchies of good and evil, free will and predestination, tyranny and liberty?
Together we examine the gothic elements of Star Wars across representational media (including films, storyboards, comics, propaganda posters, short stories, and toys) in order to better understand the ways in which Star Wars engages with the experience of (neo)Imperialism. The Skywalker saga projects a particularly gothic sense of loss and dislocation (of history, culture, identity, and autonomy) by displaying the terrors and traumas of colonization: subjugation, banishment, enforced assimilation, slavery, and genocide. As a paragon of political resistance to the patterns of retributive violence, Star Wars invites us to consider gothic fiction as a crucible for self-knowledge and deliberate action. Matthew Schultz.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
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.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 217 - Studies in Popular Music Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 217 and MUSI 217 ) Justin Patch.
Recommended: one unit in either Music, Sociology, or Anthropology.
Two 75-minute periods.
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MEDS 218 - Chinese Popular Culture
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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MEDS 220 - Medieval and Renaissance Culture Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 220 ) Topic for 2019/20b: Detectives in the Archive: Reading Medieval and Renaissance Texts. Study of manuscripts of various types, from late antiquity to the early modern period. The course includes guest lectures by Vassar faculty and other experts, a field trip, and direct work with manuscripts from Vassar’s collection. The course serves as a de facto survey of medieval and renaissance culture. Marc Epstein and Ronald Patkus.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 241 - Topics in the Construction of Gender Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 241 ) Topic for 2019/20: 241b. Masculinities///Femininities through the Lens of DisneyTM
The Disney industry has had a global impact on the circulation of masculinities and femininities in the post-war Fordist and then post-Fordist late capitalist eras. Generating a proliferation of ideas of gender that contradict and embolden one another, Disney films provide an ideal case study for examining the centrality of gender and sexuality to imperialism and the imbrication of identity and power. While remaining mostly staunchly heteronormative despite other media industries becoming more inclusive of queer relationships, DisneyTM can be read “queerly,” as this course will explore. We will be examining not only the films themselves, but also at the historical moments in which they were created, and the corporations that shaped them. The
goal of the course is to give you ways to approach texts that ask not to be seen critically and also to learn how to mine normative texts for their queer and anti-racist potential. We look at the Disney Corporation’s efforts to portray itself as innocuous and “timeless,” and then use that information to think about the aspects of Disney’s films that have implications for our understanding of the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, nation, and imperialism. Elias Krell
Prerequisite(s): Course is by permission of instructor and requires a short application.
2 75 Minute periods
Course Format: CLS -
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 also are asked to determine how the three exercises go together, how they work as interlocking parts of a transmedia narrative or ensemble.
Topic for 2019/20a: Investigating critical media practice in the production of multi-media artifacts including sound, moving images, and interactive maps. Course work is organized around the concept of “mapping” as a metaphor for many kinds of media production. The course also addresses themes of appropriation and remediation, the archive, popular memory; inclusion and exclusion. Alexander Kupfer.
Prerequisite(s): MEDS 160 or permission of the instructor.
Two 2-hour periods.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 254 - Emotional Engagement with Film Semester Offered: Fall
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 209 ; for Media Studies majors - MEDS 160 .
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
Course Format: CLS -
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 209 for students registering for FILM 256. MEDS 160 for students registering for MEDS 256.
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
Course Format: CLS -
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 2019/20.
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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.
Course Format: CLS -
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 2019/20.
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MEDS 264 - The Metropolitan Avant-Gardes
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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MEDS 265 - Modern Art and the Mass Media: the New Public Sphere
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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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 2019/20.
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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 2019/20.
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MEDS 271 - Hello, Dear Enemy: Mounting an Exhibition of Picture Books on Experiences of War and Displacement Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as EDUC 271 LALS 271 INTL 271 WMST 271 ) At a time when the world is witnessing the largest displacement of people since WWII, due in significant measure to armed conflict, this course examines select case studies (both past and present) of armed conflict and their consequences for children. Journalists, photographers and writers of young adult literature have done much to raise awareness about children and armed conflict, and to treat them in such a way that audiences develop understanding, empathy, and solidarity with children affected by armed conflict. A principal aim of the course is to study the topics of war and displacement, journalism and photography, and young adult literature, and then to mount an exhibition in the Collaboratory of photographs and books that will travel to area schools and libraries, where Vassar students serve as docents. Our work is enriched by study of human rights statutes and policy pertaining to children affected by armed conflict, as well as by interaction with visiting artists and educators. Tracey Holland. Tracey Holland
2 75 Minute periods
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 283 - Fandom and Sports Media Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as FILM 283 ) This course examines the historical and cultural development of sports media in the United States. It explores the definitions of sports media as a generic and industrial label and the transformation of audiences into fan communities. Throughout the semester, we examine how producers, leagues, and fans have used media to engage with cultural, political and technological changes in American society. We also consider more recent forms of cultural production and participation that engage the varied social practices associated with fandom. Special attention is paid to the connections between media consumption and performances of identity and community. The course places sports media in a broader industrial context that will include forms such as sponsored, experimental, amateur, and documentary films and television series. Screenings include Moneyball, Senna, Jim Thorpe All-American, Hoop Dreams, Raging Bull, The Jackie Robinson Story, and O.J.: Made in America. Since this course focuses on the relationship between media and fandom, students do not need to have any knowledge of sports to enroll. This course is not open to first-year students. Alexander Kupfer.
Prerequisite(s): FILM 209 or MEDS 160 .
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 289 - Homer’s Odyssey: From Oral Composition to Digital Editions Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as GRST 289 ) In this course we consider the long history of Homer’s epic poem from its beginning as an oral composition in Archaic Greece to its current manifestations in digital editions. Along the way we look at papyrii, medieval manuscripts, early print editions, examples of fine printing and contemporary versions. As we consider the history of the poem we also study the poem itself and explore the ways that its meaning has also been transformed through time. Among the issues we consider are orality and oral cultures, the advent of writing, the development of the text and the influence of technology. We examine materials in Greek, Latin, and English though no knowledge of the ancient languages is required. The Archives and Special Collections Library, with its rich collection of primary sources, will serve as our laboratory. Rachel Friedman and Ronald Patkus.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 290 - Community-Engaged Learning Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
Course Format: INT -
MEDS 298 - Independent Study Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Permission of the director required.
Course Format: OTH
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 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 303 - Senior Project Preparation Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
The Senior Project is a full length Thesis or a (Multi) Media Project. During the Fall semester, students write a Project Proposal and Bibliography, and complete a Chapter or a comprehensive Project Statement. In the Spring, students finalize the Senior Project under the supervision of Project Advisor. All students present their Projects in a Public Symposium at the end of the semester. The Projects become part of a permanent Media Studies Archive. The Department.
Yearlong course 303-MEDS 304 .
Course Format: INT -
MEDS 304 - Senior Project Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
The Senior Project is a full length Thesis or a (Multi) Media Project. During the Fall semester, students write a Project Proposal and Bibliography, and complete a Chapter or a comprehensive Project Statement. In the Spring, students finalize the Senior Project under the supervision of Project Advisor. All students present their Projects in a Public Symposium at the end of the semester. The Projects become part of a permanent Media Studies Archive. The Department.
Yearlong course MEDS 303 -304.
Course Format: INT -
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.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 340 - Seminar in Continental Philosophy Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as PHIL 340 ) Topic for 2019/20b: 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 350 - Studies in 18th Century British Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 350 ) Topic for 2019/20b: Origins of the Periodical Essay. Although periodical publications got started in Europe shortly after the invention of printing, there was in England such a vast increase in their numbers and importance during the British Civil Wars (1642-60) that it’s reasonable to think of that period as giving rise to periodical writing in its modern form. In the later seventeenth century periodical publications became important vehicles for a new kind of writing aptly called the periodical essay. Among the most important eighteenth-century practitioners of this form were John Dunton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith. This course will examine the periodical writing of these authors in the context of the newspapers and journals for which they wrote: The Athenian Oracle; The Review; The Tatler; The Spectator; The Female Spectator; The Gentleman’s Magazine; The Rambler; and The Bee, among other. There will be several meetings of the class in Special Collections, and students will be expected to write on an early journal or periodical writer, making use of the original publications. Robert DeMaria
One 2-hr meeting
Course Format: CLS -
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. Thomas Porcello
Topic for 2019/20b: Sound. Same as Anth 351b. 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.”
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 150 or ANTH 250 or permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS -
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.
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MEDS 356 - Culture, Commerce, and the Public Sphere
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
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MEDS 364 - Seminar in Twentieth Century and Contemporary Art
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 364 ) The World Picture: The Shape of Change. It has been a while since the world appeared as it did to Heidegger—as a picture. What shape, then, does the world take? Or, is it better to turn George Kubler’s “Shape of Time” sideways and ask about the shape of change? The seminar studies the global condition of present day culture. That there continues to be no consensus on its definition enables us to explore the active critical problems as steps in a larger trajectory inherited from the utopian experiments of the 1970s and the use they made of materialism. These questions are examined through the work of various contemporary artists. Molly Nesbit.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 374 - Ideas, Sound, and Story: Podcast Production Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 374 ) 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 1-hour period.
Course Format: INT -
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 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 379 - Computer Animation: Art, Science and Criticism
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.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 380 - Special Topics in Media Studies
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
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 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS -
MEDS 399 - Senior Independent Work
0.5 or 1 unit(s)
Course Format: OTH
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