In an era marked by information overload and epistemic uncertainty, documentary films continue to serve as a potent means of examining, interpreting, and communicating the many facets of our rapidly transforming social world. Contemporary Documentary will immerse students in the captivating and complex realm of documentary filmmaking in the 21st century. The course will delve into the artistry, history, and societal impact of documentary cinema, providing insight into its pivotal role in shaping our collective consciousness. Students will develop an understanding of documentary film’s diverse forms, including expository, observational, interactive, reflexive, poetic, and performative modes. We will also explore ethical questions surrounding representation, objectivity, and advocacy in relation to real-world events. In class discussions, students will apply their critical thinking skills to deconstruct and analyze documentaries. For their final assignment, students will undertake research projects that involve close analysis of several contemporary documentary films.

This course is an introduction to the early history of world cinema (from its nineteenth-century prehistory to the sound cinema of the 1930s) and to the interpretive skills necessary for close analysis of film. Topics considered will include the rise of early film, the gradual development of cinematic narrative, the development of national cinematic styles in the 1920s, the transition to sound, and the conflicting political filmmaking of the 1930s leading up to the second World War.

[IN]LAND is an intensive six-week program designed to immerse students in landscape architecture. Students are learning the fundamentals of landscape architectural practice through the process of making and experimentation as research into site potentials. Initial ideas are developed and transformed through rigorous investigation in a collaborative studio environment. Students develop a landscape vocabulary that engages with the concepts of ecology, public space, sustainability and multiple scales of design.

[IN]LAND is an intensive six-week program designed to immerse students in landscape architecture. Students are learning the fundamentals of landscape architectural practice through the process of making and experimentation as research into site potentials. Initial ideas are developed and transformed through rigorous investigation in a collaborative studio environment. Students develop a landscape vocabulary that engages with the concepts of ecology, public space, sustainability and multiple scales of design.

This is a short fiction workshop. Over the course of the session, each student will write and revise stories. Each participant in the workshop will edit student-written stories and will write a formal critique of each manuscript. Students will also take part in discussions about fiction. Attendance is mandatory.

This course will present the genre of speculative fiction and its historical commitment to imagining plausible and implausible alternatives to the present. We will begin by looking at the Golden Age of the science fiction short story, the 1950s and 60s, and then proceed to treat some representative novels from the 1970s to the contemporary. Along the way, we’ll consider some of the crucial topics and concepts that form the imaginary of this genre, from advanced technology and what it affords and subtracts from the human (artificial intelligence, the end of work, extended longevity, interstellar travel and contact with other entities, etc.), to the hyper-urban, as well as questions of race, class, gender, capitalism, war, and colonialization as they encounter and acquire new and estranging contexts. We’ll also attempt to theorize some of the modes and tropes by which such fictions explore these questions: apocalypse, futurity, first contact, new bodies and forms of communication, the hivemind, virtuality, and so on, as well as the traditional narrative conventions enlisted to support these representations. Book list: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; Octavia Butler, Kindred; China Miéville, Embassytown, N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season, and short stories by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, as well as critical essays by Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson.

What does it mean to know? What does it mean to do? What is the relationship between knowing and doing? Does knowledge enable action, or does action require error and ignorance? In this class we will read a series of literary works that force us to ask these questions—works that address problems of action, knowledge, knowledge of the self, and error. To the casual observer, these works might be taken to be so many detective stories. Nothing is less certain; but if literature is about telling stories, then there is an element of the detective story in all literature. That is, telling a story may not simply be a matter of narrating facts, conveying knowledge, representing a truth. The works we will read suggest that telling a story makes both knowledge and action into a problem, an experience to be undergone. And such an experience of knowledge may not be opposed to error, but may instead hinge on error: although to know something sometimes means to eradicate errors about that thing, it may turn out that to know something also requires or involves error. In our readings and conversations, we will address the ways in which these texts thematize and formalize problems of the relationship between knowledge, self-knowledge, action, and error—how they are about these problems, and how they create these problems for us as we confront them. Provisional List of Readings: Sophocles, Oedipus the King Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (Out of an Old Chronicle) Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Sigmund Freud, Fragment from an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (or Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis) Franz Kafka, “The Judgment” Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

This class will provide a short but compelling introduction to the world of popular fiction. We will explore several different popular genres—detective fiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy, thriller, and the Hollywood musical—to discover what makes these genres “popular” and in what ways they produce their mass appeal. Is popular fiction simply light leisure reading for the public or do they have "literary" merit beneath the generic formulas? How do popular fictional works play an integral role in helping us understand the dynamics of gender, science, cultural norms, and politics of the era?

This class is an exploration of the aesthetics of movement. We’ll study bodies in movement, ideas borrowed, taken up, re-configured, re-presented. The course will be grounded in literary texts by such brilliant contemporary writers as Cathy Park Hong, Valeria Luiselli, and Jonathan Escoffery. But we will also pay attention to the fascinating ways in which popular music and media have both influenced and borrowed from theory and practice in the literary and academic worlds. We will learn from border-crossing artists and thinkers about how dynamic aesthetic ideas are forged from sometimes painful histories of displacement, and also from joyful collisions on dancefloors and in workshops. We will see how incisive and ironic critique can be smuggled into the most pleasurable of envelopes. Nothing stays still here, and we’ll move to reggaeton and Afrobeats even as we attend sharply to literary close reading, theoretical ideas, and historical context. Expect to workshop your writing, develop creative approaches to essays, and to abandon static ideas of what constitutes a migrant narrative. This class satisfies the Literatures in English requirement for the English major.

In this course, students will read quintessential examples of the revenge tragedy genre—The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy—as well as seventeenth-century plays that have a more tenuous and provocative relationship to that genre’s structure, themes, and politics—A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Tempest, Samson Agonistes. We will read these plays both as historical documents that capture distinctly early modern anxieties about violence and power in moments of political instability and as provocations that continue to force playgoers and readers to grapple with questions of revenge, violence and non-violence, power, forgiveness, and the capacity of literature to create the conditions for a more just world. Additional readings will include early modern writings on revenge by figures like John Calvin, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes as well as modern contributions from writers like Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Sam Harris. Throughout the course, we will attend to issues of free will and predestination, the (il)legitimacy of state violence, and theologies of forgiveness. This class satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.