Search Results

Acting Ensemble: TBA — DRA4395.01

Instructor: Jenny Rohn
Days & Time: Tu 7:00PM-10:00PM, W 2:10PM-5:50PM
Credits: 4

The Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski defined his theory of “poor theatre” as the theatre that values the body of the actor and its relation with the spectator. Poor Theatre used the simplest of sets, costumes,lighting and props requiring the actors to employ all of their skills to transform a space into other imaginative worlds.

Graduate Teaching Fellowship in Dance — DAN5304.01

Instructor: Levi Gonzalez
Days & Time:
Credits: 4

Graduate Teaching Fellows in Dance are integrated into the dance program as teaching assistants. In consultation with their academic advisors and the dance faculty, MFA candidates develop an assistantship schedule of approximately ten hours weekly; the courses they develop and teach are listed in the curriculum. All Teaching Fellows bring their own professional histories and contribute their own manners of teaching. Outside of listed class times, TBD, the Teaching Fellows will meet to discuss their courses with the designated faculty and with each other.

Statistics for Social Science — SOC4103.01

Instructor: Emily Waterman
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

In this course students will learn to use social science statistics to test their own research questions, while becoming more educated consumers of statistical analyses presented in research and news sources. Students will employ various inferential statistics techniques commonly used in social science, such as confidence intervals, t-tests, chi-square testing, correlation, ANOVA, and regression. Students will manage and analyze data using the Stata statistical software package.

Theater Games and Improvisation — DRA2123.01

Instructor: Shawtane Bowen
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

Whose class is this anyway? Yours! Improv is for everyone—just like life, it’s all about making it up as we go.

In this course, we’ll explore the fundamentals of improvisation through high-energy theater games, pattern and rhythm exercises, and ensemble-building activities. We’ll dive into character, object, and environment work while staying grounded, truthful, and spontaneous.

The Jazz Age Revisited — LIT2304.01

Instructor: Ben Anastas
Days & Time: M/W 8:00AM-9:50AM
Credits: 4

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age in 1931. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution fueled by new communications technology, mass popular entertainment, Jazz and the Blues, and a bold “collaborative energy” (Ann Douglas) between the Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the predominantly white figures who were grouped together as the Lost Generation.

Lives of Quiet Desperation: the Transcendentalists vs. America — LIT2420.01

Instructor: Ben Anastas
Days & Time: M/Tu 7:00PM-8:50PM
Credits: 4

In this course we will undertake a comprehensive survey of American Transcendentalism through a close examination of the major writings from this tumultuous period. We will read the major figures (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau), as well as a host of lesser known members of the Transcendental Club (Orestes Brownson, Ellery Channing, poet Jones Very). We will also read some of the most withering critiques that the movement inspired, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satiric novel of the Utopian Brook Farm community, The Blithedale Romance.

Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle East — MET4103.01

Instructor: Joseph Alpar
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

This course will explore the construction and experience of gender and sexuality in the Middle East through a performative lens. Drawing on research in ethnomusicology, queer and gender studies, anthropology and Middle Eastern history, the course will examine performance (music, dance, theater, poetry and more) as a process of representation, assertion, and sometimes transgression of sexuality and gender identities. This course will delve into the ways that performance, gender, and sexuality relate to ethnicity, nationalism, modernity, colonialism, and religion.

Critical Dance Processes: Action Studies — DAN2509B.01

Instructor: Shayla-Vie Jenkins
Days & Time: W 2:10PM-4:00PM, Th 1:40PM-3:30PM
Credits: 4

This course gives students the opportunity to encounter, participate in and design choreographic practices with an emphasis on the vast approaches to process and artistic research that are current and emergent in the expanded field of dance. The course challenges students to develop relationships to performance/performative action as research. We will engage practices where seeing and being seen by each other are central, studying the ways in which witnessing one another in process stimulates and deepens learning.

Neuroscience — BIO4437.01

Instructor: Blake Jones
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

This rigorous course provides a comprehensive introduction of the nervous system, including its structure, function, and development. Students will explore the principles of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow neurons and other specialized nervous cells to detect, encode, and transmit information; including signaling, synaptic transmission, and neuroplasticity.

GANAS — APA4154.01

Instructor: Jonathan Pitcher
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

In terms of public action, Ganas remains a community-driven, cross-cultural association that offers students volunteer opportunities to engage with the predominantly undocumented Latine migrant worker population. We maintain relationships with local organizations and members while developing new ones, along with more conventional classes and readings. Over the past couple of years, it has ballooned into a range of simultaneous activities that are seemingly happening all of the time, with students very much at the center of said impetus.

Language Documentation, Revitalization, and Reclamation — LIN4115.01

Instructor: Alexia Fawcett
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

This course addresses the theories, methods, ethics, and actual outcomes of language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation work. Students will examine the causes and consequences of language endangerment, strategies for revitalization, and community-led initiatives in reclaiming linguistic and cultural heritage. Case studies from around the world will provide insight into real-world applications of language work and the diversity in form that this work takes depending on context.

Framed? Literature Heroines on Screen — FRE4809.01

Instructor: Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

French literature and film have always reciprocally inspired one another – as early as 1897, Lumière represented the main characters of Hugo’s Les Misérables. This course will offer students the opportunity to analyze literary representations of women and their film adaptations in terms of intermediality and intertextuality. Adaptations will include: La Princesse de Clèves (La Fayette/Sauder), La Religieuse (Diderot/Rivette), La Noire de… (Sembène/Sembène), La Prisonnière/La Captive (Proust/Akerman). Students will focus on various adaptation strategies and approaches.

The Scriptorium: What Is Culture? — WRI2168.01

Instructor: Alex Creighton
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

The Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” is a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with writing and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we work to create new habits and productive strategies for analytical writing.

Rakugo and Humor: The Art of Storytelling — JPN4505.01

Instructor: Ikuko Yoshida
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

Rakugo is one of the traditional Japanese art and storytelling entertainment that became extremely popular during the Edo period (1603-1868).  Rakugo is a rather unique storytelling performance because a storyteller sits on a seat on the stage called “Ǵdz” and tells humorous stories without standing up from the seat.  Moreover, the storytellers narrate and play various characters by changing their voice, pitch, tone, facial expressions, and physical movements. 

Linear Algebra: An Introduction — MAT2482.01

Instructor: Joe Mundt
Days & Time: T/Th 6:30PM-8:30PM
Credits: 4

Together with calculus, linear algebra is one of the foundations of higher-level mathematics and its applications. This is NOT just the algebra you know from high school. There are several perspectives one can take on linear algebra: it is a method for handling large systems of linear equations, it is a theory of linear geometry (including in dimensions larger than three), it is matrix algebra, and it is a theoretical structure that appears throughout mathematics, physics, computer science, and statistics.

Sets and Structures — MAT2121.01

Instructor: Andrew McIntyre
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics underwent a vast expansion, into new, exciting, and increasingly counter-intuitive realms. The subject risked mystification and mutual incomprehensibility between experts in different sub-fields. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of French mathematicians, under the pseudonym Bourbaki, undertook an ultimately successful program to use the foundation of set theory to put all of mathematics onto a common conceptual and logical foundation.

Critical Dance Studies — DAN4830B.01

Instructor: Emily Wexler
Days & Time: W 10:00AM-11:50AM & 7:00PM-8:50PM
Credits: 4

This course looks through multiple modes of questioning, research, and a critically theoretical lens to put into consideration the complex ways that dance shapes and reflects our lives. We will look to scholars, artists, thinkers, and ourselves to process the elliptical paths people take to understand material existence through the relationality of dance. We will try to bring a scope of questioning to regard dance as an artistic practice which illuminates the continuum of time rooted in the lived phenomena of recognizing aliveness as it is lived.

Critical Dance Processes: Research Studies — DAN4801B.01

Instructor: Donna Faye Burchfield
Days & Time: W 2:10PM-4:00PM, Th 1:40PM-3:30PM
Credits: 4

This course utilizes a seminar and workshop format focusing on conceptual, relational, and material frameworks of the choreographic. Through shaping a bibliographic course archive, we will source current developments within the field of contemporary art making. The class investigations, projects and discussions will yield imaginative and experimental directions for student’s development towards a senior thesis project.

Senior Thesis Workshop — DAN4803B.01, section 1

Instructor: Jesse Zaritt
Days & Time: W 8:30AM-9:50AM, F 2:10PM-4:00PM
Credits: 4

This course is designed to be the culmination of the BFA program for all dance majors. Each student will propose a thesis project, develop goals and objectives for the semester, and present their work. Modes of practicing, situating and expressing thesis project research will be mobilized and extended through ongoing critical dialogue. We will attend to, in practice, the urgent questions facing our lives and the field of dance and performance. 

Senior Thesis Workshop — DAN4803B.02, section 2

Instructor: Shayla-Vie Jenkins
Days & Time: W 8:30AM-9:50AM, F 2:10PM-4:00PM
Credits: 4

This course is designed to be the culmination of the BFA program for all dance majors. Each student will propose a thesis project, develop goals and objectives for the semester, and present their work. Modes of practicing, situating and expressing thesis project research will be mobilized and extended through ongoing critical dialogue. We will attend to, in practice, the urgent questions facing our lives and the field of dance and performance. 

Environment and Public Action — APA2122.01

Instructor: David Bond
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

Today it is clear that the environment matters. In activism and scholarship and public policy, the environment has become a potent (if sometimes obligatory) point of reference. Less attention, however, has focused on the emergence of the environment itself as a converging field of action for advocacy, science, and statecraft. In this seminar, we will reflect not only on what we know of the environment but also on how we came to know the environment.