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Vampires are everywhere. This course hunts the dangerous and subversive figure of the vampire across a variety of pages, stages and screens. From raucous stage comedies, to lush cinematic epics and politically savvy television--and all the Draculas that have come and gone in between--we will explore how the vampire changes with medium, period, and genre. Students will be asked to consider why vampires emerge in particular historical and contemporary moments, and what cultural anxieties they articulate, as well as how the vampire is constructed, appropriated, and performed. By engaging with course texts, students will develop strategies for attentive reading and thoughtful writing. Assignments will vary in style and format, and will focus on critical thinking, preparation, clear prose, and papers structured around well-supported claims.

Ours is a food-obsessed culture. Whether we focus on diet and health, or binge-watch competitive cooking shows, or explore cuisine in relation to regional, racial, or ethnic identity, many of us either eat to live or live to eat. Television producers, investigative journalists, bloggers, and cultural critics feed our obsession, generating a burgeoning body of food-related prose and programming both informative and entertaining. Through readings from Gourmet and Eating Well magazines, screenings of Beat Bobby Flay and The Great British Baking Show, and airings of Samin Nosrat's Home Cooking, among others, we will examine together how food suffuses our media and constitutes our Food Nation. Assignments will include food memoirs, food histories, food podcasts, food criticism, and food reporting.

How does love shape an environment? How do we perceive the space where love ends and the environment begins, or can we? How are relationships co-creating space? With what can we cultivate a greater intimacy? These are some of the questions we will explore creatively and rhetorically this semester. We will consider love from the theoretical framework of black feminist, queer, and indigenous thought to expand the concept from western romantic notions to explore intimacies of various formations-platonic, communal, familial, spiritual, natural--through the lens of ecopoetics. I use the term 'environment' to invoke scene/setting, natural/ecological perspectives, and interpersonal space. We will engage with varieties of text--poetry to performance art to film--and have 6 writing assignments, 5 essays and 1 experimental work, with opportunities for revision.

From the Bronx to LA, hip-hop journeys from coast to coast and across oceans. What are the special analytical problems of hip-hop’s dissemination? How can we resolve the contradictions that arise when diasporic groups express themselves through hip-hop? This course is for students who are open to thinking critically about hip-hop’s contradictions while uplifting the culture’s beauty and imagining possibilities. We explore hip-hop’s pillars for answers (DJing, MCing, graffiti writing, breakdancing, and the pursuit of knowledge). We will listen to music, watch films, and read theoretical texts. Key authors include Jeff Chang, Paul Gilroy, and Michelle Wright; key artists: James Brown, Beat Junkies DJ crew, Triple Edge, and La Differénce. Writers will sharpen their skills to articulate strong, original arguments via five formal essays.

In high school, I wasn’t allowed to use “I” in an essay. But now that I’m in university, “I argue” or “We observe” or something similar is in almost every article or book I’ve been assigned. When or how did “I” enter into an academic argument? When did or how do “I” enter into the university? For those of us who have entered into major spaces from backgrounds considered minor, our class seeks to critically understand the ways minoritarian people have and will make space in academia. Through exercises in “personalized” writing genre like performance reviews and conducting interviews, this course finds meanings in scholarly relations to people, texts, events, and performances through theoretical frameworks and turns these findings into cogent arguments.

The Media Production Lab course is a series of self-contained lecture/workshops on various topics in the production of film and video on-set and on-location. The workshops will be hands on experience with cameras, lighting and sound equipment, exploring the technique of cinematography as well as, lighting, sound, and grip techniques for the studio and in the field. We will cover specific areas such as dollies and rigging, location sound, and production protocol. Open to all skill levels.

In what ways do movies reflect our world? In what ways to movies limit our imagination? Can we learn about ourselves and the real world from fiction in films? And if so, what is it that we learn? What do movies communicate? Can you misinterpret a film? Does it matter what the filmmaker intended? How do we evaluate the truth of what films say? How can we answer the questions they ask us? This course will explore philosophical questions and themes taken up through film and ask these philosophical questions about the genre itself.

This technology lab will provide students with a foundation of the production process through experiential learning of scenographic practices. Students will learn about the technical production processes as they pertain too: scenery fabrication and installation, properties fabrication, costume fabrication, and lighting installation (primarily lighting for live performance).

Students participating in a PMA creative project led by a faculty member or PMA Guest Artist can earn PMA 1611 credit.

The objective of this course is to introduce students to a core topic that unites the tracks between performing and media studies: story. Throughout the semester students will explore the structures of film, television, and new media through the lens of storytelling. We will also examine how each of these mediums function at both the level of the individual consumer as well as the level of global society.

The Student Laboratory Theatre Company (SLTC) is a group of student-actors who earn credit by acting in two or three scenes directed by students taking PMA 4880.

What makes us laugh, and what doesn't? How does laughter vary from person to person, place to place, and across time? What work does laughter perform? Is it contagious? What does it mean to have (or lack) a sense of humor? What is laughter's relationship to pleasure and pain, health and wellness? In this course, we will experiment with the art of making funny. Students will explore the science and psychology of humor, construct laughter through language and the body, analyze jokes (to learn how to tell them), and investigate the role of humor in a democratic society.

The Colloquium provides opportunities for exchange, reflection, discussion of relevant concepts, and extended engagement with the media objects made in a variety of Making Media courses.

This course is designed to offer students a broad, foundational introduction to the mission of the Department of Performing and Media Arts. With a focus both on making artistic work in mediated forms and in live performance and on the critical methods for studying such artwork, we explore a variety of topics and concepts, from composition and gesture to sound and movement-and beyond. Joined by visiting guest experts from all across the PMA faculty, the instructors usher students through a range of approaches to creative authorship, design, embodied performance, history, and theory. Organized around a series of keywords, including adaptation, representation, transformation, and world-building, the course also foregrounds ways of thinking about and with categories of identity and social relations, such as ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality.

Introductory modern technique intended for students with some dance training. Material covered includes specific spinal and center work with attention to rhythm, design, and movement expression.

Contemporary Movement Practices is an intermediate-level studio immersion in contemporary concert dance genres and methodologies germane to the 21st-century field. In-depth modules will extract and explore most notably from Bartenieff Fundamentals? and Countertechnique?, as well as ripen the sensibility and capacity for current trends and approaches to dynamic floorwork, such as Flying-Low?. The objective is to cultivate and champion a dynamic anatomy and body consciousness built on learned perception, sensation, and organization. This is achieved through the experiential research and framing of Total Body Connectivity, which is based on the perennial work of Irmgard Bartenieff: Breath, Head/Tail, Core/Distal, Upper/Lower Body, Body Halves, and Diagonal.

The training and practice of skills for the spontaneous collaborative composition of movement performance. Students hone their abilities to invent and respond to each other and their environment to produce dances that engage their audience. This course coaxes inspiration, seeking to make it reliable and to keep it surprising. It offers the possibility of training one's movement instincts to respond relevantly and with spontaneity.

Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work. Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography.

Choreography and cinematography are kindred spirits. This class explores their evolving relationship within the interdisciplinary realm of screendance. From Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering photographic studies of motion to the iconic dance films of Hollywood's golden age in the 1930s, and from the avant-garde works of Maya Deren to the incorporation of dance in commercials and Instagram Reels, we will trace the trajectory of screendance. We will examine various aesthetic approaches to the form. Through these explorations, we aim to understand the process and significance of creating dances through the medium of film.

In Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, Africa is a place of nobility, where even lions are at peace with lambs. In contrast, Leonardo DeCaprio's Blood Diamond is a violent look at the role the demand for diamonds has played in destabilizing mineral-rich African countries. But if Hollywood has long been concerned with depicting Africa in particular ways, African filmmakers are at the same time creating their own stories. Popular and scholarly film critics are also contributing to the battle over who speaks for Africa. In this course we will explore these competing images of Africa, questions of imagination versus reality, and the extent to which artists should, if at all, be responsible to the subject of their art.

This undergraduate course introduces the formal and topical innovations that African cinema has experienced since its inception in the 1960s. Sections will explore, among others, Nollywood, sci-fi, and ideological cinema. Films include: Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako, Mohamed Camara's Dakan, Djibril Diop Mambety's Touki-Bouki, Cheikh Oumar Sissoko's Finzan, Anne-Laure Folly's Women with Open Eyes, Ousmane Sembene's Camp de Thiaroye, Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Quartier Mozart.

In this course, we will explore over one hundred years of Japanese cinema—one of the most prominent and diverse global film industries—from silent comedies to J-Horror, “ramen westerns” to Studio Ghibli. You will gain a thorough grounding in film vocabulary and tools of cinematic analysis, allowing for deep investigations of gender, genre, history, and the connections between film and other media in modern and contemporary Japan. All films will have English subtitles, and all readings will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required.

This course introduces Korean popular culture in global context. Beginning with cultural forms of the late Choson period, the course will also examine popular culture during the Japanese colonial period, the post-war period, the democratization period, and contemporary Korea. Through analysis of numerous forms of media, including films, television, music, literature, and music videos, the course will explore the emergence of the “Korean Wave” in East Asia and its subsequent global impact. In our examination of North and South Korean cultural products, we will discuss theories of transnationalism, globalization, and cultural politics. The course will consider the increasing global circulation of Korean popular culture through new media and K-Pop’s transculturation of forms of American music such as rap. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is required.

An introduction to media studies from a global, “planetary,” comparatist perspective, at the intersection of languages, cultures, discourses, disciplines, and materials representing a range of contexts and approaches world-wide, this course will explore the historical and theoretical foundations of the current landscape of media economies and ecologies, and the ways that landscape continues to be shaped by contemporary developments in technology, culture, and politics. Among our topics and concerns will be the persistence of questions of genre in cinema, television, video, the film industry, journalism and digital media, the emergence and evolution of social media platforms and streaming services, and the increasing cultural, social, economic, and political impacts and implications of AI.

What does it mean to call a film is Jewish? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews-actors, directors, screenwriters, composers-play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class-an average of one per week-and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

The importance of sports to American society and popular culture cannot be denied, and this seminar will study sports films' vital significance in representing the intersection of sports, history, and social identities. This seminar explores how the role of competition between individuals and teams in sports films relate to the competing discourses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in society at large. Additionally, we will examine how social issues are understood in sporting terms and concepts, such as: the hero and the underdog; urban and rural; natural talent versus hard work; and the individual versus team identity.

Contemporary World Cinema offers an introduction to some of the most acclaimed international films of the 21st century. We will consider narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental films from multiple national and transnational contexts. We will examine both dominant and alternative forms of storytelling, how funding institutions, festivals, and awards shape the global circulation of films, how genres get transformed internationally, and how films intervene in how we think about specific social issues and political contexts. Specific films and case studies may vary from year to year.

From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies - and in particular Hollywood - have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino).

Learn what it means to run a live show. Participate as part of a team to ensure all the elements work together and on time. Learn the intricacies of collaborating with a production group to create a unified artistic vision. Program lighting, sound, or video boards, or participate as a dresser, stage crew member, or assistant stage manager.

This lab will give students practical experience as an assistant stage manager in the organization and management of a theatrical or mediated production; in rehearsals, in technical rehearsals as the scenographic elements are implemented, and in performance or filming for a fully supported department production under the supervision of the staff stage manager. The course can only be applied to a fully supported department production with a full rehearsal period and performance.

An introduction to Asian American performance, this course will consider both historical and contemporary examples and forms through the analytics of Asian American studies, theatre studies, and performance studies. Throughout the semester, we will pay equal attention to various forms of performance - plays and other staged performances, performance art, as well as everyday performances - as well as both primary sources and theoretical/critical readings. Students will be introduced to key concepts of Asian American performance studies, such as Orientalism, yellow face, radicalized accents, and the performing body, and will begin to not only map a history of Asian American performance but also situate contemporary examples within this tradition.

This course introduces students to basic two-dimensional techniques of makeup design and application for the stage including corrective, old age, youth, likeness, cross gender, and animal makeups. The process of stylizing imagery in makeup design is explored. Students will also work with false facial hair.

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musical-and how in turn musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent.

This course introduces students to ancient Greek drama, with a particular focus on the genre of tragedy and its relation to the cultural, political, and performance context of Athens in the 5th century BC. Students will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in English translation and explore how they address key themes such as gender, racialization, slavery, war, mourning, trauma, empathy, and justice. Students will also study how contemporary artists, writers, and communities have adapted and restaged Greek drama, transforming and animating these ancient scripts across various media (theater, film, literature, etc.) to speak to complex and urgent social issues today (e.g., state/institutional violence; sexual violence; racism and xenophobia; queer bodies and desires; mental health; disability and caregiving).

In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

This course aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central and continuing place in Renaissance culture and beyond. We will read poetry and primarily plays representing the shape of Shakespeare's career as it moves through comedies, histories, tragedies, and a romance. Specific plays include The Two Gentleman of Verona, Richard II, Henry IV (Part 1), Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will focus on dramatic forms (genres), Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions. While we will view some scenes from film adaptations, the main focus is on careful close interaction with the language of the plays. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Language is a skin, the critic Roland Barthes once wrote: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. Sexual desire has a history, even a literary history, which we will examine through an introductory survey of European dramatic literature from the Ancient Greeks to the present, as well as classic readings in sexual theory, including Plato, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theory.

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the methods employed in media arts, sound and performance. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the strategies and historical context of these disciplines. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary studio setting with a specific focus on one of these areas. Through hands-on experience, they will delve into contemporary artistic practices, honing their technical skills to develop and realize their creative projects. Potential topics covered include video and animation, digital image production, sound art, performance art, and movement

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

This course is an introduction to Latina/o/x Performance investigating the historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/xs in performance and media. Throughout the semester, students will critically examine central themes and issues that inform the experiences and (re) presentations of Latina/o/xs in the United States. How is latinidad performed? In situating the class around Latina/o/x, as both an umbrella term and an enacted social construction, we will then turn our attention to (re) presentations of latinidad within different genres of cultural expressions.

An introduction to the actor's technique and performance skills, exploring the elements necessary to begin training as an actor, i.e., observation, concentration, and imagination. Focus is on physical and vocal exercises, improvisation, and text and character. There is required play reading, play attendance, and some scene study.

Independent study allows students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

What do we learn when we turn an ear to the commons? Who determines what sounds are desirable or undesirable in a community and what are the stakes of that negotiation when it comes to public space? This seminar will study the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim space, and shape their public spaces. We will engage the work of artists who have called our attention to the social aspects of listening. We will listen to public art projects, films, concerts, field recordings, installations, informal sonic practices, and political interventions as we read about the contested control of public space.

Classical Dance Technique is a studio course for the practice and performance of classical concert dance techniques, principles, and elements, including but not limited to Cecchetti and Vaganova ballet methods.

This course explores dance across multiple stages-TikTok videos, concert halls, streets-to assess how people create, sustain, and challenge markers of difference (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class). How is dance appreciation different from appropriation? What are dancing avatars in video games allowed to do that real persons are not? We will examine genres such as k-pop, hip hop, salsa, modern dance, and ballroom as we develop the tools necessary for viewing dance, analyzing it, and understanding its place in larger social, cultural, historical, and political structures. We will explore how markers of difference affect the practice and the reception of dance forms, and, in turn, how dance helps shape representations of identities.

In this course, we interrogate how immigration debates are staged and experiences of belonging are redefined through performance. The categories of undocumented, illegal, displaced, and exile collide on international and national stages when governmental bodies decide who gets to be a migrant and under what terms. We assess how bodies marked culturally and legally as aliens use performance to navigate complex migration laws and dangerous social terrains that appear to be shifting and solidifying at the same time. We consider performances on stage, as well as performance in a broader understanding. We examine visual, linguistic, and performative representations of migrant experiences. We analyze and write about performances that deal with issues of migration beyond economic and security models.

How does the social production of dance reflect its historical context? Is dance inherently political? What is the meaning of the beautiful in dance? Beginning with 16th century court dances, we will explore how aesthetics have been aligned both with and against politics in various periods, across borders, and genres of the performing body, looking at dance as insider's diplomacy and outsider's rebellion. Is modern dance a democratization of the art form? Is postmodern dance a discourse of traditions? This course is designed to promote a critical appreciation of dance, its values and its ambitions, by developing a historical and cultural understanding.

“Performance as Protest” examines the art and act of performance as an influential model for social activism, civil disobedience, and community mobilization. Students delve into the works of historical and contemporary artists and cultural figures who radicalized their creative practices and platforms to promote social advocacy and revolution. Ranging from participatory mass actions to intimate personal storytelling, how can a performance disrupt a space, a consciousness, a culture? From protest anthems to pop lyrics, from to pop-up theater to organized sit-ins, modules explore the performing body as a site of healing, empowerment, and resistance to systemic injustices and erasures. Students research and respond to a diverse, international constellation of manifestos, manifestations, and their placemaking through writing, building, and activating their own socially-engaged bodies of work.

Site-Specific to Immersive Dance Theater: Choreographing for Unconventional Formats and Spaces is a research-to-practice course reconsidering the function, philosophy, and reality of an evolving stage. What is the practice and purpose of performance beyond the traditional proscenium? How does the meaning of choreography operate and expand as its format alters and transforms? How does the performer properly exercise and prepare themselves to address their work in new and different surroundings? Audiences? Students will confront and respond to the psychological, political, historical, and communal orientation and potential of dance in non-traditional spaces. Using exercises based on reactive versus relational movement, students will distinguish between the making of site-sympathetic, site-specific, site-adaptable, environmental, installation, interactive, interventional, and immersive modes of dance performance, production, and world-making

This is a studio design course that examines and implements dance/movement as a mechanism for community-based and community-driven art practices centered on collective change, justice, and joy. Studying and practicing skills and frameworks for action research, archival, identity and place-making, and participatory meaning-making and production, students will endeavor in a collaborative community art practice of local import and partnership, either here at Cornell or within greater Ithaca.

Making Dance on Camera is an interdisciplinary laboratory course where students acquire and apply fundamental camera, direction, editing, and production skills through the context and collaboration of dance/movement choreography. With studies and exercises ranging from dance film and cinema to music videos, screendance, and new media and digital platforms, students will develop both hands-on and conceptual skills to produce original projects in gaining a deeper, personal understanding of the practice, power, history, theory, and potential for the dancing/moving body and its story on screen.

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, the mafia has been the subject of numerous films over the course of 70 years, so many in fact that one might well speak of a mafia obsession in American popular culture. Drawing upon a large number of American and Italian films, this course examines the cultural history of the mafia through film. We will explore issues related to the figure of the gangster, the gender and class assumptions that underpin it, and the portrayal-almost always stereotypical-of Italian-American immigrant experience that emerges from our viewings. The aim will be to enhance our understanding of the role of mafia plays in American and Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Film screenings will include Little Caesar, Scarface, Shame of the Nation, The Godfather Parts I and II, Goodfellas, The Funeral, Donnie Brasco, episodes from The Sopranos, and Gomorrah.

This course surveys the histories, aesthetics, and politics of music and virtuality, focusing on contemporary manifestations of “virtual music” since the 2010s. We will learn about how music is created, performed, and consumed in virtual environments, focusing specifically on questions of embodiment and identity. Case studies will include virtual and augmented reality concerts; musical performances in video games; virtual bands; and Web3/blockchain music. We will pay particular attention to the ties between virtual worlds, musical aesthetics, and queer and trans community building. Students will learn how to conduct digital musical ethnography and will complete participant observation-based final projects in a virtual music community.

This course examines both mainstream representations of and independent media made by, for, and about Asians and Asian Americans throughout U.S. cultural history. In this course, we will analyze popular cultural genres & forms such as: documentary & narrative films, musical theatre & live performance revues, television, zines & blogs, YouTube/online performances, karaoke & cover performances, stand-up comedy, and popular music. Employing theories of cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies, we will discuss the cultural, discursive, and political impact of these various popular cultural forms and representations from the turn of the 20th century to the present.

This course will explore approaches to the Deaf experience taken by Deaf artists from the 1900s to the present. Analysis of chosen works of Deaf art, film and theater will illuminate the expression of the Deaf narrative through symbolism, themes, and genres. We will examine the interaction of these works in multiple social, historical, cultural and political contexts and how they have contributed to the construction of Deaf culture and identity. This course will be taught in advanced ASL, with emphasis on the production and comprehension of academic ASL.

Anchoring the East and West coasts, New York and Los Angeles have been celebrated and excoriated in films. On the edge literally and metaphorically, these cities seem to be about competing visions of urban form, culture, and modernity. The iconic forms of New York (tenements and skyscrapers) and of Los Angeles (highways and suburban homes) have fascinated film makers from the nineteenth century to the present day. We will both evoke and complicate the contrasts between New York and Los Angeles by mapping the intersections of each city with cinema. We explore how the urban experience gives rise to particular cinematic forms and how cinematic styles are translated or not into urban design.

What role should moving images play in debates about transnational migration, one of the principal factors re-shaping communities and communication today? Focusing on cinema from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with primary examples drawn from Germany, France, the United States, Italy, Denmark—in relation to Algeria, Senegal, Iran, Mexico, Korea, China, Benin, Turkey, Syria—this course explores how film re-imagines the fabric of social life affected by migration. Seminar-style discussion of films are paired with contextual readings and readings from film studies. Key concepts such as borders and movement, ethnoscapes and citizenship, cityscapes and place-making, mediascapes and personhood, lawfulness and illegality, labor and leisure, language and speech, art and perception will guide our discussions of films and readings.

This course explores the rich and diverse history of African American filmmaking. Focusing on films written and/or directed by African Americans, this seminar traces the history of filmmaking from the silent era to the present day. In exploring Black cultural production and creative expression, students will consider the ways in which film is used as a medium of protest, resistance, and cultural affirmation. We will look at films through the critical lenses of race and representation in American cinema while locating our analysis within larger frameworks of Hollywood's representation of African Americans and various cultural and social movements within local and global contexts.

This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how new media forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.

This course is designed to explore the varied ways that race and gender intersect with the media industry. While common industrial logic suggests these descriptors of identity are not a factor in terms of its business models and assumptions, the reality is much more complex. Race, as well as gender, class, and sexuality, play large parts in how media industries function and in informing and shaping audience expectations and assumptions. Thus, the time spent in class will largely consist of deconstructing several media industries, including film, television, and new media to show just how race, as well as other modes of identity such as gender, sexuality, and class, operate within it.

The objective of this course is two-pronged: first, you will be introduced to the world of independent cinema through an intensive study of arthouse/experimental/avant garde cinema and documentary. Second, we will explore how the film festival as an exhibition hub and marketplace operates as a cultural site that legitimizes and maintains the prestige of independent film.

The massive success of contemporary novel and film adaptations like Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey as well as television series such as Scandal have generated new interest in media targeted to female audiences. Historically considered a low-form genre, women's media was not considered a legitimate object of academic study until the 1970s and 1980s when feminist media scholars shed crucial light on low form texts such as daytime soaps, Harlequin romance novels, and family melodramas, insisting that each impacted female audiences in a multitude of surprising and significant ways. Through an analysis of historical and contemporary readings, films, and televisual texts, we will explore how media designed for women specifically targets women viewers. We will identify the current debates around women's spectatorship. We will evaluate and offer a multitude of pleasures.

This class is designed to introduce students to ways of understanding and evaluating the specificity of film, television, and emerging media.

While there has been much said in the news about reality television’s adverse effects on society, our class asks, “which kind”? Reality television has been around in some form or fashion for the last 50 years. Considering reality television as a mode of production, we will survey the different genres of reality television and assess its influence on society from a variety of standpoints: industry, economics, and culture.

Currently, society’s notion of what defines good representation revolves around metrics of positive and negative as well as an unquestioned ability to quantify how many different looking bodies appear on screen. But what if representation requires larger, more developed metrics than those? What if the bodies on screen charged with representing us also felt meaningful to us as audiences and viewers? Through an examination of race and gender through film and televisual mediation, this course explores a variety of strategies and tactics designed to take representation from solely visual to fully embodied experiences.

This course places the global film and television industry within the economic and historical context of its production, circulation, and consumption. Students explore how the aesthetic systems at work in these industries should not be separated from their underlying commercial ambitions. With readings from major film scholars and industry personnel, students learn about the workings of Hollywood revealing the delicate balance between industry and art, between entertainment and commercial enterprise, between “show” and “business.”

This course explores the rich performing and media arts history and practices in Los Angeles, California. Students explore how the city’s cultural institutions have been shaped by the city’s history and evolving identity. Engaged in a multidisciplinary conversation about live and mediated art practices, this course considers how Los Angeles functions as an epicenter for global performing and media industries. Balancing readings from film and media, theater, dance, and performance studies, students learn about the various artist figures, communities, and movements that shape the City of Angels.

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

A course that creates films through various cameras and tools. Using everything from film still photography to 16mm film and digital cameras, students will make diverse and experimental films. This class encourages students to step outside the traditional boundaries of cinema and create new and experimental projects.

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

This course explores the fundamentals of writing for the screen. The course format will include creative writing assignments, class discussion, screenings and workshop. Students will produce short film scripts, film analysis papers and feedback on student work. The semester will culminate in a revision of a longer film script and presentation.

This course explores the history, theory, and craft of writing for film, television, and other narrative media (including documentary, reality television, interactive media, etc.). We consider the vital elements of storytelling along with structural principles, evolving industrial pressures and practices, and emerging non-linear ideas, with a regular line of up of screenings, guest speakers and practicing writers. This course includes both analytic and creative-writing assignments.

Today, the legacy of the Middle Ages can be found everywhere, from the game of chess to Game of Thrones, the parliament to the university, the Crusades to the Vikings, the nostalgia for tradition to the very concept of modernity. This course explores the function of the medieval past through the lens of modern visual culture, as part of an emerging field known as “Medievalism.” Along with readings of classic theories of Medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Panofsky, Bazin, McLuhan, Eco), screenings will put auteur films (Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Ran) in dialogue with popular culture (from Monthy Python to A Knight’s Tale) in order to raise the question of a Global Middle Ages.

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

What is a comic? How might comics attend to complex historical, social, and political topics? How do comics facilitate a coming to terms with the past or function as an activist medium—spurring on political and cultural shifts? Given this great variety of comics from Germanophone locales this course engages with comics as a key literary form and one that provides a deep engagement with histories, cultures, activisms, and representations thereof. Our readings will include queer/trans comics and zines, early text/image works preceding the comic form, and webcomics on decolonization projects and fantastical places. We will also read comics scholarship and historical texts that will provide a solid foundation from which to approach these literary works. As a way of immersing ourselves into the world of comics, each student will create their own comic over the course of our class—building upon the formal components we locate in class texts. (Drawing skills are not required! Come as you are.) As comics have their own medium-specific vocabulary for visual and textual analysis, we will also spend time building the skills and vocabulary necessary for analyzing the comics we read.

An introduction to filmmaking, students will learn to create compelling characters, as well as develop strong storytelling skills through basic character and story development and breakdown, cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. Over the course of the semester, students will deconstruct and analyze visual culture in an effort to learn effective techniques in visual storytelling. Students will write, shoot and edit a series of dramatic narrative exercises, participating in the preproduction to post production processes. Students will collaborate and rotate through various roles. The course will culminate with the screening of the various course projects, in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Documentary Filmmaking will equip. students with the knowledge to produce quality short, socially and culturally conscious, documentaries that express an interesting story. This course covers the aesthetic and technical fundamentals of directing and producing documentaries. It provides working tools to plan and tell your stories creatively, collaboratively, artistically and professionally. The goal is to produce quality productions designed as a stepping stone to more advanced projects. In the process, we will deeply discuss the principles, history, and ethics of documentary filmmaking.

Film is a language that expresses the director's idea and cinematography is a key component of the language of film. You need to develop visual storytelling skills by blending lights, camera movements, frame composition, and color palette to use this film language to convey your idea. In this class we will learn the concept of visual strategies in filmmaking and cameras and lighting and research the various aspects of film cinematography.

Based on previous coursework and experience, students may be offered the opportunity to participate as an apprentice in a mentored PMA creative project. The apprentice experience and number of credits will be defined by the needs of the project, the area of study, and the mentor. Apprentice roles may include Assistant Director, Assistant Designer, Assistant Choreographer, Dramaturg, or others, as determined by the mentor. Successful completion of this course is necessary for application to the AUPR program.

A course working on the creation and development of characters on paper. The character designs explored will not be bound by the limits of the human body or physical costumes, but rather will push the limits of character imagery to that which could ultimately be achieved in print illustration, sequential art, traditional animation, digital special effects and animation, video gaming, various forms of puppetry and animatronic forms, depending on the student's area of interest. (Students will not engage in animation, or three-dimensional crafting of characters, but rather will develop the design content that could then be applied to these forms).

Introduction to draping and patterning basics followed by research, experimentation, and translation of historic silhouettes and structure. Previous basic machine sewing experience helpful, but not required.

This course explores the evolution of western dress from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the early twentieth century by focusing on areas of the human anatomy and how each area has been presented, comported, supported, augmented, confined, or manipulated in costume. Rather than indulging in the strange, we will endeavor to come to an understanding of the motivation for each gesture or the catalyst for each phenomenon in the context of the period, taking into consideration social, political, economic, environmental, technological, and aesthetic influences.

The Scenic and Lighting designers are responsible for creating 'the visual world' of the play. From sketches to models, from groundplans to light plots, this intro-level hands-on, project-based course introduces students to the scenic and lighting design processes through text analysis, visual research, beginning drafting practices, model building, light laboratories and beyond. Intended to provide a foundation in scenic and lighting design practices, the teachings of this course will have future applications in all performance disciplines including Theatre, Dance, Film, and Television.

An exploration of the scene design process for the live theatre. Students will execute design projects employing various media (e.g. sketches, paper models, computer graphics) that examine how elements of stage craft, architecture, and interior design can be employed to support and enhance the action of dramatic texts.

Design of costumes for theatre and film, concentrating on script and character analysis, period research, design elements, figure drawing and rendering skills, and an understanding of production style.

This course will explore unconventional costume designs for theatre, dance, and mediated performance. It will deal with the special considerations found in some plays and performance pieces, such as the theatricalization of non-human subjects (animals, plants, elements, magical creatures, etc.), the visualization of music, or the support or enhancement of movement. It will cover alternative ways to create character through costume, make-up, masks, and wearable forms of puppetry. Students will be responsible for script reading, character analysis, written concepts, visual research, and rendering of design sketches for three projects, as well as other exercises.

Covering the basics of digital audio, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics and sound design, as they apply to theatre, film and music production. Students create soundscapes for text and moving image using ProTools software.

What can sound tell us about culture, power, and ideology? Does it echo the information given to us by images? Does the information translate across media? Or does sonic information speak in a fundamentally different way? Does it tell us about other subjects or does it tell us information that contradicts what vision describes? What do we have to gain when we sharpen our critical tools for interpreting the work of sound or recognizing the cultural values inherent in sonic communication? Critical Listening Strategies answers that last question with a necessarily interdisciplinary approach.

This course explores creative collaboration, examining effective methods for leading and participating in artist-teams across various disciplines. Students will study successful models of collective art-making, drawing insights from visual arts collectives, film crews, theatre ensembles, art studios, bands, and community art projects. The course covers historical approaches, contemporary best practices, and emerging collaborative techniques, offering a cross-disciplinary view of teamwork in the arts. Through analysis of case studies and class projects, students will develop skills for fostering productive creative partnerships, managing group dynamics, and navigating the challenges of collective authorship.

The pleasure of the text, Roland Barthes writes, is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas-for my body does not have the same ideas I do. What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas? In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

Jews have been on TV since the beginning of the medium - over 70 years - and have made decisions about how they are represented. What kind of Jews do we put on screen, and do they actually represent Jews in America? What about the representation of other ethnic and cultural groups? What can we learn from the history of Jewish television that might apply to Black, Latinx, Muslim, LGBTQ, Asian and other communities as they present themselves to the American public? Sitcom Jews uses media analysis, theoretical discussion, and student writing to examine a huge range of TV, starting with classic sitcoms (The Goldbergs (1948), All in the Family, and Bridget Loves Bernie), continuing through current Jewish TV shows (Broad City, Transparent, Curb Your Enthusiasm), and adding a range of ethnic television (The Jeffersons, Black-ish, Insecure, Ramy, Will & Grace, Never Have I Ever).

How have Irish playwrights reached out to the world, how do theatrical productions travel internationally, and how do dramatists adapt their work to local audiences in a global marketplace? We will journey with Lady Gregory onto American campuses, see Beckett staged in Sarajevo, and consider how contemporary playwrights reflect on cultural tensions within Ireland: debates about immigration and emigration, the influence of new media, and the social impact of global financial crises. What performance strategies are embedded in the mobility of exiles and emigres? What becomes of a National Theater in a transnational world? How are actors trained in Ireland today, and how does the Irish accent sound as it projects across borders? In addition to canonical and contemporary plays, we will consider dance and film performances.

After Rome's collapse, drama was gradually re-created from many sources: school-room debates, popular festivals, and, especially, religious liturgy. By the 17th century it was one of the most polished literary arts (and one of the sleaziest). This long span allows us to consider what happened in the middle. This course traces the residues of Roman drama and some rebeginnings of European drama, 10th to 13th centuries, then focuses mainly on late medieval drama in English in the 15th century, following that into the drama of the early Renaissance. We'll consider what became modern-and what was utterly unlike anything later. Discussion, lecture, regular writing, some experiments with production. English texts will be read in Middle English with lots of help; no previous knowledge required.

In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity. Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of meaning making that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century imitative works in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for recent parody. An emphasis on postmodern or contemporary performances and media that renovate images, ideas, and icons from modernism and modernity will unite our otherwise diverse efforts. Some of these efforts will also highlight what happens when an artist takes up a work made for one platform (for example, theatre, performance art, installation, cinema, television, the Web) and parodies it in another. Creators and works under consideration may range from Christopher Durang, Split Britches, and Pig Iron Theatre Company to The Simpsons, Cookie's Fortune, and Strindberg and Helium.

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of historical, cross-cultural, and transnational performance texts, theories, and practices; to motivate students to examine the broad social, political, cultural, and economic contexts in which performances take place; and to familiarize students with major methodologies and paradigms for the creation, spectatorship, and interpretation of performances.

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre.

How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?

Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others.

How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond? What role has politics played in the theatre? How has performance been used to examine concepts of identity, community, and nationality? And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present. We will focus on theatre that responds directly to moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements, Women's and Gender Equality Movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.

The course focuses on Shakespeare's middle to late plays, from the problem comedies, through the great tragedies and romances. While we will pay particular attention to questions of dramatic form (genre) and historical context (including ways in which the plays themselves call context into question), the primary concentration will be on careful close readings of the language of the play-texts, in relation to critical questions of subjectivity, power, and art. On the way, we will encounter problems of sexuality, identity, emotion, the body, family, violence, politics, God, the nation, nature and money (not necessarily in that order).

Practical exploration of the actor's craft through exercises in physical and psychological action, improvisation and scene study.

Class members will expand their acting skills via specific projects, approaches and methodologies of the instructors' choosing to develop scripted and/or original material for in-class study and presentation.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study the strategies that sound artists, composers, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers have employed to use Black sounds as a sign. We will explore intersections between sound and image throughout the African diaspora. Intersections in question include the place of sound art within different Black musical and visual traditions, Black music as a resource for painting and sculpture, the visual design of Black music projects, the Black soundscape and the built environment, acoustic ecology and mapping in Black communities, and African diasporic filmmaking as a sonic art form.

In this introductory class, students will study elements of successful dramatic writing: strong structure, effective dialogue, and imaginative theatricality. Students will craft and revise short plays, in addition to drafting several short assignments and one analytical paper. Readings include full-length and 10-minute plays. Through giving and receiving constructive feedback, each writer will aim to take their work to new levels of complexity, theatricality, and meaning.

The course traces the history and innovation of the Immersive Theatre Movement. These 21st century projects eliminate the stage as the primary location for performance to prioritize more experiential interactive audience engagements- with live-ness and active participation as fundamental goals. Working as collaborative think tank, students will engage, explore and specify examples set by artists such as Kara Walker, RA Walden, Coco Fusco and Marina Abramovics and Tania El Khoury evoking and expanding the definitions of experiential. They will examine the work of companies such as PIEHOLE, PUNCHDRUNK (SLEEP NO MORE), THIRD RAIL PROJECTS (THEN SHE FELL) and EN GARDE ARTS, SPEAKEASY DOLLHOUSE companies seeking to re-create the relationship between performer and spectator focusing on sensory engagement, visceral engagement and accessible spectacle a variety of approach to stimulate and reawaken performativity - expanding theatre towards multimedia applications, AR/VR and also solo interactive and site specific processes intended to surprise startle and instigate.

Focused, practical exercises teach the student fundamental staging techniques that bring written text to theatrical life. A core objective is to increase the student's awareness of why and how certain stage events communicate effectively to an audience. Each student directs a number of exercises as well as a short scene.

This course will use the process devised by Fiasco Theatre Company to produce a play by Shakespeare with reduced support, inventive design, and smaller casts. The selected text will be arranged so that between eight to twelve actors can perform all the roles and physical support relies on inventiveness, economy, and adaptation. At the beginning of the semester students will study the language, history, and acting techniques necessary to perform the play and then rehearse the text--devising solutions to the complexities of production--during the remainder of the semester. Students may participate as actors, dramaturgs, or designers. The semester's work culminates in a presentation of a reduced/condensed production of the selected text.

This independent study course is part of the semester long Cornell in Los Angeles program where students will work on their independent projects.

In this advanced undergraduate-level seminar, all senior majors synthesize four years of study in a collaborative intellectual and artistic project with the faculty. Over the course of the fall semester, students conceive and produce work for presentation to the public in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Students also generate a supporting scholarly matrix for that work, and their collective genesis of material integrates the major's four rubrics (history, theory, and criticism; creative authorship; design; and embodied performance). As a crucible for artistic and intellectual collaboration, the senior studio may emphasize an area of study, a period, a text, or a theme. The studio's organizing emphasis will be specific to ongoing, pressing inquiries in the disciplines of performing and media arts.

This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory.

This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.

This production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

When people (academics usually) write about cult movies they are typically talking about films like Rocky Horror Picture Show or Casablanca or The Big Lebowski. Rarely, if ever, are Coming to America or The Color Purple or Friday-films with predominantly Black casts and seemingly marketed toward Black audiences-also considered within the canon of cult. This kind of exclusion begs the central question of the course: What is Black Cult Media?

Students work in groups on a series of tests, short exercises, and scene projects using 16mm cameras, digital video cameras, HD camera movement apparatus, a range of lighting instruments, filters, and gels to expand their knowledge of the technical and aesthetic aspects of cinematography. The course will focus on acting and directing for the camera through scene work.

The Rural Humanities seminar will introduce students to the public humanities as both a disciplinary inquiry and a set of practices grounded in public and community engagement. It is intended to train cohorts of graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the various theories, methods, and practices of public humanities, to think collectively with and beyond disciplinary interests, and to bring these discipline-defined research agendas to much wider communities by first focusing on local rural communities. Students will produce a collaborative project related to or working with a community partner.Topic: TBA

Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writing in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

Radical transformations in our media landscape raise urgent questions for the field of cinema and media studies. This course focuses on a topic drawn from current scholarly research. They may include: theorizing the global, narrative and new media, queer/trans media paradigms, media and public life, media and migration, and critical race and media studies. Weekly class meetings will combine discussion and short screenings; there may be additional screenings outside of class.

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations.

Focuses on the structure and style of the original web-series and long-form short screenplay, and incorporates extensive peer feedback, workshop, and revision. Students will produce and revise an original mid-length short film and/or show pilot, in addition to crafting a log-line, treatment, and pitch for their film.?

A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age, Oscar Wilde once announced in a characteristically immodest, yet accurate, appraisal of his talent. With his legendary wit, his exuberant style of perversity and paradox, and his tendency to scandal, he has come to stand in symbolic relation to our own age as well, and for some of the same reasons he was a delight and a challenge to the Victorians. We will explore his poetry, essays, plays, letters, and fiction, in the context of the Aesthetic, Decadent, and Symbolist movements of the late-nineteenth century and also in the context of current debates in literary criticism and the history of sexuality.

Examines the play as the central, essential source for production decisions made by the actor, the director, the designer, and the dramaturg. Students "present" their conclusions about the performance of studied texts through project work as either an actor, director, designer, or dramaturg, as well as through two to three papers.

The act of adaptation invokes a response to source material from a variety of inspiration(s) -- images, poems, stories, iconic moments, people, legends, events, histories. Artist/creators work to transcend and translate resonant and remnant questions, curiosities, and provocations in their work—this work evokes a reconciling or a recontextualizing of event and revelation. Writer/creators are visual and physical explorers, choreographers of language text and imagery, artistic inventors. Work we explore this year includes the inspiration of Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, R A Walden, William Kentridge, Coco Fusco, Toni Morrison Jenny Holzer, Beatriz Cortez, Laurie Anderson, the exploration of generative AI interventions and immersive performance techniques. This wholly interactive course challenges the boundaries of text/image to uncover the possibilities of performance. Working collaboratively—in workshop format—students explore the process of developing performance pieces based on a variety of sources.

A survey of the origins and applications of the term Absurdism. What is the style it provokes? This course traces the roots, definitions, and contemporary resonance of Absurdism. How and why would we stage the impossible? How could we re-new the term for the 21st century—does a post historical post apocalypse necessitate a new approach? In this class we will investigate and perform the works of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Ruhl, Charles Ludlam, Virginia Woolf and the Cirque du Soleil. We will also examine the pathos of silent film and consider the influence and the inheritance of The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud and The Creative Mind by Henri Bergson.

The most studied and written about work in Western Literature outside the Bible, Hamlet according to Harold Bloom, is our secular savior and our ambassador to death. This course centers on a close reading of the play. Through research and assigned readings the course tests theoretical viewpoints about the play against the text itself by reading the theory in relationship to the production history.

This course will explore the cultural, political and social ramifications of stand-up comedy through the lens of twentieth and twenty-first century stand up comedians. Because of streaming services, Stand Up is more accessible than ever to a wider audience. Too, streamed video is not subject to the censorship rules of broadcast television so the wider array of subject matter and the way that subject can be presented is direct and fearless, making comics not just entertainers, but cultural influencers in a much broader way that earlier cultural critics, such as Lenny Bruce and Moms Mabley could only imagine. This newfound influence makes Stand Up comedians and their comedy ripe for study, not only within a cultural context but also as a part of free-speech arguments.

Examines how collaboration among stage directors, designers, and actors leads to differing interpretations of plays. The course focuses on how the texts themselves are blueprints for productions with particular emphasis on the choices available to the actor inherent in the text. This is a special seminar sponsored by the John S. Knight Institute’s Sophomore Seminars Program. Seminars offer discipline-intensive study within an interdisciplinary context. While not restricted to sophomores, the seminars aim at initiating students into the discipline’s outlook, discourse community, modes of knowledge, and ways of articulating that knowledge. Limited to 15 students. Special emphasis is given to strong thinking and writing and to personalized instruction with tip university professors.

To explore cultural aspects of imprisonment through a focus on theatre produced by those incarcerated. Does making theatre in prison seem to assist in transformation? Students create work with PPTG members in lab sessions, do narrative interviews, create annotated Internet data base.

This course explores the increasing presence of all the arts in prisons throughout the country and examines the increasing scholarship surrounding arts programs and their efficacy for incarcerated persons. The course uses video's, archival material, reading material and in-person or Zoom interviews to investigate how and why art is taught in prisons. The course will also look at art produced by incarcerated artists as well as art by those who are still practicing after going home. And finally, the course will explore the increasing scholarship around the impact practicing the arts while incarcerated has on recidivism rates and preparation for re-entry.

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.

This upper-level seminar considers the long evolution of queer and trans TV from its role in the origins of television as a medium through its contemporary manifestations. The premises of the course—subject to complication and contestation—include the notions that we stall as thinkers and viewers when we dwell both in the illogic of progress narratives and in the tepid debate about “good” versus “bad” televised representations of LGBTQ+ lives and experiences; that close audiovisual analysis lies at the heart of a generative study of television that must also attend closely to economic, industrial, and sociocultural schemes; and that any discourse about queerness that does not move intersectionally, with attention to race, class, ability, gender, and more, is an imprecise and inadequate one.

Fictions of dictatorship, as termed by scholar Lucy Burns, denote both the narratives and spectacles produced by authoritarian governments and the performances, events, and cultural objects that work against these states of exception. This course will critically examine histories of dictatorships, through both documentary & creative forms (i.e. novels, memoirs, and performance) and with a geographic focus on Asia and Latin America, in order to understand authoritarian returns in our present historical moment.

This class focuses on advanced challenges for the stage presented by particular authors or plays that have a particular stylistic or structural demand. Focuses on advanced challenges for the stage. Monologues and scenes are drawn from Shakespeare and classical sources.

Advanced acting students will expand their skills using targeted approaches and methodologies of the instructors' choosing to develop scripted and/or original material for in-class study and presentation.

This class interrogates new theoretical understandings about space and how bodies marked by various types of difference (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, fatness, ability, and socioeconomic class) interact and move in it. We will uncover the visual, linguistic, and performative representations and social structures used in deciding which bodies are allowed to create and use spaces, and to what ends. We will ask questions that examine how people make claims to space. What kind of space does a performance engender? How do racialized and gendered spaces alter where performances can happen? This course is part-seminar and part-practicum. We will investigate theories that shape and contest our understanding of space, the body, and motion, and engage these themes by creating mini-performances. Previous performance experience is not necessary.

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Builds on the directing techniques learned in Fundamentals of Directing I. In this course each student directs actors from the Student Laboratory Theatre Company in a series of projects and public presentations focusing on specific directorial challenges.

First of a two-semester sequence (the second is PMA 4951) for seniors engaged in an honors project. Honor guidelines and form.

Second of a two-semester sequence (the first is PMA 4950) for students engaged in an honors project.

Academic credit can only be awarded for unpaid internships. Students must submit an Application for Academic Credit by April 15. The Application for Academic Credit must be received/approved prior to the start of the internship. If the internship opportunity is deemed eligible for academic credit, the student pursues the internship during the summer months and enrolls in this course the fall semester immediately following the summer internship. A written evaluation of the internship experience is required. Find complete information and application forms on the department website.

What do we learn when we turn an ear to the commons? Who determines what sounds are desirable or undesirable in a community and what are the stakes of that negotiation when it comes to public space? This seminar will study the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim space, and shape their public spaces. We will engage the work of artists who have called our attention to the social aspects of listening. We will listen to public art projects, films, concerts, field recordings, installations, informal sonic practices, and political interventions as we read about the contested control of public space.

What is at stake when an artist creates a work through a set of linguistic instructions or textual cues? This class will look at early written scores and instructions from artists, performers, and composers, such as Sol Lewitt, George Lewis, Adrian Piper, Felix Gonzales Torres, Yoko Ono, Benjamin Patterson, Alison Knowles, Anthony Braxton, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. We will also explore early artists’ code-based projects and recent work done with artificial intelligence. In this course we will look at the myriad of reasons artists have used a language-based system to realize an artwork.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study the strategies that sound artists, composers, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers have employed to use Black sounds as a sign. We will explore intersections between sound and image throughout the African diaspora. Intersections in question include the place of sound art within different Black musical and visual traditions, Black music as a resource for painting and sculpture, the visual design of Black music projects, the Black soundscape and the built environment, acoustic ecology and mapping in Black communities, and African diasporic filmmaking as a sonic art form.

In this course, we will develop a toolbox of performance techniques based on methods developed in the Spanish-speaking and Latinx contexts. These techniques will be used in preparing short, original, collectively-created or scripted plays for production and public presentation in the October 2024 regional microtheater festival in upstate New York and/or the annual downtown Ithaca holiday pastorela in December.

This course examines the history and afterlives of U.S. war and empire across the Asia/Pacific region and the politics they engender for Asian/Pacific Americans. Since the Philippine American war (1898-1904), the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy (1893) and the subsequent annexation of the Hawaiian Islands (1898), the 20th century has been constituted by U.S. wars and colonial conquests across the Asia/Pacific region. From South Korea to Vietnam, Japan to Cambodia, Laos to Okinawa, U.S. presence has been felt in hot wars as well as Cold War discourse, in the U.S. military-industrial complex and its socio-political, cultural and environmental impact within the region. Reckoning with this global U.S. history, students will better understand Asian/Pacific Islander racialization in the U.S. At the same time, we will reckon with Black, indigenous, and Latinx racialization through and against U.S. wars and militarism in Asia. Course themes include: critical refugee studies, U.S. militarism & gender, settler colonialism, transpacific critique, the politics of memory and post-memory.

This class is designed to introduce doctoral students to Humanistic Research Methods. While qualitative and quantitative research methods are humanistic, this course serves as an added layer of context that integrates the rationales for why these methods aid us as researchers in thinking about structures, power, and identity. In this sense, the humanistic research methods explored in this class are designed to generate thinking about those topics as it relates to both ourselves as individuals and the societal communities we are a part of.

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

The class is dedicated to texts, issues, approaches, histories/archives, and theories in Black Film and Media Studies. With a disciplinary grounding in the field of cinema and media studies, this course explores relevant and revelatory scholarship and creative/critical practices in the study of Black film and media.

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

A course on strategies and techniques for live musical performance with technology, including multimedia: image, video, movement, and sound. In developing our awareness of tools for live music with various media, we will explore several stylistic, technical, and logistical approaches, including collaboration and ensemble. We will engage with an array of software and hardware combinations within a variety of performance spaces, seeking to both understand and subvert standard practices for our own creative purposes.

This seminar examines German media theories from the Frankfurt School to the Kittler Network and beyond. We will discuss influential concepts associated with this work (e.g., the culture industry, the public sphere, discourse networks), along with related concepts in media and cultural studies (e.g., space and time, analog and digital, old and new media). Theoretical readings address questions about media aesthetics, intermediality, and media change; automation, mechanization, and standardization; and communication, command, and control. Engaging with scholarly debates about interdisciplinarity and theory transfer, we will also revisit and revise reductive stereotypes about media critique, technological determinism, and the Germanness of German media theories.

The Rural Humanities seminar will introduce students to the public humanities as both a disciplinary inquiry and a set of practices grounded in public and community engagement. It is intended to train cohorts of graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the various theories, methods, and practices of public humanities, to think collectively with and beyond disciplinary interests, and to bring these discipline-defined research agendas to much wider communities by first focusing on local rural communities. Students will produce a collaborative project related to or working with a community partner.Topic: TBA

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the age of digital media and A.I.? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? Moving among a range of genres and sub-genres, poetry, fiction, film, and multimedia, websites and streaming services, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media, and the increasingly pervasive role of A.I., in contemporary culture and politics.

Radical transformations in our media landscape raise urgent questions for the field of cinema and media studies. This course focuses on a topic drawn from current scholarly research. They may include: theorizing the global, narrative and new media, queer/trans media paradigms, media and public life, media and migration, and critical race and media studies. Weekly class meetings will combine discussion and short screenings; there may be additional screenings outside of class.

Film festivals are important entry spaces for young filmmakers, but also spaces of cultural politics that promote the year’s new films and provide a meeting ground for market forces and cinephilia. This course seeks to understand what cultural work festivals do: What were the political reasons for the foundation of well-known festivals such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin? How did Sundance become the premier festival for independent film? What significance do festivals have for LGBT and other minority audiences? How do festivals participate in discourses about human rights? How do they negotiate changing exhibition formats (from streaming to virtual reality)? Do they have the power to change the film industry? Possible fieldtrip (e.g. to the Tribeca Film Festival), and participation in Cornell’s student film festival.

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Labor is a universal human activity that orders societal hierarchies and determines value. Cinema and television, by zooming in and out of labor paid or unpaid, masculine or feminine, tedious or pleasurable, individual or collective, manual or intellectual, variously highlight the dual nature of work and workers as scaled objects on screen, and scaling agents off screen. This course introduces students to North American, European, and Asian films and television series that raise questions about what it means to work, and how work has shaped the way we think about time, space, identities, and social relations.

This course focuses on the structure and style of the original, long-form short screenplay and web-series (approximately 25-35 pages), and incorporates extensive peer feedback, workshop, and revision. Students will produce and revise an original short script or two episodes of a show pilot, in addition to crafting a log-line, treatment, and pitch for their film.

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

An introduction to the theory and methods involved in the study of performing and media arts. Attention focuses on pedagogy and the profession in Part I. Part II explores current scholarly trends.

This graduate seminar takes a transhistorical and global approach to understanding the influential ways in which live and mediated performances have been theorized. Moving from a consideration of treatises from antiquity to an investigation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholarly work, as well as landing at points in between, we will explore the ways in which different aestheticians, historians, and other philosophically motivated thinkers have conceived such phenomena as dramatic construction, kinesthetic performance, embodied spectatorship, (mnemo)technics, live(li)ness, spec(tac)ularity, and ludic play. Close analysis of a variety of art objects, arrayed as case studies, will complement our intensive readings of dense theoretical texts. Authors may include Adorno, Aristotle, Bharata, Bergson, Boal, Brecht, Carlson, Deleuze, Flusser, Kant, Parikka, Soyinka, Stiegler, Zeami, and others.

What are minoritarian aesthetics? How do these inform the production and reception of performance, broadly defined? How does attending to the aesthetics involved in the production of artistic and cultural productions open up new ways of critically understanding the world around us? In seeking to answer these questions, and others, this seminar will introduce graduate students to theories and critiques that attend to the aesthetic dimensions of visual culture, scripted staged performances, performance art, and contemporary media created by Black, queer, Asian, Caribbean, and Latinx/Latin people. Drawing on the work of theorists Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Leticia Alvarado, and Sandra Ruiz amongst others, students will interrogate the dialectical relationship between the artist’s subject position and their resultant creative and critical work.

You didn't see anything, a woman in a movie says to her dubious lover. No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand. What is desire in a movie, and how do we know it when we see it or feel it? How do the images, sounds, and narratives of a cinematic event engage us erotically? How might we want to revise classic psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories of desire and cinema in light of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st century? We will focus especially on metacinematic work by Pedro Almod?, Olivier Assayas, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others.

To explore cultural aspects of imprisonment through a focus on theatre produced by those incarcerated. Does making theatre in prison seem to assist in transformation? Students create work with PPTG members in lab sessions, do narrative interviews, create annotated Internet data base.

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as after hours in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.

How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?

Urban Justice Labs are innovative seminars designed to bring students into direct contact with complex questions about race and social justice within the context of American urban culture, architecture, humanities, and media. Drawing from Cornell's collections, such as the Hip Hop Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, the Human Sexuality Collection, holdings on American Indian History and Culture, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, and the Johnson Museum of Art, students will leverage archival materials to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban justice. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. Topic: Sound, Music, Public Space.

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term is and does, but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

The course will consider the aesthetics and politics of touch in dialogue with critical, artistic experimentation. Emphasizing interactivity and immersion in art and theory, the course will discuss renewed critical emphasis on the legacy of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Deleuze to affect theory) in dialogue with recent writings on global critical race and sexual theory (Glissant, Spillers, Mbembe, Ganguly, Lalu, Moten, Cardenas). Designed as an archive-based course, students will be invited to shape the second part of the syllabus around works featured in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and in the 2022 CCA Biennial on Futurities, Uncertain with the aim of staging a final text/exhibit/performance based on conceptual approaches to touch.

Independent study in performing and media arts allows graduate students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Provides graduate students in the field of Performing and Media Arts an opportunity to work directly with a faculty member to explore pedagogical theory and practice in undergraduate theatre classes in all areas of the curriculum.

This production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.