Upper Level Courses

4.00 Credits
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Women's and Gender Studies. It emphasizes understanding the "common differences" that both unite and divide women and men. By examining how womanhood has been represented in myths, literature, ads, culture in general, the course's aims are: 1) to explore how gender inequalities have been both explained and critiqued, 2) to study the cultural meaning given to gender as it intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, and 3) to address the historical role of feminism in the rise of gender studies. Ultimately, it poses the central paradox of contemporary thinking: the necessity to make gender matter and not matter at the same time.

4.00 Credits
This course enables students to volunteer their time and skills to non-profit community organizations and engage in critical reflection about their experiences through readings, class discussion, and reflective analysis. The course readings provide concepts and theories from a range of disciplines, including literature, psychology, social and political science, that students may find helpful in analyzing their on-site experiences. Students will also gain an awareness of different modes of inquiry such as the case study method in psychology, statistical analysis of survey research in political science, and ethnographic fieldwork. Finally, students will explore the value of different forms of literary and analytical writing in representing and reflecting on the service-learning experience and its relationship to social activism.

4.00 Credits
This course explores performance as a mode of communication within and across culture(s). We begin by discussing performance as an ideologically and culturally communicative activity. We then consider examples of performances that are specifically intended as cultural criticism and, in particular, examples of solo performance art. In addition to discussing and critiquing the performances of working artists, we will construct and present performances ourselves. The process of composing, presenting, and evaluating a critical cultural performance will provide an opportunity to synthesize course concepts and to develop skills for creative rebellion.

4.00 Credits
This course examines the historical, socio-economic and ideological contexts within which twentieth-century post-colonial cultures have been produced and are negotiated. Providing both geographical coverage and theoretical frameworks, it examines cultural production from formerly colonized nations. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with both the primary material and the critical contexts within which those materials can be read and understood. Possible topics in the Post-Colonial Cultures course include: 1) African and African-Diaspora Film, 2) Transnational Chinese Cinemas, 3) Latin American Testimonial Literature, 4) West-Indian Literature, 5) Transnational Culture Studies. Fulfills the General Education Global Diversity requirement.

4.00 Credits
This course interrogates the roles communications media (from etchings on cave walls to full immersion virtual realities) play in the formation of personal identity, self-consciousness, and consciousness of each other as social actors. In the process we will consider the cognitive skills and habits necessary for gaining fluency or literacy in each of the respective media addressed, including print, radio, television, computers, the internet, cell phones and other personal and mass communication technologies. More broadly, the course is an investigation into how conceptions of self, society, aesthetics, morality, and culture are established and maintained vis-à-vis a number of different modes of communication. After successful completion of this course students should possess a critical understanding of the many ways in which communication technologies have altered and continue to change all of the conceptions mentioned above.

4.00 Credits
In this course, we will consider multiple, interdisciplinary approaches to the current debates about exile and citizenship and the tangled identities that result from post-colonial/post-war migrations. We will explore the unstable continuum between location and identity, and discuss the impact of independence, war, and globalization on national, cultural, social, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities. Through postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and global perspectives, we will examine issues of agency and responsibility alongside the plurality of (re)visions and (re)configurations that our various experiences of belonging, unbelonging, ambivalence and in-betweenness make possible. Alongside key theoretical texts drawn from such disciplines as sociology, cultural studies, political science, psychology, philosophy and history, we will examine cultural texts such as literature, film, art and photography.

4.00 Credits
This course addresses the issues of Culture, Interculturality, Multiculturalism and Transculturality in the contemporary societies of the United States and Eastern Europe. It focuses on two issues: the rise of the nation in Eastern European societies, and cultural pluralism in American society. While in the United States a nationalistic paradigm has often existed in productive tension with a multicultural one, in Eastern Europe, this paradigm has led to nationalistic and often mono-cultural societies. This course adopts a perspective that is both multicultural and interdisciplinary in an attempt to question some of the leading assumptions underlying cultural identity and the constitution of the West.

4.00 Credits
The intent of this course is to engage students in a cultural study of the relationship between film and the post-modern conditions of social order. Films construct images about social reality. In this course, the ways in which these images present and interpret this relationship will be examined from the standpoint of post-modernism. Students will learn how to view films analytically, and how to apply cultural analysis to the post-modern conditions of social order. We will explore the shifting and interdisciplinary relationships between film, film criticism, and cultural analysis, and between writing and film as contemporary media forms.

4.00 Credits
This course is an exploration of topics in U.S. social history and race relations, and of blues culture as a reflection of social change. The course will present historical and literary materials relevant to African American social and economic development, as well as white American cultural and social development in 20th century America. The blues songs of a broad range of artists and bands will enhance these historical and literary materials. They will underscore the oral-expressive nature of African American culture, its relationship to social experience, and its influence on mainstream American culture. At the end of this course, students will have a better appreciation for the connections between the history and the songs of a people, and of the way in which American social/musical culture developed from a shared experience. This course will promote an understanding of a range of historical topics, including the plantation South, migration, urban adaptation, experience of women, New Deal and 1960s Counterculture politics, and the influence of blues culture internationally. This course also will explore a range of humanities themes in the blues, including alienation, sexual assertion, despair, and resistance. Satisfies the General Education U.S. Diversity requirement.

4.00 Credits
Students from all parts of the college will use this course to both hone their specialties -- as writers, film students, theatre majors, performing artists, communicators, and political actors  as well as to collectively build a new voice using combined skills to contribute to specific social change objectives. The objective of this course will be to engage students in studying specific social issues and conducting research to design effective creative media projects to address community problems. Students will learn how to conceptualize and identify community problems and social issues in tangible ways. Public health and political science will be used to engage students in identifying key target objectives for change. These may include finding specific community groups or audiences, with whom they will attempt to communicate specific behavioral, informational or attitudinal messages. Examples include but are not limited to community-based media projects to stop social sources of tobacco; public service announcements to raise hepatitis C awareness; theater projects to prevent HIV/AIDS and other STDs; and educational videos about any number of social ills.

4.00 Credits
This interdisciplinary course integrates two of the most often combined areas of expression: words and music. By bringing together the perspectives of poetry and musical composition, students are introduced to the many ways in which these two disciplines can combine in theory, history, and the practice of classroom exercises. The course ends with a concert or musical evening presentation of songs written by the students, and showing the different ways of combining these two art forms. The course is open to anyone who writes songs and/or poetry or is willing to try. MU152, MU252 and WP212 are highly recommended as prerequisites but not required.

4.00 Credits
Adopting critical/cultural studies, sociological, and media studies approaches, this course will explore and problematize how various forms of masculinities are signified in and through popular culture, how nationalist discourses are gendered and are bound up in masculine identities, how the gender of the audience is implicated in such processes, and how such constructions and representations both shape and are shaped by the larger social, cultural, racial, economic, and political contexts. Focusing on both theoretical critiques and practical interpretations of masculinities, the course will examine such media and popular cultural venues as film, video games, Japanese anime, wrestling (including sumo), sports, music and various television genres. Particular topics addressed in lectures, discussions, screenings, and (multi-media) student presentations include: Theories of Gender/Defining Masculinity; Female Masculinity; Masculinity, Nation, and Globalization; Masculinity and Sports, Video Game, and the Action Cinema; Male Body and Sexualities; Constructions and Intersections of Racial and Sexual Differences; and Performing Masculinities.

4.00 Credits
This is a studio-oriented course that will bring artists into a practical workshop, tutorial and critique environment. 1. Workshops by visiting artists will focus on a variety of interventions into the city 2. Students will plan and undertake a series of urban interventions 3. Students will read and discuss selected texts with a focus on contemporary art and urban theory. 4. Tutorials will introduce methods of digital imaging and remote file sharing. Students will undertake projects in groups; collecting, editing and presenting images, sound files and text. As the student's immediate shared resource and environment, the city will offer subject matter and a shared context for writing and reflection. The city will be used as a workspace and a presentation forum as students move to various locations in their presentation of public projects. In this course, students will intervene into existing modes of communication and observation within the city of Boston. From the flaneur of Paris in the late 19th century through European and American Conceptual Art interventions of the 1960-1970s to contemporary Boston, this course proposes a trajectory of theory and practice that utilizes the city as subject, material, workspace and presentation forum.

4.00 Credits
In traditional societies, personal identities appear easy to acquire and maintain. One's membership in a family clan, one's religious beliefs, one's trade, one's sense of regional belonging, all combined to convey a feeling for who one was and where one belonged in the world. Modern societies are quite different. Rapid social and cultural change, economic flux and social mobility, together with a diversity of complex choices and freedoms and a general crisis in cultural authorities leave modern identities unfixed and unstable. Modern identity is left up to individuals themselves, who create a sense of who they are through choices they make in daily life. This course examines the diverse ways in which modern people have fashioned their own identities. Drawing from a range of philosophical and social thinkers (Simmel, Foucault, Butler, Mulvey, Giddens, Hall), students learn how each of these thinkers considered the question of modern identity. Moreover, these theories will be related to specific examples of self-formation that developed at specific junctures in the history of modern society. These examples range from the evolution of table manners in the late Feudal period to the rise of the routines of industrial labor in the 18th and 19th century, to the conspicuous consumption of the post war suburb, to the be-ins of the 1960's, to the gyms and health regimes of the '70s and '80s and on to the media saturated lifestyles of the contemporary period. Throughout, the emphasis will be placed on identity as a creative accomplishment of the individual in his or her daily life activities.

4.00 Credits
Through a combination of history, theory, and studio projects, this course provides a solid introduction to visual communications theory and the design process. Students will develop an understanding of the culture of design as well as the complex interrelationships between graphic design and the culture at large by undertaking an analytical and critical approach to visual communications. Through this course students will: Gain an understanding of basic communications theories and their application to communications problems and to the evaluation of design solutions; learn the principles of composition in two-dimensional media space; gain an appreciation of the historical context of contemporary design; establish a vocabulary to articulate ideas about visual communication; come to understand the process of design and communication problem solving. The semester's work will culminate in a final portfolio project.

4.00 Credits
Henry James and William Faulkner, arguably America's two greatest fiction writers, are "highbrow" canonical authors in the high art tradition, who also worked in what they considered lowbrow popular performance genres. James, after adapting his novel The American for the stage with some success, attempted to become a commercial playwright and failed spectacularly in the 1890s. Faulkner reluctantly worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the 30s and 40s, and his play Requiem for a Nun was produced in Europe and on Broadway in the 50s. The fiction of both writers has been often adapted for film and television. This course uses interdisciplinary theories of narrative to explore how popular performance media shaped and reflected the fiction of James and Faulkner and the shifting response to their work on stage and in screen media.

4.00 Credits
The aims of this course are three fold: to introduce students to anthropology of visual communications through photography, films, documentation of performance, and texts; to help them evaluate how sites of exhibition (museums, theaters, television, cinema and the web) are also sites of cultural and social reproduction; and to help them incorporate ethnographic methodology, specifically participant observation and field writing into their artistic production. In this class we will investigate how culture is produced in/through a variety of locales and media. Analyzing the activities/products of both senders (authors/artists/makers) and receivers (viewers/audience members/users) the following questions will be central to our investigations: How do people use visual communication to make truth claims about the world? How are issues of representation and power negotiated within these various forums? What is the impact of these visual communicative acts on society? Through asking these questions about other visual artists students will develop the self-awareness to ask the same questions of themselves and their own artistic production.

4.00 Credits
Global Studies promotes an understanding and appreciation of the peoples, cultures, and diversity of the world. Topics in Global Studies courses include an examination of the causes and consequences of globalization viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective. The focus of these courses includes an assessment of the impact of globalization on the economic, political, social, cultural and natural environments of nations, regions, and the world. Issues addressed in these courses will include the impact and uses of technology (such as contemporary media) on cultural production, cultural diversity and multiculturalism," and disparities in power and control among nations and peoples. Approaches to these issues may include human responses to globalization, including the ways we think about the world, as well as regional and cultural differences in responding to globalization. Topics may differ from year to year. Past topics have included: Global Cities, Third World Women, Media and Globalization, Globalization and Its Discontents, and The Global Event. Satisfies the General Education Global Diversity requirement.

4.00 Credits
This course asks you to seriously consider how gender is performed and performative, both in your own life and in the world around you. The course is designed for students with some experience and a definite interest in Gender Studies and Performance Studies who wish to explore gender identity--and related aspects of identity such as class, race and ethnicity, and sexuality--through critical response to an ever-growing, interdisciplinary body of scholarship that includes scholarly books and essays, films, ethnographic and autoethnographic performance, and creative non-fiction. This course is reading and writing intensive, in that it requires close readings of key texts, and applied critique of these texts through class participation, short analysis papers, and a semester long research project.

4.00 Credits
This course focuses on mainstream and alternative media's responses to information about the Holocaust and its aftermath through film, radio, television, and print media. We'll have the opportunity to speak with Holocaust eyewitnesses and survivors. Students will pursue individual areas of interest with research projects. The course concludes by considering what the media should be doing today to prevent continuing genocide.

4.00 Credits
In this course we will explore the nature of artistic collaboration through researching, reading, writing, and experiencing the collaborative process, with a primary focus on experimental, interdisciplinary processes and presentations. The goals of the course are to examine, explore and develop an understanding of, and successful working methods for, artistic collaboration. Through lectures, videos, slide presentations, artist talks, student research presentations and in-depth experiential processes, we will address how different creative disciplines illuminate one another; how individual interests, skills and methods inform one another in the context of a collective undertaking. This course will culminate in final, public presentations of multi-disciplinary work by each of the collaborative groups in the class, and documenting and mapping the methods and process of these collaborations.

4.00 Credits
The aims of this course are twofold. First, by tracing themes of identity and difference, meaning and paradox, accommodation and strife, through a variety of Renaissance texts, including drama, poetry, painting, music, other visual media, and the speculative essay, we will explore "period" attempts within these media to formulate vocabularies of representation and affect. Second, the course will direct attention to the relation of our own interpretive practices and assumptions to the thematics of Renaissance representation through students' own written and oral exercises and through the examination of modern critical and artistic representations and (re)interpretations of Renaissance texts.

4.00 Credits
This course provides an in-depth exploration of the evolution of queer (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) identity and culture. Through the lens of historical, literary (fiction, poetry, drama, autobiography), and theoretical readings, as well as a variety of films and other audio/visual media, students will be introduced to the relationship between these fields, and how they intertwine around the complex questions of queer identity and cultural representation. Is homosexuality, as stated by theorists such as Butler and Foucault, primarily a social construct, or is it something more essentialistic, as Dyer and Fuss suggest? Additionally, we will consider the role that the arts in general have served in the queer liberation movement worldwide.

4.00 Credits
This course explores the process of ethnogenesis, the process of "becoming American" that is common to all immigrants in the United States. Our principal focus is on the questions provoked by "moving out" of one's own country and "moving in" to another, on the deeper question of the psychosocial journey of moving out and into one's self, one's culture, and one's community. What is identity? What does it mean to be visible? What are the real and imaginary journeys that comprise our individual and collective maps of experience? We will explore these questions in interdisciplinary study and express our discoveries through multidisciplinary art in a very real, artistic interaction with children in Boston's Latino community.

0.00 Credits
Individual projects in areas of interdisciplinary study planned in collaboration with full-time faculty members to meet student's interests that are not satisfied by existing courses. Students must submit a proposal for study that includes learning objectives, methods of evaluation, and a bibliography before a directed study is approved. All proposals must be approved in the semester preceding the semester in which the students wants to complete the directed study. This proposal cannot substitute for a course that is in the catalogue. Prerequisites: Permission of full-time faculty member and the Executive Director of the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.