Media, Culture & Communication

Gateway Courses:

• For all 200-level and 300-level courses in Communication: Humanities in the World

100-level:

• Introduction to Rhetoric & Argumentation

200-level:

• Style & Meaning in Fiction & Beyond
• Communicating the Climate Crisis

300-level:

• Persuasive Communication
• Creative Writing

Course Descriptions

100-level: Humanities in the World
In today’s interconnected global world, the humanities play a crucial role in fostering critical thinking, empathy, and cultural awareness. They help us navigate complex social issues, understand diverse perspectives, and contribute meaningfully to global conversations.

This gateway course introduces you to the methodologies and research skills central to the humanities courses within the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. You will explore Film and Media, understanding how movies, series, and online content shape our emotions and beliefs. You will learn about Communication, discovering how ideas spread, how people connect, and the implications when they don’t. You will delve into Literature, uncovering how language serves as a tool for imagination, memory, and protest. Additionally, you will examine Heritage, Art, and Museums, investigating how material culture, identity, and meaning are preserved, challenged, and reimagined.

This course will help you make sense of the world through stories, images, and technology, preparing you for upper-level courses in the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. The course is not about memorizing facts; it is about learning how the humanities can help you ask better questions.

100-level: Introduction to Rhetoric & Argumentation
This course gives students the rhetorical and argumentative tools to write well, think clearly speak eloquently and thus function as a productive critical citizen in a democratic society. In this course students will learn the fundamental, theoretical and historical principles of classical rhetoric, including invention, arrangement, stylization, memory, delivery, as well as logos, ethos and pathos. They will also write and perform a variety of rhetorical tasks and learn about sound and fallacious reasoning. The course builds towards an individual public speaking performance.

200-level: Communicating the Climate Crisis
This course explores how the climate crisis is communicated, contested, and understood. Rather than treating climate communication as the transmission of scientific facts, we approach it as a situated cultural practice. You will study literary narratives, documentary films, museum exhibitions, public art, protest slogans, and viral social media content. You will engage with theoretical texts and case studies to develop the tools needed to critically assess rhetorical form and function while considering the conditions under which certain framings succeed or fail. The course culminates in a final project to challenge students to engage in meaningful debate. In other words, instead of simply calling bullshit, we will dissect how arguments persuade, expose the values they encode, and learn to craft interventions that shift the public debate. This is for students who want to do more than just repost climate memes. It’s for those who want to understand the fight over meaning itself.

300-level: Persuasive Communication
This advanced level course comprises a number of interdisciplinary perspectives on persuasion from classical rhetoric, communication studies and social psychology. It looks at persuasion techniques in the real world of politics, marketing, law and advertising. It makes students aware of a number of non-conscious persuasive mechanisms at work in society that are designed to make us think and act in certain ways: including framing, priming, and nudging. Students will study the theories and then design and execute their own ethical persuasion campaigns in real-world settings.

300-level: Creative Writing
This course aims to continue honing writing skills through production of creative texts and application of tools learned in rhetoric, stylistics, and other courses to produce deviant, soundly structured, well-crafted literary texts. This course will therefore focus on construction of poetic texts, fragments, and short prose pieces. Creative writing involves considerable amounts of composition, and students complete numerous exercises, as well as review the work of peers. Classes consist of discussion, reviewing one another’s work, workshopping work in progress, and in-class exercises.

Gateway Courses:

• For all 200-level and 300-level courses in Heritage, Art & Museums: Humanities in the World

100-level:

• Introduction to Western Art History
• Introduction to World Archaeology

200-level:

• African Art & Heritage
• Archaeology & Communities

300-level:

• Museums, Art Crime & Restitution
• Modern Art & Modern Museums

Course Descriptions

100-level: Humanities in the World
In today’s interconnected global world, the humanities play a crucial role in fostering critical thinking, empathy, and cultural awareness. They help us navigate complex social issues, understand diverse perspectives, and contribute meaningfully to global conversations.

This gateway course introduces you to the methodologies and research skills central to the humanities courses within the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. You will explore Film and Media, understanding how movies, series, and online content shape our emotions and beliefs. You will learn about Communication, discovering how ideas spread, how people connect, and the implications when they don’t. You will delve into Literature, uncovering how language serves as a tool for imagination, memory, and protest. Additionally, you will examine Heritage, Art, and Museums, investigating how material culture, identity, and meaning are preserved, challenged, and reimagined.

This course will help you make sense of the world through stories, images, and technology, preparing you for upper-level courses in the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. The course is not about memorizing facts; it is about learning how the humanities can help you ask better questions.

100-level: Introduction to Western Art History
This course introduces students to the field of art history. It focuses on a number of important paintings, each representative of a specific period or movement in the history of Western art. Thus a chronological survey is offered ranging from the later Middle Ages until the present day. The course discusses individual works of art and their makers in depth, and pays attention to the art institutions and markets, as well as to critics and historiographers that somehow contributed to these masterpieces and their reputation. Field trips to important art collections are part of the course.

100-level: Introduction to World Archaeology​
The oldest settlement we know, Çatalhöyük, dates from 10.000 BC. Later in antiquity came the first great centres like Alexandria, Rome, Jerusalem, Meroe and Istanbul. This course explores how people’s lives changed by living in these early cities, from the Neolithic to Medieval times, from Greece, to Kush, to Sogdia. How did their interaction with landscapes change? What role did craft and other forms of material culture have on the social and cognitive make-up of communities? Through these questions, this course will change the way you look at objects as bearers of information.

300-level: Modern Art & Modern Museums
Modernism is the common denominator for a complex and widely differing range of movements and developments in the visual arts since 1870. The notions of modernism and avant-garde led and still lead to a broad range of ideas and theories on art.
This course provides a comprehensive survey of the most important movements in modern and contemporary art, presented in chronological order. We will explore key debates on the nature of modern art through carefully selected themes and topics. In addition to painting and sculpture, the course will cover photography, video, installation art, architecture, and design.
An important aspect of this course is its focus on how modern art is presented in and connected to museums and exhibitions. Discussions will examine the role of institutions in shaping public perception and understanding of modern art, offering insights into curatorial practices and exhibition strategies that influence the contemporary art scene.

Gateway Courses:

• For all 200-level and 300-level courses in Literature: Humanities in the World

100-level:

• Great Literary Works
• Introduction to Literary Studies

200-level:

• World Myth & Literature
• Life & Travel Writing

300-level:

• Film & Text
• Perspectives on Literary Meaning

Course Descriptions

100-level: Humanities in the World
In today’s interconnected global world, the humanities play a crucial role in fostering critical thinking, empathy, and cultural awareness. They help us navigate complex social issues, understand diverse perspectives, and contribute meaningfully to global conversations.

This gateway course introduces you to the methodologies and research skills central to the humanities courses within the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. You will explore Film and Media, understanding how movies, series, and online content shape our emotions and beliefs. You will learn about Communication, discovering how ideas spread, how people connect, and the implications when they don’t. You will delve into Literature, uncovering how language serves as a tool for imagination, memory, and protest. Additionally, you will examine Heritage, Art, and Museums, investigating how material culture, identity, and meaning are preserved, challenged, and reimagined.

This course will help you make sense of the world through stories, images, and technology, preparing you for upper-level courses in the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. The course is not about memorizing facts; it is about learning how the humanities can help you ask better questions.

100-level: Great Literary Works
The course is a chronological overview of literature ranging from the earliest monuments (the epic of Gilgamesh) to post-modernity. Within this framework you will read texts that represent what it means to be human, mortal, female, male, or child, a member of family or other community, civilized or barbarian.
You will be invited to analyse literary representations of home, labour, leisure, duty, love, leadership, religion, and memory, and correlate them with diverse genres: heroic epic, philosophical tale, fairy tale, short story, autobiography, essay and novella.

100-level: Introduction to Literary Studies
The course explores some basic issues of literary analysis starting from the questions: what is literature, and why do we read and study it, and how we define literary value?
It is based on the classic division into three broad genres (fiction, poetry and drama), followed by contemporary non-fiction and rudiments of film narration.
You will learn basic critical terms, tools and techniques, improve your analytical skills and enhance your pleasure of reading literature.

200-level: Life & Travel Writing
The course is about various forms of life narrative: memoir, autobiography, diary, personal essay, travel narrative.
You will learn how to read and analyse them, and be sensitive to other autobiographical modes (blog, oral history), thus gaining skills important for us living in the late modern culture of autobiography.
You will be invited to prove your comprehension of theoretical aspects of life narrative research analysing your own subjective experience and writing structured short personal narratives.

300-level: Film & Text
There are plentiful examples of famous films based on literary texts, from the already hackneyed Pride and Prejudice, through Bridget Jones’ Diary, The Lord of the Rings, to Frankenstein, Dracula, and Hamlet.
Keeping this in mind, we will discuss various ways in which a literary source is translated on screen but where a relation between it and film turns out to be one of equal partners. In line with it, and against the misconception of fidelity studies, we will trace various links between literary and film narration and diverse intertextual dimensions of film adaptation.

300-level: Perspectives on Literary Meaning
Literature is a socially important aesthetic practice and learning to read it from multiple perspectives is a fine intellectual challenge. This is what our course is about: it prepares you for reading in the global and diverse world, from multiple points of view, and with an awareness of societal consequences of taking a stance on cultural meaning. How do you approach a text as a humanist, feminist, Marxist, psychoanalyst, or a representative of a cultural minority? What accounts for literary meaning and what is the relation of literature to other forms of cultural production?

Gateway Courses:

• For all 200-level and 300-level courses in Media: Humanities in the World

100-level:

• Introduction to Film & Media
• Analog Media Technologies

200-level:

• From T.V. to TikTok: Media Studies
• Media & the Environment

300-level:

• Media & Race: A Cultural History
• The Documentary

Course Descriptions

100-level: Humanities in the World
In today’s interconnected global world, the humanities play a crucial role in fostering critical thinking, empathy, and cultural awareness. They help us navigate complex social issues, understand diverse perspectives, and contribute meaningfully to global conversations.

This gateway course introduces you to the methodologies and research skills central to the humanities courses within the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. You will explore Film and Media, understanding how movies, series, and online content shape our emotions and beliefs. You will learn about Communication, discovering how ideas spread, how people connect, and the implications when they don’t. You will delve into Literature, uncovering how language serves as a tool for imagination, memory, and protest. Additionally, you will examine Heritage, Art, and Museums, investigating how material culture, identity, and meaning are preserved, challenged, and reimagined.

This course will help you make sense of the world through stories, images, and technology, preparing you for upper-level courses in the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. The course is not about memorizing facts; it is about learning how the humanities can help you ask better questions.

100-level: Analog Media Technologies
Before the cloud abstracted memory and screens compressed experience, media had weight, texture, and noise. Analog Media Technologies explores how obsolete formats function as tools for critical inquiry. Drawing on media theory, material analysis, and cultural criticism, we examine how analog technologies shape perception. You will engage in weekly readings, conceptual exercises, and object-based analysis. Activities may include recording silence, studying cassette hiss as an aesthetic form, or constructing a primitive printing system using organic materials. Others may pursue traditional approaches, such as a formal analysis of typewriter key ergonomics or an investigation into the cultural reception of the Walkman. No technical experience is required. The course is open to all students interested in how media forms shape knowledge through material interaction and decay over time. We begin with a box of discarded machines and end by discovering which ones still speak.

100-level: Introduction to Film & Media
In this course, basic concepts, theories, and analytical tools are introduced, discussed, and applied. Students are introduced to a glossary of cinema and examine film as a cultural product. The course covers dramaturgical principles and the functions of media in society. Students can choose to write an essay or do an applied project. The course thus prepares students for continued study in the field.

200-level: Media Studies
Stories told in film and graphic narratives, online series, blogs, and through music and dance, teach us about the past and present. We explore dis/empowerment by juxtaposing Hollywood’s projections of Indian stereotypes with independent indigenous films. We study internet platforms and streaming series to uncover constructions of the dis/abled “other,” the ‘oppositional gaze,’ (Hooks), and race and class privilege. Visiting activists, artists and scholars educate, inspire and lead civic engagement.

200-level: Media & the Environment
This course examines ways contemporary environmental concerns unfold in forms of visual culture. We discuss the animal, the Anthropocene, anthropomorphism, biocentrism, deep time, deep ecology, contested ideas of “nature,” as well as indigenous and postcolonial digital media. Students can write an academic paper or explore environmental understanding through media art practices such as the moving image, photography, or installations.

300-level:  Media & Race: A Cultural History
This course studies the United States from the immediate aftermath of the American Civil war, ending in 1865, through today. It centers around the lives of ordinary people and their creation of cultural institutions like Disneyland, expressions like music, and forms like film. A central premise is that media reflects and shapes daily life. Associations of crime with race framed in ‘the’ news, for instance, reinforce the idea that racial groups are inherently criminal. Race, at the center of American history and life, is at the heart of the class. For example, we study the racial constructions of ordinary lives by exploring how new technologies, like the automobile, were racialized. Topics including crime and punishment, sickness and health, inclusion and exclusion, work, leisure, and childhood also reveal the ways that gender, age, class, dis/ability and other categories of identity intersect with race to shape history and life. Throughout the term, students learn how the past connects with the present. By the end of the semester, they will know that historical knowledge is essential for understanding modern day life and imagining better futures.

300-level:  The Documentary
In this course, students will be introduced to the development of the documentary form. Students will A) produce a theoretical paper dealing with a problem and 2) deal with the problem in a short documentary film, video, or piece of media. The aims of the course are to foster an understanding of documentary as a diverse form, with a range of styles and genres, to root this diversity in its various historical and social contexts, and to introduce you to analytical tools appropriate for study of documentaries.