Undergraduate Courses

Students study creativity and the science of engaging learning environments and use their findings to brainstorm low-cost solutions for improving classroom atmosphere. Students generate Do It Yourself" ideas that teachers can use to transform the physical space of their classroom on a budget to help students enter the proper mindset for learning. Students aggregate and edit their ideas into an eBook as an inspirational resources for teachers around the country.

Prepares students to navigate today's world of professional music performance. Topics include setting career goals, defining success, finding and creating performance opportunities, grant writing, creating publicity materials, auditions, day jobs, freelancing, and how to manage money, time, and stress

This is a practice-based course designed to teach basic programming skills in the context of critical and cultural media studies and digital humanities. Requires no prior programming experience, simply a willingness to explore code at a more technical level with the aim of using computation as an expressive, analytical, critical and visualizing medium. Students learn basic coding techniques such as variables, loops, graphics, and networking, all within a larger conversation on the social, cultural, and historical nature of code and coding practices.

This course is designed for students interested in learning about using creativity and future studies in formal and informal educational settings. Students explore technological progress and notions of futurism to better prepare students for a fast-paced world. The course offers an opportunity for students to create tangible and useful educational material and to exercise their creativity muscles in educationally significant ways.

What is the value of an idea? How do we frame ideas to convince others of their value? Students explore methods of fundraising for educational projects, including grant writing, crowdfunding, and community engagement; analyze successful grant proposals, Kickstarter campaigns and events; and discover ways technology has enhanced small-scale fundraising. Students craft their own fundraising pitch around a new creative product, project or need. This course offers a fun and engaging way to gain experience in educational fundraising—a crucial skill for any future educator.

Students serve as a production team that will create, rehearse, produce, and perform a culminating musical presentation at local venues. Such site may be schools, Senior Citizens Homes, Health Care Facilities, Community Centers. Students will assume the roles played by all personnel involved in putting on a performance, as well as becoming familiar with repertoire *music, lyrics, and dialogue) suited to the abilities of the performers.

Are modern generative AI systems capable of true creativity or are they simply stochastic parrots, unthinkingly repeating sequences in their training data? We begin with an examination of human creativity and the science of human cognition, followed by an accessible review of the inner workings of modern generative transformer models with a focus on pattern recognition and creative pattern expansion. The course concludes with group and individual projects applying new knowledge and skills to creative tasks.

Course explores the question of what is creativity through a set of practices that can be integrated into professional and personal lives. Students will answer this question through an exploration of three themes: creativity and identity (everyone has creative potential), rules and limits (do they limit and/or foster creativity), imagination and possibilities for action. At each course meeting, students will highlight creative thinking tools, exercises, and strategies to think through various challenges in their particular fields.

Debates about the role of crime in the media have been among the most sustained and divisive in the field of communications, and they are dependent on a foundation of equally divisive debates about “media influence.” This course will broaden this discussion to consider the culture of crime in relation to conventions of news and entertainment in the mass media, and its larger social and political context. Topics will include crime reporting, the role of place in crime stories, the aesthetics of crime, moral panics and fears, crime and consumer culture, and the social construction of different kinds of crimes and criminals.

The cultural context of crime in relation to conventions of news and entertainment in the mass media. Topics include competing theories of criminogenic behavior, news conventions and crime reporting, the aesthetics and representation of crime in the media, the role of place in crime stories, moral panics and fears, crime and consumer culture, and the social construction of different kinds of crimes and criminals.

Examines a variety of speech communities and linguistic codes within contemporary American society and their relationship to language use and learning in schools. Black and Hispanic English vernaculars receive special emphasis. Group projects focus on actual investigations in the area of sociolinguistics and language teaching/learning.

Critical making is hands-on hardware practice as a form of reflection and analysis that draws on the literature of media studies and digital humanities. We turn to the physicality of computation and communications infrastructure, taking objects apart both literally and figuratively to understand how they work. In the process we learn to interpret and intervene in the material layer of digital technologies, using prototyping, reverse engineering, hardware hacking and circuit bending, design fiction, electronics fabrication, and other approaches.

This course introduces students to critical video—the use of documentary, ethnographic, and research-based video to investigate and critique contemporary culture. Students gain a theoretical overview of documentary video, a set of conceptual tools to analyze video, and an introduction to the practice of video production for small and mobile screens. Students apply texts on video's history, culture, and distribution, as well as the ethical challenges of video production, to their own, research-based video project. No prior experience required.

This course explores New York City as a cultural and economic hub for food and media, where food shapes communities and social and cultural identities. Media of all types fuel and shape our connections to food. Tastes are defined; diets and food habits are promoted and demoted; food fortunes and food celebrities are made. Topics include: Food-related publishing and broadcasting; green markets, food trucks, systems of supply and distribution; marketing; diversity, fusion, and identity. Classroom work is supplemented by site visits, guest lectures, and field research.

This course explores the multi-faceted nature of New York City as a cultural & economic hub for food & media. Food is never just something we eat, but in New York City food has taken on an increasing prominence in public life. Food shapes communities & is an increasingly important marker of social & cultural identities. Media of all types fuel & shape our connections to food. Tastes are defined; diets & food habits are promoted & demoted; food fortunes & food celebrities are made. How has New York City become so important to the business of taste? What goes on behind-the-scenes? Topics include: Food-related publishing & broadcasting; green markets, food trucks, & systems of supply & distribution; marketing; Chinatowns, diversity, fusion, & identity. Open to majors & non-majors including special students. Classroom instruction is supplemented by site visits, guest lectures, & field research.

This course explores New York City as a cultural and economic hub for media and the arts, arguably the cultural capital of the world. Classroom work is supplemented by site visits, guest lectures, and field research to explore the ways that media and the arts have shaped work and leisure in NYC life in the past century. Topics include: Time Square and live spectacle, the Broadway theatre, Madison Ave and modern advertising, the museum of New York, galleries, artists, and the art market, the Harlem Renaissance, alternative media and Bohemian arts.

This course will investigate the cultural geography of a specific commodity, assessing historical & contemporary issues that inform modes of production & development of international or domestic trade. The subtopic may vary. Students will work as a team to produce a project that analyzes the intricacies of the commodity—in this case, coffee. The course will include on-the-ground research and site visits.

Whether large, small, wide, high-definition, public, personal, shared, or handheld, screens are one of the most pervasive technologies in everyday life. From spaces of work to spaces of leisure, screens are sites for collaboration, performance, surveillance, and resistance. This course traces the cultural history of screens from a range of forms - from the panorama to the cinema, from the radar system to the television, and from the terminal to the mobile device - to provide a way of thinking about the development of the screen as simultaneously architectural, material, representational and computational.

This course examines how cultural memory is enacted through visual culture in a comparative global context. It looks at the rise of a memory culture over the last few decades, in particular in the United States, Europe & Latin America, & how this engagement with memory demonstrates how the politics of memory can reveal aspects of nationalism & national identity, ethnic conflict & strife, the legacies of state terrorism, & the deployment of memory as a means for further continued conflict.

What does it mean to be "urban" in China & how is Chinese urbanism mediated by new cultural formations? In this course we examine the culture and media that define city life in China, including state and popular media, television and film, music, fashion, verbal art and literature, and visual art. We focus on the period from the building booms of the mid-to-late nineties to the present. Students work in teams to make presentations, use primary sources (in translation) and secondary sources to write individual essays.