Undergraduate Courses

This course will build on a core concept of Lewis Mumford who understood media ecology as a component of spatial and urban ecology. Emphasis will be given on how space socially organizes human meaning and on the “inscription” of space. How do people, throUEh, their practices and their being in the world, form relationships with the locales they occupy (both the natural world and the build environment)? How do they attach meanings to spaces to create places? And how do the experiences of inhabiting viewing and hearing those places shape their meanings, communicative practices, cultural performance memories and habits? Course themes include; mapping and the imagination; vision and space, soundscape, architecture and landscape; new media and space/time compression; space and identity; spatial violence; spatialization of memory.

This course is a Dean’s Global Honors Seminar and available by application only.Eligible students are contacted directly. It includes travel to Florence, Italy during January 2018 and requires a $400 fee. This course explores the implications of having a disability in global contexts. Students will explore and identify factors, which can influence a community’s view of disability, including enablers and barriers to participation in daily life especially for people with disabilities.

Employing a global perspective, this course introduces students to the major issues and concepts regarding food and culture. Examining food and diet from historical and transnational perspectives, we examine the effect of colonialism and immigration on agriculture, food technologies, diets, and health. Through field trips, guest speakers, discussions, hands-on activities and eating, students explore how food influences and is influenced by myriad factors, including politics, economics, climate, geography, technology, and culture.

This course will examine the origins, development, and meaning of cultural conflicts around the world. How have cultural issues divided human beings, within their own countries and across them? How have these issues changed during our contemporary era of globalization, with its rapid spread of people and ideas across borders? How have these developments created new global alliances as well as fractures? And, most of all, how can we find common ground across our profound cultural and national differences? Special topics may include abortion, same-sex marriage, sex education, pornography, and drug regulation. Liberal Arts CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Cultures and Contexts.

Builds on a basic understanding of graphic design to help students refine their skills & develop more personally expressive ways to solving problems through visual communication. Assignments, readings, & research projects will allow students to consider the complex nature of graphic design. Both traditional & digital approaches to typography & layout will be incorporated with a wide range of assignment. A priority is placed on the use of concepts to dictate design techniques & on the pursuit of a genuinely creative vision

Design for today's stage in period and modern styles. Methods of originating and presenting a design conception. Practice in scene sketching. Three hours of laboratory per week.

This course serves to familiarize the student with the fundamentals of typography. Typography forms the basis of our contemporary communication. Students will gain design abilities based on analogue techniques as well as digital software. The class explores letterform design & moves subsequently to typesetting exercises performed using the letterpress printer & computer. Compositions exploring typography as color, form, & image will be examined for visual impact as well as meaning. The history of typography is incorporated beginning with Guttenberg in the 1400’s through the classic designers of the 17th & 18th centuries, type-design through Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, & Modernism to contemporary digital type design.

This class acquaints the student with the fundamentals of Design by focusing primarily on layout, composition & color through use of the grid. The grid is a fundamental building block for publication design (print & digital), website design, & animation design. This class focuses primarily on Graphic Design but proposes basic concepts that can be extrapolated into other design fields. Classes will be client & solutions-based and will assume a professional career orientation. Additionally the class will provide a current overview of what’s happening in the contemporary design world through field trips, readings & presentations.

A continuing exploration of graphic design to help students refine their skills & develop more personally expressive ways to solving problems through visual communication. Assignments, readings, & research projects will allow students to consider the complex nature of graphic design. Both traditional & digital approaches to typography & layout will be incorporated with a wide range of assignment. A priority is placed on the use of concepts to dictate design techniques & on the pursuit of a genuinely creative vision.

Explores the subject of desire in modern media and culture. Freud's ideas have had a profound influence on everything from the earliest manuals on public relations to the struggles of modern feminism. We will read a range of psychoanalytic theorists while studying how their insights have been put to work by both the culture industry and its critics.

Exposes students to approaches to research in diverse settings in the field of Applied Psychology. Students begin developing ideas for independent research. Through scaffolded experiences, lectures, discussions, guest speakers, research lab visits, and readings, students develop and articulate goals for engaging in independent research, identify types of mentorship and ways to integrate their own goals for research with the work of a potential mentor, and begin to formulate ideas for their research proposals.

A comprehensive overview of human development from conception through adolescence. Theories of developmental psychology are related to research findings, & implications are drawn for practical issues.

Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences

Discussion of human growth across the lifespan; multiple contexts in which development unfolds are explored & implications for practice are considered.

Assessment of the food intake and needs of individuals of diverse ages and backgrounds. Taking into consideration the genetic, cultural, social, and economic factors that affect dietary choices, students will develop dietary plans that meet current recommendations for a variety of health conditions using exchange systems, food composition data, menus, recipes, and product labels.

Production-based course designed as a structured classroom environment for hands-on, critical inquiry. Students receive research guidance, feedback & support for individually-designed & executed digital media/computational projects. May be taken in conjunction with another MCC course or as a stand-alone course in which students develop an independent project that may be an outgrowth of a previous MCC course. Open to graduate students by permission of instructor.

The aesthetic & personal potential of the computer for the artist is defined. Students work on building skills in areas such as PhotoShop, Illustrator, layout & design, & animation. Readings & discussion include the impact of digital technology on culture, as well as individual artists’ projects.

Assignments, critiques, & demonstrations related to the specific level on which the course is being given. The use of the computer to augment & expand conceptualization & expression has provided the artist with some of the most important new means for visual thinking since the Renaissance invention of perspective. Students learn how to use the computer as an extension of the visualization process & its specific applications in both two-dimensional & three-dimensional art.

Assignments, critiques and demonstrations for the more advanced digital art student. The use of the computer to augment and expand conceptualization and expression has provided the artist with some of the most important new means for visual thinking since the Renaissance invention of perspective. Students learn how to use the computer as an extension of the visualization process and its specific applications in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional art.

An introduction to Digital Electronics, including binary systems & logic. Students must enroll in a Lab section to apply hands-on experience in simple computer programming techniques, digital processing applied to music with specific relevance to computer music synthesis & MIDI.

Hands-on lab accompanying Digital Electronics. Lab sessions will contain hands-on experience with logic circuits & microcontrollers. The course culminates with a student developed final project.