TOPIC COURSES: FALL 2015
Last Updated: March 3, 2014
COM 401 002 Cinematography: The Visual Language of Movies
This course will explore conventional and cutting edge methods for digital motion-picture
acquisition. Course content will provide introductions to the tools, equipment, and terminology of the
cinematographer. Students will study award-winning cinematographers and their work; during research,
careful attention will be placed on their workmanship, techniques, and style that are ultimately displayed
on the silver screens. Essentially, students will learn how to “paint with light” as they explore the “look” of
various cameras, the visual effect of different lenses, camera blocking, studio/field lighting, and advanced
camera movements.
ENG 251 001 Topics in Cultural Studies – “Secret Identities: Diversity and Popular Culture”
“It wasn’t Krypton that Superman really came from,” the cartoonist Jules Feiffer once wrote, “it was planet
Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw.” Because Superman, one of the quintessential products of American
popular culture and himself an immigrant (an illegal immigrant, at that), was the creation of firstgeneration American Jews whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. In this course, we’ll
explore how diversity—particularly through the influence of American Jews and African Americans—
shaped American popular culture. We’ll look at Hollywood films, comic books, and rock ‘n’ roll music in
order to understand how American culture reflects—sometimes in disguised and secret ways—the
diversity of American society. Our cast will include, among others, Superman, Captain America, various
Hollywood film-makers, and Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” This course counts for the
Jewish Studies minor. 4 hrs.
HST 289 001 Seminar in American History: Concentration Camps, USA
This course will introduce students to the history of Japanese Americans from the beginning of largescale immigration in the 1890s to the present. Topics include international migration patterns, settlement
and employment, racial discrimination and the responses of Japanese American individuals and
communities to such oppression, generational divides, internment during World War II and redress in the
1980s, and the struggles associated with the formation of Asian American panethnicity. Readings
emphasize secondary scholarship and primary source materials. No Prerequisites. 4 hrs.
HST 291 001 Seminar in World History: Mapping Slavery
Have you ever wanted to create a map? Do you enjoy hands-on activities and digital research? Join us
as we embark on a semester-long project to map the experience of thousands of individuals whose lives
were swept up in the transatlantic slave trade. Students in this seminar will encounter shipwrecks, slave
rebellions, imperial rivalries, and more as we explore records pulled from numerous historical archives
and compiled in Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. The seminar will combine historical
research with cutting-edge Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques to access and chart these
stories digitally across time and space. No Prerequisites. 4 hrs
INS 300 002 Middle East Media
This course will build on developments in media and social change and contemporary analyses of the
Middle East toward a consideration of how communication technologies are being used in strategic
transition in the region. The course will consider strategic transition in democratic, liberalization, and
commercial reforms (such as the Arab Spring), in domestic, transnational, and new media systems in the
Middle East. The course will also explore the role of Middle Eastern media in political action, as a
potential tool for negotiation or resistance. We will be taking a critical look at how media technologies are
assumed to facilitate or impede political, social and cultural transitions. Cross-listed with COM 346 4 hrs
PHY 250 001 Special Topics in Modern Physics
A survey course covering topics from physics after 1900, with a focus on special relativity and quantum
mechanics. The class will alternate between the presentation of new concepts and the exploration of their
unusual consequences. Material will challenge everyday common sense ideas; as a result this course
should help you appreciate how science reaches conclusions and comes to accept hypotheses. 1 hr.
PREREQUISITE: Students must have completed PHYS 102 with at least a B or get permission of the
instructor.1 hr
POL 280 001 Intermediate Topics in Political Science: Genocide
The course is intended to introduce students to the comparative study of genocide in its varied and
international forms as an essential feature of modern history and the contemporary world. The focus will
be on genocide as perpetrated in “the bloody 20th century,” although historical and policy-making
linkages will be made to the pre-20th century and 21st-century worlds. Students will be trained to
analyze and apply the concepts, history, and consequences of genocide: political, social, cultural, ethical,
and moral. We will employ case studies to distinguish between categories, or typologies of genocide as
characterized by motivations, methods, and effects. 4 hrs.
SCI 101 001 Issues in Science: Food and Agriculture
Where did the food from your most recent meal come from? How is our food produced? Is our food
safe? What are you really eating? What are you really paying for at the grocery store? Are there enough
resources and food to feed everyone on earth? What is a food desert and do you live in one? In this
course we will attempt to answer these questions and many more by investigating issues in modern
agriculture, personal health, nutrition and hunger. 4 hrs.
SPN 370 001 Topics in Hispanic Studies: Spanish-American Literature and Film
This course explores the complex interplay between film and literary texts. Selected novels and short
stories are analyzed in relation to film versions of the same works in order to gain an understanding of the
possibilities—and problems—involved in the transposition to film. As this is a course in literature and film
analysis, students do not need to have taken other Cinema courses before taking this course. This course
is taught in Spanish. 4 hrs.
THR 301 001 Topics in Dramatic Literature
Study of World Drama from the realism of Ibsen through naturalism, expressionism, symbolism, into
current theatre trends. The course analyzes major modern works featuring Maeterlinck, Shaw, O’Neill,
Pirandello, Brecht, Williams, Stoppard, Deveare Smith, Wilson, and Soyinka. It also discusses lasting
influences including Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty,” Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” Beckett’s “Theatre of the
Absurd” and Postmodern approaches to theatre. 4 hrs.