Global Arc

This advanced screenwriting workshop will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current "golden age of television." Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes, and engage in in-depth discussion about story, series engine, character, structure, tone and season arcs. Each student will formulate and pitch an original series idea, including season arcs, and complete most or all of the pilot episode by end of semester.

Introduction to screenwriting adaptation techniques, focusing primarily on the challenges of adapting "true stories" pulled from various non-fiction sources. The class will address the ethics of adaptation, questions and techniques surrounding the need to fictionalize truth for dramatic purposes, as well as touch on the differences between fictional and nonfictional original materials. Students will be exposed to various contemporary non-fiction adaptations, and will write a short film and one longer project. By application.

An advanced course in screenwriting. Students will explore the possibilities of transposing their understanding of the contemporary Athens as a physical and metaphorical space, into the fabric of short film/screenplay. This class will build upon the techniques introduced in Screenwriting I and II - and will examine other films that have used cities as a source of narrative and structural inspiration in order to direct students towards their own script interpretations of Athens-specific, or Athens-inspired, stories.

Can the emotional fabric of a world, a space, or a country be adapted into a work for the screen? Using Greece and Greek culture as a source of inspiration, students will explore their own approach of transposing a physical and metaphorical space into the fabric of a short film/screenplay. Traditional screen adaptations of memoirs, novels, and plays taking place in Greece will be used as filmic study-texts. An intermediate course in screenwriting, also open to beginners. Prerequisite: by application.

What is translation? What is a language? So essential and widespread is translation today that it has become a central analytic term for the contact of cultures, and a paradigm for studying many different aspects of our multilingual world. This course will consider translation as it appeared in the past, but especially as it constructs everyday life in the contemporary world. It will look at issues of anthropology, artificial intelligence, diplomacy, film, law and literature that involve interlingual and intercultural communication. Students should acquire an understanding of the problems and practices of modern translation.

This course will provide an in-depth study of the Machine Translation paradigms (direct, transfer, statistical/example, interlingua and neural network) used in state-of-the-art speech-to-speech and text-based MT systems, from computational and linguistic perspectives. Techniques for processing human languages (morphological analysis, tagging, syntactic and semantic parsing, and language generation) will be discussed. Linguistic variation across languages and its impact on computational models will be presented. Projects will involve implementing speech/text translation components, identifying their limitations and suggesting improvements.

Translation is at the core of our engagement with China, Japan, and Korea, influencing our reading choices and shaping our understanding of East Asia. From translations of the classics to the grass-root subtitling of contemporary Anime movies, from the formation of the modern East Asian cultural discourse to cross-cultural references in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on what "translation" of "original works" means in a global world where the "original" is often already located in its projected "translation."

This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.

An introduction to probability theory and statistical methods especially as they relate to public policy. The course will consist of a brief introduction to probability theory as well as various topics in statistics and how they can be used in the public policy realm. Subject areas will include random variables, sampling, descriptive statistics, distributions, estimation, hypothesis testing, and introduction to the regression model. The data sources will be actual examples taken from the public policy realm. Stata, a general purpose statistical programming package will be used to perform the statistical analysis.

This course introduces students to basic concepts from the study of public policy. It will serve as an introduction into SPIA and the many disciplines that make up its faculty. The course is designed to familiarize students with the broader issues involved in analyzing, designing, and implementing public polity. The course will a) introduce students to three approaches that policy makers use to design and evaluate policy; and b) allow students to apply these abstract notions to a variety of policy debates.