Global Arc

This course immerses students in the dynamic world of South African physical theatre. Through full-body training, improvisation, and ensemble work, students explore movement as protest, storytelling, and community-building. Inspired by Lecoq's teachings of the four core elements namely Earth, Air, Fire and Water; we will dive into building a performance vocabulary based on gesture, rhythm, and space. Students create original performances, using the body as the primary text, culminating in a showcase of devised physical theatre work.

This workshop rehearses the critical and compositional skills relevant to the task of writing about live performance. We will engage a variety of critical and creative modes to research and compose original works of performance criticism, performance documentation, and other modes of writing about performance. We will survey the contemporary and historical ecosystems that have shaped the methods, theories, and practice of performance criticism in the United States, while also considering the recurring disruptions of these systems coming not only from artists and audiences, but also changes the technologies and economics of arts writing.

Over the course of the semester, novice and experienced student artists create an ensemble-devised performance of theater or immersive art, and test their project against mock eco-centric challenges from the field. Students will experiment with ecological impacts of producing theatre and growing ecological challenges of presenting public art. Students will foster whimsy and innovative thinking to create art-centered solutions. The project will have an open studio performance. Students will also pitch an achievable climate-conscious solution to a challenge they see on campus

Live Art, also known as Performance Art, integrates several disciplines: dance, drama, and visual art as well as architecture, anthropology, sociology, and political science. This course includes classes in creative movement, voice and text, improvisation, mixed media, and technology in performance practice. Composition of the site-specific works provides experiences of space and architecture. Theoretical perspectives consider the principles of interdisciplinary practices from early twentieth century and will focus on socio-political contexts that Live Art historically responds to, giving this innovative practice immediacy and relevance.

This course examines how Africa and its diasporas are imagined, translated, and contested on Western stages, from Broadway to regional theatres and college campuses across the United States. Focusing on contemporary plays written by African writers with varying degrees of connection to the African continent, students analyze how migration, return, memory, and power shape representation in stage. Through close reading, performance, design inquiry, and contextual research, the course asks who gets to tell African stories, for whom, and to what effect, while engaging theatre as a site of cultural negotiation and futurity.

This course will introduce students to important works, authors, styles, themes and trends in contemporary Hindi-Urdu short fiction. We will read short stories from Hindi and Urdu writers including Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Nirmal Verma, Mannu Bhandari, Intizar Hussain, and Mridula Garg, among others. In-class discussion will improve students' proficiency in spoken Hindi/Urdu through expression of their ideas.

Artificial intelligence existed in fiction well before the first computer was built. In fact, storytelling and AI appear to be inseparable: apart from countless science-fiction works, stories ranging from mass unemployment to doomsday scenarios have become entangled with real-world AI and its development. This class studies some iconic representations of AI in the arts alongside non-fiction texts that shed some light on how AI works, its potentialities, limits, and biases. In so doing, we will make sense of the stories that we read about AI, and reflect on whether the former can teach us anything about the latter.

This course explores the different ways that medicine is represented in the fields of literature and the visual arts, using the concept of storytelling to examine themes that are at once medical and existential, and that are part of everybody's lives, such as death and dying, epidemics, caregiving, disability, and public health. Focusing on literary texts and art, we'll analyze how these themes are staged in the different sources. We'll develop a toolbox of concepts and techniques by which to investigate the narrative structures used to convey meanings about medicine, be it as a field of knowledge, a set of practices, or a mode of experience.

The Middle Ages was a period of far-ranging travel, long-distance entanglements, and cultural hybridity. This course will study how geographers and travelers - including eco-travelers like crops and disease - encountered a world grown smaller through empires, trade, and migration, ca. 750-1250 CE. By gathering texts, artifacts, and art from regions often studied separately, this course will test the possibilities for defining a "global Middle Ages" and what that means for our understanding of globalization today. Includes visits from outside experts and trips to special collections.

This course will provide the historical and theoretical background essential for understanding the evolution of women's film in European cinema. Particular attention will be paid to questions of sexual difference and to the challenges feminist and queer theory pose to a politics of identity in film. Students will explore and assess the ways cultural identity determines the cinematic representation of women, while receiving a solid grounding in the poetics of cinema as it developed across time, genres, and cultures.