This course explores the history and politics of gender representation on television from the 1950s to the present. Since the mid-20 century, television has occupied a central place in U.S. cultural production and thus serves as a nexus where concerns with gender as well as sexuality, class, and race are negotiated. To interrogate these negotiations, the course will attend to the shifts in the industrial arrangement of television and to corresponding shifts in television’s formal arrangement. It asks not only how gender has been represented on television but also how gender functions in the television industry and how it functions within a televisual aesthetic. It traces the role of gender in many of television studies prominent theories: flow, liveness, televisuality, quality TV, and media convergence. The course will cover both nonfiction and fiction, looking at a range of television genres: sitcom, soap operas, news, primetime drama, cartoons, music videos, commercials, and Netflix original content.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

PREREQUISITES: None

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of media studies. We will look at a range of both media and historical tendencies related to the media, including manuscript culture, print, and the rise of the newspaper, novel, and modern nation-state; photography, film, television and their respective differences as visual mediums; important shifts in attitudes towards painting; the place of sound in the media of modernity; and the computerization of culture brought about by the computer, social networks, video games, and cell phones. In looking at these, we will consider both the approaches that key scholars in the field of media studies use, and the concepts that are central to the field itself (media/medium; medium-specificity; remediation; the culture industry; reification and utopia; cultural politics). By the end of the class, students will have developed a toolkit for understanding, analyzing, and even using the media that shape their lives in late modernity.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 202

This course introduces the basic aesthetic and technical elements of video production. Emphasis is on the creative use and understanding of the video medium while learning to use the video camera, video editing processes and the fundamental procedures of planning video projects. Strategies for the use of video as an art-making tool will be explored. Works by artists and directors critically exploring media of film and video will be viewed and discussed. Video techniques will be studied through screenings, group discussions, readings, practice sessions and presentations of original video projects made during the course. Sophomores and Juniors with officially declared FMS and SA majors are given priority registration; followed by sophomores and juniors with officially declared FMS and SA minors. Studio arts supplies fee: $50. To be added to the rolling waiting list, please contact Jason Middleton at jason.middleton@rochester.edu

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

This course offers a unique opportunity for students to engage critically with broadcasting and the supporting areas of the radio and television industries. Students will participate in theoretical and practical applications in a selected area of focus at Rochester’s public broadcasting organization, WXXI. These areas include production for news, 1370 Connections, Second Opinion, Homework Hotline, music, television, and audio engineering and administrative support including accounting, fundraising, web development, social media, and others. Weekly class meetings cover the basics of broadcasting including the history, regulations, and formats of over-the air communications, along with an overview of the changes that digital media has brought to traditional broadcasting. This course requires students spend 8 hours per week at the WXXI studios and offices in Rochester. These times are to be arranged by the student, course instructor and WXXI Executive Vice President Susan Rogers, and the WXXI site supervisor.

BUILDING: DEWEY | ROOM: 1305

Mass extinction, extreme weather, disaster capitalism, petro-cultures, ecosystem collapse, epidemic contagions, superbugs, information wars, system failures, democracy hacks, and cultural debates about the new geologic epoch of the Anthropocene: this introductory course uses experimental art, graphic design, moving images, and social media to reflect on pervasive popular anxiety about the end of the world from an environmental perspective. Special emphasis will be placed on introductory techniques that move beyond the studio and into collaborative, participatory, community-based productions. Not open to seniors. $50 Studio Fee. For wait list info - Megan Mette at megan.mette@rochester.edu

BUILDING: SAGE | ROOM: BLDG

For many, the mental image of American artistic production from the Depression Era is far more akin to the barren black & white Kansas homestead than the sparkling technicolor of Oz. This was hardly the case. In fact, the 1930s was a decade of diverse artistic experiments in the United States—a veritable laboratory for debating art’s forms and social aims that would come to redefine American culture itself. This course introduces a range of those experiments, focusing on the network between film and the other visual arts. Topics include federally sponsored New Deal programs, the social realisms of African-American and immigrant artists, the rise of photo-journalism and emergence of “documentary” across mediums, the aesthetic diplomacy of World’s Fairs and films such as Capra’s American Madness, Lang’s Fury, and Ford’s Grapes of Wrath. Throughout the course we will be asking in what ways did these experiments represent propositions about the direction and shape of modern art and culture in America.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 104

Media ABC is an introduction to the very idea of medium and media—as in “the medium of print.” The goal is to come to a basic understanding of that concept. The perspective of the course is historical and critical. The key assumption is that media—the human voice, manuscripts, printed books, telegrams, photos, film, TV, paintings, electronic files--shape their "content"--words, pictures, sounds—and also shape their authors and their audiences. There have always been media because life cannot be lived without them. We are now experiencing a digital revolution. This remarkable media shift puts us among the first explorers to arrive on the scene of epoch-making changes. We should take advantage of our own unique intellectual opportunity to look back on the history of media from the powerful new perspective of digital media—and also to contemplate the great void that no medium has yet filled, the spaces of communication that we cannot yet cross.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 161

This course will look at the internet’s impact on aesthetic practices from across the world, with a special focus on works from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, as well as indigenous communities in North America and the Pacific. We’ll study a wide range visual and written material, from Instagram poetry, zine fiction, and viral fictional blogs, to video art, video games, and graphic narratives. We’ll also read a few internet-infused print novels, like Nikesh Shukla’s Meatspace and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City, that approach the digital literature question from the other side. Genres and forms will run the gamut from science fiction to memoir, music video to animation. How, we’ll ask, have black and brown artists from around the globe used the internet to critically engage our contemporary world, shape new aesthetic forms, and create new forms of community and belonging?

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 218

This course focuses on the horror genre as popular entertainment in Germany, England, and the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Particular attention will be paid to the construction of "others" as monsters in literature and film (Frankenstein, Vampires, Devils, Aliens, etc.). Authors/filmmakers include: Hoffmann, Poe, Shelley, Stoker, Jackson, Rice, Harris, King, Murnau, Jordan, Wise, Siegel, Kubrick, Demme, . This course is part of the Horror in Literature & Film Cluster. Taught in English.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 401

Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course focuses on the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and film conservation and preservation. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at analog film and its preservation in action, allowing us to consider it as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is in addition to being art, entertainment, and evidentiary document, also an historical artifact. There are weekly film assignments. Class meets at George Eastman Museum and on River Campus (transportation provided).

BUILDING: WEGMN | ROOM: 1009

Join us as we consider feature films as evidence for the cultural historian of modern America by considering the role of movies in the social imaginary of distinct moments in the nation's history.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 525

An introduction to the three-act film structure. Students will read and view numerous screenplays and films, and develop their own film treatment into a full-length script.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 403

Our lives are full of repetition – things we do as part of our daily routine, but also repetition in the form of practice is the way we learn a language, learn a sport, and learn a particular skill. This class will investigate how thinking about learning as practice provides us with ways of thinking about knowledge as something that is experienced and embodied, rather than acquired and possessed. We will explore what it means to come back to a film or a text throughout the course of the semester, but also look at the ways in which various artists and theorists use repetition to explore and engage with a particular idea or topic.

BUILDING: DOUG | ROOM: 420

This course examines American writers’ responses to intense social, economic, and technological upheavals, such as urbanization, colonization, industrialization, and social injustices, from 1850s through now. As we read Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, Henry Thoreau’s Walden, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, and more, we will explore how these creative authors have left us an archive of historical traces that can help us understand our own environmental experiences today. Topics covered include colonialism, ecotourism, slavery, civil rights, trauma, technology, urbanization, the rise of science, and students can expect to explore questions such as, What are the environmental politics of race? How do indigenous writers respond to the trauma of losing homelands? How to communicate the hazards of climate change? How do we create a meaningful connection to home and the planet amidst so much injustice and technological upheaval?

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 121

Focused on (but not limited to) the first half of the 20th century, this course explores representations of Japan in a wide range of visual and material culture: ephemera generated by tourism and education; advertisements and souvenirs; and wartime propaganda traveling similar routes of exchange. Illustrations, guidebooks, photographs, and films reflect changing concepts of urban space, rural culture, industry, geography, and military and political authority. Recurrent iconography and coded images link tourism and educational objects and images with evolving concepts of nationalism and cultural identity. How is the meaning of modern in Japan useful to a study of the continuous transformation of culture in specific contexts, as in the transition from ukiyo-e culture to photography and animated films. This course has a digital component: students work (hands on) with the Re-Envisioning Japan Research Collection in curating their own digital exhibitions. Weekly film assignments. Trips to MAG/GEM (trans. incl.).

BUILDING: WEGMN | ROOM: 1009

Apart from his infamous cameos, Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who wanted his presence—seen or unseen—felt by his audience. When you watch a Hitchcock film, you are meant to be acutely aware that it is Hitchcock’s film. This course examines how exactly that works.More than a proper noun, “Hitchcock” implies a formal style, a dramatic genre and a paradigm of postwar Autuerism and influence. This course revolves around a close examination of fifteen out of the director’s fifty films, as well as samples from his television series. Without pardoning his socially insensitive shortcomings (i.e. misogynist “heros,” mistreatment of leading ladies, use of blackface, etc.) we will unpack just what constitutes the “Hitchcock” touch. From his British silents to his Hollywood “masterpieces” to his final works, this course considers the ways in which Hitchcock devised a relation among narrative, spectator and character point of view, so as to yield his singular configuration of suspense, sensation and perception.

BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 201

This advanced seminar explores ecological realism as an approach to art history. It concerns historiography of art as well as studies of specific art genres, especially landscape paintings. Responding to relevant discussions in the history of science and technology, the course aims to bring into new light artistic realisms by expanding artworks’ relationalities and possibilities. By shedding light on the agencies of the inert, the mystic, the disadvantaged, and the wasted, this course provides thinking tools that can be used to reassess the complexities, contradictions, and limitations of human creativity in the ecological process of the living world. The course presents and encourages interdisciplinary views on critical issues of various fields including (but not limited to) art historiography, ecology, philosophy, and psychology. At the same time, the course offers an understanding of the history of Chinese landscape painting as the basis of critical discussions.

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Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course focuses on the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and film conservation and preservation. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at analog film and its preservation in action, allowing us to consider it as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is in addition to being art, entertainment, and evidentiary document, also an historical artifact. There are weekly film assignments. Class meets at George Eastman Museum and on River Campus (transportation provided).

BUILDING: WEGMN | ROOM: 1009

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