Courses

Imagine a world with no war, violence, or injustice. For centuries, storytellers have envisioned such utopias. This course examines the powerful allure perfected tomorrowlands exert, especially over trans, queer, feminist, disabled, and BIPOC imaginaries. Considering race and ethnicity, the environment, class divides, forms of gender and sexuality, disability, and the role of technology, we will transport to various utopias appearing in speculative fiction texts, including: Brave New World, I Robot, The Giver, Never Let Me GO, Black Mirror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Utopia Falls. As we explore, we will develop a utopian critical vocabulary. Supplemented by theoretical texts, students will engage in critical and creative writing formats including research essays, stylistic imitations, and a project imaginatively representing a utopia of their own design.

Full details for PMA 1119 - FWS: Utopias

Fantastic places often cut into reality with a "subtle knife" or fold it via tesseract. Transported to timeless noplaces masquerading as whimsical flights of fancy, like Neverland or Oz, we enter a wardrobe into dark, melancholy, even eerie imaginary lands. We journey alongside children touched by trauma, and together we navigate the most treacherous adventures: recovery and maturity. Through different writing assignments we will cross these thin borderlands into Lyra's Oxford, Martin's Fillory, Percy's Camp Half-Blood, Bastian's Fantasia, Eve's Bayou, or Miranda's Hanging Rock, and using critical strategies, explore them. With an emphasis on cinema and television adaptations (which are themselves familiar worlds transformed), and with particular foci on diverse identities, we will practice critical strategies to closely analyze and articulate in writing evidence-based arguments.

Full details for PMA 1160 - FWS: Wonderlands and Other Worlds

What is paradise? Is it a cruise through the Bahamas? Or an all-inclusive stay in Punta Cana? Is paradise the same for those who must live where you vacation?

Full details for PMA 1171 - FWS: Paraiso Infernal: Caribbean and Diasporic Contemporary Art

Full details for PMA 1176 - FWS: New Perspectives in Nollywood

Full details for PMA 1177 - FWS: Asian American Drama

The Media Production Lab course is a series of self-contained lecture/workshops on various topics in the production of film and video on-set and on-location. The workshops will be hands on experience with cameras, lighting and sound equipment, exploring the technique of cinematography as well as, lighting, sound, and grip techniques for the studio and in the field. We will cover specific areas such as dollies and rigging, location sound, and production protocol.  Open to all skill levels.

Full details for PMA 1410 - Media Production Laboratory

This technology lab will provide students with a foundation of the production process through experiential learning of scenographic practices. Students will learn about the technical production processes as they pertain too: scenery fabrication and installation, properties fabrication, costume fabrication, and lighting installation (primarily lighting for live performance).

Full details for PMA 1610 - Production Technology Laboratory

Perform in a departmental theatre or film production, or dance concert. Research a role, develop a character, and perform for a live or mediated audience in a faculty supervised production. Explore choreography and perform in a departmental dance concert.

Full details for PMA 1611 - Rehearsal and Performance

The objective of this course is to introduce students to a core topic that unites the tracks between performing and media studies: story. Throughout the semester students will explore the structures of film, television, and new media through the lens of storytelling. We will also examine how each of these mediums function at both the level of the individual consumer as well as the level of global society.

Full details for PMA 1641 - Introduction to Storytelling

The Student Laboratory Theatre Company (SLTC) is a group of student-actors who earn credit by acting in two or three scenes directed by students taking PMA 4880.

Full details for PMA 1670 - Student Laboratory Theatre Company

The Colloquium provides opportunities for exchange, reflection, discussion of relevant concepts, and extended engagement with the media objects made in a variety of Making Media courses.

Full details for PMA 2000 - Media Studies Minor Colloquium

This course is designed to offer students a broad, foundational introduction to the mission of the Department of Performing and Media Arts. With a focus both on making artistic work in mediated forms and in live performance and on the critical methods for studying such artwork, we explore a variety of topics and concepts, from composition and gesture to sound and movement—and beyond. Joined by visiting guest experts from all across the PMA faculty, the instructors usher students through a range of approaches to creative authorship, design, embodied performance, history, and theory. Organized around a series of keywords, including adaptation, representation, transformation, and world-building, the course also foregrounds ways of thinking about and with categories of identity and social relations, such as ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality.

Full details for PMA 2100 - Introduction to Performing and Media Arts

Full details for PMA 2221 - Contemporary Movement Practices

Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work. Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography.

Full details for PMA 2300 - Beginning Dance Composition

In this course, we will explore over one hundred years of Japanese cinema – one of the most prominent and diverse global film industries – from silent comedies to J-Horror, "ramen westerns" to Studio Ghibli. You will gain a thorough grounding in film vocabulary and tools of cinematic analysis, allowing for deep investigations of gender, genre, history, and the connections between film and other media in modern and contemporary Japan. All films will have English subtitles, and all readings will be available in English; no prior knowledge of Japanese language, history, or culture required.

Full details for PMA 2452 - Introduction to Japanese Film

Japanese pop culture—anime, manga, video games, music and more—has been a major phenomenon with massive worldwide popularity for the last three decades. In this course, we will explore a wide range of Japanese pop cultural forms, exploring the interactions between different media, Japanese pop culture as global pop culture, and a variety of modes of analyzing visual and audio materials. We will also see how pop cultural works themselves, in their content and form, engage with questions of gender, technology, fandom, nation, and the environment. No prior knowledge of Japanese language, culture, or history required. All readings and screenings will be available in English or with English subtitles.

Full details for PMA 2460 - Japanese Pop Culture

What does it mean to call a film is "Jewish"? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews—actors, directors, screenwriters, composers—play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class—an average of one per week—and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

Full details for PMA 2490 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

Learn what it means to run a live show. Participate as part of a team to ensure all the elements work together and on time. Learn the intricacies of collaborating with a production group to create a unified artistic vision. Program lighting, sound, or video boards, or participate as a dresser, stage crew member, or assistant stage manager.

Full details for PMA 2610 - Production Crew Laboratory

This lab will give students practical experience as an assistant stage manager in the organization and management of a theatrical or mediated production; in rehearsals, in technical rehearsals as the scenographic elements are implemented, and in performance or filming for a fully supported department production under the supervision of the staff stage manager.  The course can only be applied to a fully supported department production with a full rehearsal period and performance.

Full details for PMA 2611 - Stage Management Laboratory

The musical is a distinct and significant form of American performance. This course will consider the origins, development, and internationalization of the American musical and will emphasize the interpenetration of the history of musical theatre with the history of the United States in the 20th century and beyond. We will investigate how political, social, and economic factors shape the production of important American musicals-and how, in turn, musicals shape expressions of personal identity and national ideology. Key texts include Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Hair, and Rent.

Full details for PMA 2650 - The American Musical

This course introduces students to ancient Greek drama, with a particular focus on the genre of tragedy and its relation to the cultural, political, and performance context of Athens in the 5th century BC. Students will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in English translation and explore how they address key themes such as gender, racialization, slavery, war, mourning, trauma, empathy, and justice. Students will also study how contemporary artists, writers, and communities have adapted and restaged Greek drama, transforming and animating these ancient scripts across various media (theater, film, literature, etc.) to speak to complex and urgent social issues today (e.g., state/institutional violence; sexual violence; racism and xenophobia; queer bodies and desires; mental health; disability and caregiving).

Full details for PMA 2652 - Ancient Greek Drama

More than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare remains an inescapable part of world culture. His influence can be traced at every level, from traditional art forms like theater, poetry, and opera to popular genres like Broadway musicals, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romcoms. Contemporary adaptations and bold re-stagings of his plays abound that reflect his deep understanding of sexual and gender fluidity, racial and class antipathy, and the complex workings of political power. In this course, we'll focus on five plays that continue to generate creative responses across many media: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for PMA 2681 - Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century

This interdisciplinary course offers an introduction to the methods employed in media arts, sound and performance. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the strategies and historical context of these disciplines. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary studio setting with a specific focus on one of these areas. Through hands-on experience, they will delve into contemporary artistic practices, honing their technical skills to develop and realize their creative projects. Potential topics covered include video and animation, digital image production, sound art, performance art, and movement

Full details for PMA 2701 - Media Arts, Performance, and Sound: Intersections

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Full details for PMA 2703 - Thinking Media

An introduction to the actor's technique and performance skills, exploring the elements necessary to begin training as an actor, i.e., observation, concentration, and imagination. Focus is on physical and vocal exercises, improvisation, and text and character. There is required play reading, play attendance, and some scene study.

Full details for PMA 2800 - Introduction to Acting

Independent study allows students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for PMA 3000 - Independent Study

Intermediate Western classical dance technique. Work is done on strengthening the body through a movement technique emphasizing presence and musicality based on harmonic muscular control.

Full details for PMA 3210 - Dance Technique III - Classical

In this course, we interrogate how immigration debates are staged and experiences of belonging are redefined through performance. The categories of "undocumented," "illegal," "displaced," and "exile" collide on international and national stages when governmental bodies decide who gets to be a migrant and under what terms. We assess how bodies marked culturally and legally as "aliens" use performance to navigate complex migration laws and dangerous social terrains that appear to be shifting and solidifying at the same time. We consider performances on stage, as well as performance in a broader understanding. We examine visual, linguistic, and performative representations of migrant experiences. We analyze and write about performances that deal with issues of migration beyond economic and security models.

Full details for PMA 3215 - Performance and Immigration:Staging the Migrant, Alien, and Refugee in and outside the US

Full details for PMA 3240 - Performance as Protest

Intermediate choreographic projects are critiqued in progress by faculty and peers. Consideration of design problems in costuming and lighting.  Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography. Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work.

Full details for PMA 3300 - Intermediate Dance Composition I

Formally titled "technosomakinesics," this class works to expand the specific aesthetics related to dance as embodied performance. Included in the process is the analysis of built environments that both inspire and are designed to be inhabited by these disciplines. This course explores the resulting neoperformance forms being created within the range of digital media processing; such as gallery installations, multimedia dance-theatre, personal interactive media (games and digital art) and web projects. Computer-imaging and sound-production programs are examined and used in the class work (human form-animation software, vocal recording and digital editing, digital-imaging tools. The new context of digital performance raises questions concerning the use of traditional lighting, set, costume, and sound-design techniques that are examined as they are repositioned by digital-translation tools with the goal of creating experimental and/or conceptual multimedia performance and/or installation work. Theoretical texts on dance and theatrical performance, film studies, the dynamic social body, architecture, and digital technology are also used to support conceptual creative work.

Full details for PMA 3350 - Technology and the Moving Body I

This course will explore approaches to the Deaf experience taken by Deaf artists from the 1900s to the present. Analysis of chosen works of Deaf art, film and theater will illuminate the expression of the Deaf narrative through symbolism, themes, and genres. We will examine the interaction of these works in multiple social, historical, cultural and political contexts and how they have contributed to the construction of Deaf culture and identity. This course will be taught in advanced ASL, with emphasis on the production and comprehension of academic ASL.

Full details for PMA 3425 - Deaf Art, Film and Theatre

This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how "new media" forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.

Full details for PMA 3463 - Contemporary Television

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called "city films," combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of "knowing" a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for PMA 3485 - Cinematic Cities

An in depth look at rom-com/rom-drama films and screenplays. Students will write their own first draft of an original feature length rom-com/rom-drama.

Full details for PMA 3502 - Love as a Character: Writing the Romantic Feature

In this course, students will study an entire season of television and discuss how to break story, how to build a series and what it means to be each position in a writer's room. Students will also develop, prep, and outline a new original series and receive feedback from their peers in a workshop environment.

Full details for PMA 3503 - The Writer's Room: Running The Show

The medieval past often returns in modern media with a critical twist. This course explores the imagination of the Middle Ages in modern films, video games, and other popular media. It introduces classic medieval films (Dreyer, Bergman, Buñuel), theories of medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Eco), and recent tabletop and video games from the German-speaking world and beyond. Working primarily with visual and interactive materials, we will discuss questions of aesthetics, identity, and representation; the dialectics of tradition and innovation; and the mobilization of the past in service of the present.

Full details for PMA 3545 - Imagining the Middle Ages: Films, Games, and Media

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history.

Full details for PMA 3551 - Global Cinema II

An introduction to filmmaking, students will learn to create compelling characters, as well as develop strong storytelling skills through basic character and story development and breakdown, cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. Over the course of the semester, students will deconstruct and analyze visual culture in an effort to learn effective techniques in visual storytelling. Students will write, shoot and edit a series of dramatic narrative exercises, participating in the preproduction to post production processes. Students will collaborate and rotate through various roles. The course will culminate with the screening of the various course projects, in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester. 

Full details for PMA 3570 - Film and Video Production I

Based on previous coursework and experience, students may be offered the opportunity to participate as an apprentice in a mentored PMA creative project.  The apprentice experience and number of credits will be defined by the needs of the project, the area of study, and the mentor.  Apprentice roles may include Assistant Director, Assistant Designer, Assistant Choreographer, Dramaturg, or others, as determined by the mentor.  Successful completion of this course is necessary for application to the AUPR program.

Full details for PMA 3610 - Creative Apprenticeship

Introduction to draping and patterning basics followed by research, experimentation, and translation of historic silhouettes and structure. Previous basic machine sewing experience helpful, but not required.

Full details for PMA 3615 - Costume Construction Studio

The storyteller is a master of their own universe. In this course, students will design a fictional society starting from the ground up. From terra forma to the rise of religions and governments, societies and cultures are shaped by the world that surrounds them. Natural resources, biological evolution, socio-economics, religion, family dynamics, and cultural mores all play a roll in story development. The goal of this course is to explore allegorical thinking processes as they relate to social matrixes useful for telling "human" stories in performance and media. Social diagrams, relatable research, written allegories, concept artwork, and detailed visual representations will be used to express each individual student's unique universe.

Full details for PMA 3631 - Project: Terrarium Imagined; World Building Through Allegory

The production designer is responsible for creating, controlling, and managing 'the look' of narrative films, television & contemporary and digital media from page to screen. This hands-on, project-based course explores the processes of production design, art direction, and lighting direction as related to design for these arenas. From initial Production Design sketches, Storyboards, and 'Feel-Boards' to accommodating desired cinematographic angles and looks when designing a studio set, a designer needs to shape an entire visual world while keeping in mind the story as a whole. The goal of this course is to provide an initial understanding of the Production Design process in practice through studio work and instruction.

Full details for PMA 3632 - Production Design for Film, Television and Contemporary and Digital Media Studio I

Design of costumes for theatre and film, concentrating on script and character analysis, period research, design elements, figure drawing and rendering skills, and an understanding of production style.

Full details for PMA 3660 - Costume Design Studio I

Covering the basics of digital audio, bioacoustics, psychoacoustics and sound design, as they apply to theatre, film and music production. Students create soundscapes for text and moving image using ProTools software.

Full details for PMA 3680 - Sound Design

How have Irish playwrights reached out to the world, how do theatrical productions travel internationally, and how do dramatists adapt their work to local audiences in a global marketplace? We will journey with Lady Gregory onto American campuses, see Beckett staged in Sarajevo, and consider how contemporary playwrights reflect on cultural tensions within Ireland: debates about immigration and emigration, the influence of new media, and the social impact of global financial crises. What performance strategies are embedded in the mobility of exiles and émigrés? What becomes of a National Theater in a transnational world? How are actors trained in Ireland today, and how does the Irish accent sound as it projects across borders? In addition to canonical and contemporary plays, we will consider dance and film performances.

Full details for PMA 3715 - Ireland's World Stages: Drama and Mobility

This course is designed to introduce students to a range of historical, cross-cultural, and transnational performance texts, theories, and practices; to motivate students to examine the broad social, political, cultural, and economic contexts in which performances take place; and to familiarize students with the major methodologies and paradigms for the creation, spectatorship, and interpretation of embodied performances. Our investigations of these issues will be routed through three organizing concepts: conquest, commerce, and community.

Full details for PMA 3751 - Global Stages II

Practical exploration of the actor's craft through exercises in physical and psychological action, improvisation and scene study.

Full details for PMA 3800 - Acting II

In this introductory class, students will study elements of successful dramatic writing: strong structure, effective dialogue, and imaginative theatricality. Students will craft and revise short plays, in addition to drafting several short assignments and one analytical paper. Readings include full-length and 10-minute plays. Through giving and receiving constructive feedback, each writer will aim to take their work to new levels of complexity, theatricality, and meaning.

Full details for PMA 3805 - Playwriting I

This course will use the process devised by Fiasco Theatre Company to produce a play by Shakespeare with reduced support, inventive design, and smaller casts. The selected text will be arranged so that between eight to twelve actors can perform all the roles and physical support relies on inventiveness, economy, and adaptation. At the beginning of the semester students will study the language, history, and acting techniques necessary to perform the play and then rehearse the text--devising solutions to the complexities of production--during the remainder of the semester. Students may participate as actors, dramaturgs, or designers. The semester's work culminates in a presentation of a "reduced/condensed" production of the selected text.

Full details for PMA 3887 - Shakespeare Studio: Devising Shakespeare for Performance

In this advanced undergraduate-level seminar, all senior majors synthesize four years of study in a collaborative intellectual and artistic project with the faculty. Over the course of the fall semester, students conceive and produce work for presentation to the public in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Students also generate a supporting scholarly matrix for that work, and their collective genesis of material integrates the major's four rubrics (history, theory, and criticism; creative authorship; design; and embodied performance). As a crucible for artistic and intellectual collaboration, the senior studio may emphasize an area of study, a period, a text, or a theme. The studio's organizing emphasis will be specific to ongoing, pressing inquiries in the disciplines of performing and media arts.

Full details for PMA 4000 - Senior Studio

Students work on advanced choreographic problems, to be presented in performance. Work in progress is critiqued by faculty members on a regular basis.

Full details for PMA 4300 - Advanced Dance Composition I

Continuation of PMA 3350. PMA 4350 expands on principles explored in PMA 3350 using more complex and interactive software and spatialities. Students must create work utilizing projections and built objects or interactive web based projects.

Full details for PMA 4350 - Technology and the Moving Body II

The Rural Humanities seminar will introduce students to the public humanities as both a disciplinary inquiry and a set of practices grounded in public and community engagement. It is intended to train cohorts of graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the various theories, methods, and practices of public humanities, to think collectively with and beyond disciplinary interests, and to bring these discipline-defined research agendas to much wider communities by first focusing on local rural communities. Students will produce a collaborative project related to or working with a community partner.

Full details for PMA 4450 - Rural Humanities Seminar

A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for PMA 4585 - Film and Video Production II

The act of adaptation invokes a response to source material from a variety of inspiration(s) - images, poems, stories, iconic moments, people, legends, events, histories. Artist/creators work to transcend and translate resonant and remnant questions, curiosities, and provocations in their work—this work evokes a reconciling or a recontextualizing of event and revelation. Writer/creators are visual and physical explorers, choreographers of language text and imagery, artistic inventors. Work we explore this year includes the inspiration of Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, R A Walden, William Kentridge, Coco Fusco, Toni Morrison Jenny Holzer, Beatriz Cortez, Laurie Anderson, the exploration of generative AI interventions and immersive performance techniques. This wholly interactive course challenges the boundaries of text/image to uncover the possibilities of performance. Working collaboratively—in workshop format—students explore the process of developing performance pieces based on a variety of sources.

Full details for PMA 4660 - Adaptation: Visceral Text and Performance

This course explores the increasing presence of all the arts in prisons throughout the country and examines the increasing scholarship surrounding arts programs and their efficacy for incarcerated persons. The course uses video's, archival material, reading material and in-person or Zoom interviews to investigate how and why art is taught in prisons. The course will also look at art produced by incarcerated artists as well as art by those who are still practicing after going home. And finally, the course will explore the increasing scholarship around the impact practicing the arts while incarcerated has on recidivism rates and preparation for re-entry.

Full details for PMA 4681 - Cages and Creativity: Arts in Incarceration

Advanced acting students will expand their skills using targeted approaches and methodologies of the instructors' choosing to develop scripted and/or original material for in-class study and presentation.

Full details for PMA 4801 - Advanced Studies in Acting Techniques

Builds on the directing techniques learned in Fundamentals of Directing I. In this course each student directs actors from the Student Laboratory Theatre Company in a series of projects and public presentations focusing on specific directorial challenges.

Full details for PMA 4880 - Fundamentals of Directing II

First of a two-semester sequence (the second is PMA 4951) for seniors engaged in an honors project. Honor guidelines and form.

Full details for PMA 4950 - Honors Research Tutorial I

Second of a two-semester sequence (the first is PMA 4950) for students engaged in an honors project.

Full details for PMA 4951 - Honors Research Tutorial II

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for PMA 6400 - Thinking Media Studies

The Rural Humanities seminar will introduce students to the public humanities as both a disciplinary inquiry and a set of practices grounded in public and community engagement. It is intended to train cohorts of graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the various theories, methods, and practices of public humanities, to think collectively with and beyond disciplinary interests, and to bring these discipline-defined research agendas to much wider communities by first focusing on local rural communities. Students will produce a collaborative project related to or working with a community partner.

Full details for PMA 6450 - Rural Humanities Seminar

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history.  

Full details for PMA 6551 - Global Cinema II

An introduction to the theory and methods involved in the study of performing and media arts. Attention focuses on pedagogy and the profession in Part I. Part II explores current scholarly trends.

Full details for PMA 6600 - Proseminar in Performing and Media Arts

Urban Justice Labs are innovative seminars designed to bring students into direct contact with complex questions about race and social justice within the context of American urban culture, architecture, humanities, and media. Drawing from Cornell's collections, such as the Hip Hop Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, the Human Sexuality Collection, holdings on American Indian History and Culture, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, and the Johnson Museum of Art, students will leverage archival materials to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban justice. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. Topic: Sound, Music, Public Space.

Full details for PMA 6819 - Urban Justice Lab

Independent study in performing and media arts allows graduate students the opportunity to pursue special interests not treated in regularly scheduled courses. A faculty member, who becomes the student's instructor for the course, must approve the student's program of study and agree to provide continuing supervision of the work.

Full details for PMA 7000 - Independent Study for Graduate Students in Performing and Media Arts

Provides graduate students in the field of Performing and Media Arts an opportunity to work directly with a faculty member to explore pedagogical theory and practice in undergraduate theatre classes in all areas of the curriculum.

Full details for PMA 7100 - The Pedagogy of Performing and Media Arts

Graduate student course while working on thesis and research for dissertation.

Full details for PMA 9900 - Thesis and Research Projects