Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
PMA1104 FWS: Gender and Crime: The Case of the Female Detective
"Women don't fit well into a trench coat and slouch hat," Marilyn Stasio has observed, yet female detectives can be found solving crimes and busting bad guys across media. Drawing from TV, film, fiction and theatre, this course explores the ways in which the female detective radically revises the conventions of the crime narrative in which she functions. Interrogating an inherent tension between gender and genre, we'll ask how different media construct female detectives and what gets re-visioned when Miss Marple and Clarice Starling fight violence and restore social order. By engaging with course texts, students will develop strategies for attentive reading and thoughtful writing. Assignments ranging from reviews to research papers will focus on critical thinking, preparation, clear prose, and papers structured around well-supported claims.

Full details for PMA 1104 - FWS: Gender and Crime: The Case of the Female Detective

Fall, Spring.
PMA1119 FWS: Utopias
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

Fall.
PMA1160 FWS: Wonderlands and Other Worlds
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

Fall.
PMA1161 FWS: Food and the Media
Ours is a food-obsessed culture. Whether we focus on diet and health, or binge-watch competitive cooking shows, or explore cuisine in relation to regional, racial, or ethnic identity, many of us either "eat to live" or "live to eat." Television producers, investigative journalists, bloggers, and cultural critics feed our obsession, generating a burgeoning body of food-related prose and programming both informative and entertaining. Through readings from Gourmet and Eating Well magazines, screenings of Beat Bobby Flay and The Great British Baking Show, and airings of Samin Nosrat's Home Cooking, among others, we will examine together how food suffuses our media and constitutes our Food Nation. Assignments will include food memoirs, food histories, food podcasts, food criticism, and food reporting.

Full details for PMA 1161 - FWS: Food and the Media

Fall.
PMA1171 FWS: Paraiso Infernal: Caribbean and Diasporic Contemporary Art
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA1173 FWS: Care and Marginalization
This course examines the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality through an investigation of the cultural productions and political theories of marginalized communities. We will engage with historical and academic approaches to care and kinship studies and examine how friendships, families, and community-building operate as key sites through which the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality figure in global, economic, and cultural structures. The overarching questions we will explore in this course are: How have activisms by marginalized communities influenced and shaped our understandings of care? What are the approaches, methods, and forms of knowledge that inform new turns in the fields of care and kinship studies? Through the study of course readings and media texts, we will learn about the interdisciplinary field of care studies and kinship studies and learn to write critically and thoughtfully about care and marginalization.

Full details for PMA 1173 - FWS: Care and Marginalization

Fall.
PMA1174 FWS: Backcountry Onstage: Theatre in and of Rural America
The 1920s saw the transition in the United States from being a majority rural nation to a majority urban one. A century later, though rural populations have shrunken, their symbolic space on the American stage has continued to loom large. From Thorton Wilder's Our Town to Samm-Art William's Home to John Cariani's Almost, Maine, bucolic valleys, forests, fields, and small towns have proved fertile ground for American dramatists of the last century to investigate questions of politics, identity and belonging.

Full details for PMA 1174 - FWS: Backcountry Onstage: Theatre in and of Rural America

Fall.
PMA1175 FWS: Hell is a Teenage Girl: Terror and Turmoil of Girlhood in Horror Films
"Hell is a teenage girl" are the first words uttered by Anita Lesnicki in the 2009 comedy-horror Jennifer's Body. In this course, we will analyze how various themes and experiences of girlhood are explored in horror films. In conjunction with watching films, we will read introductory texts in feminist studies to contextualize how sexuality (and all its expressions), negative emotions (such as anger or disgust), and living in a gendered body can help us elucidate other textual or aesthetic meanings in the films we will watch.

Full details for PMA 1175 - FWS: Hell is a Teenage Girl: Terror and Turmoil of Girlhood in Horror Films

Fall.
PMA1410 Media Production Laboratory
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA1610 Production Technology 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

Fall, Spring.
PMA1611 Rehearsal and Performance
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA1700 Laughter
What makes us laugh, and what doesn't? How does laughter vary from person to person, place to place, and across time? What work does laughter perform? Is it contagious? What does it mean to have (or lack) a sense of humor? What is laughter's relationship to pleasure and pain, health and wellness? In this course, we will experiment with the art of "making funny." Students will explore the science and psychology of humor, construct laughter through language and the body, analyze jokes (to learn how to tell them), and investigate the role of humor in a democratic society.

Full details for PMA 1700 - Laughter

Fall.
PMA2280 Dance Improvisation
The training and practice of skills for the spontaneous collaborative composition of movement performance. Students hone their abilities to invent and respond to each other and their environment to produce dances that engage their audience. This course coaxes inspiration, seeking to make it reliable and to keep it surprising. It offers the possibility of "training" one's movement instincts to respond relevantly and with spontaneity.

Full details for PMA 2280 - Dance Improvisation

Fall.
PMA2300 Beginning Dance Composition
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

Fall.
PMA2465 Korean Popular Culture
This course introduces Korean popular culture in global context. Beginning with cultural forms of the late Chosŏn period, the course will also examine popular culture during the Japanese colonial period, the post-war period, the democratization period, and contemporary Korea. Through analysis of numerous forms of media, including films, television, music, literature, and music videos, the course will explore the emergence of the "Korean Wave" in East Asia and its subsequent global impact. In our examination of North and South Korean cultural products, we will discuss theories of transnationalism, globalization, and cultural politics. The course will consider the increasing global circulation of Korean popular culture through new media and K-Pop's transculturation of forms of American music such as rap. Readings for the course will be in English or in English translation and no prior knowledge of Korean culture is required.

Full details for PMA 2465 - Korean Popular Culture

Fall.
PMA2610 Production Crew Laboratory
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA2611 Stage Management 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

Fall, Spring.
PMA2660 Television
In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Full details for PMA 2660 - Television

Fall.
PMA2670 Shakespeare
This course aims to give students a good historical and critical grounding in Shakespeare's drama and its central and continuing place in Renaissance culture and beyond. We will read poetry and primarily plays representing the shape of Shakespeare's career as it moves through comedies, histories, tragedies, and a romance.  Specific plays include The Two Gentleman of Verona, Richard II, Henry IV (Part 1), Henry V, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello, Macbeth and The Tempest. We will focus on dramatic forms (genres), Shakespeare's themes, and social and historical contexts. The course combines lectures and hands-on work in weekly discussions.  While we will view some scenes from film adaptations, the main focus is on careful close interaction with the language of the plays. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for PMA 2670 - Shakespeare

Fall.
PMA2800 Introduction to Acting
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3000 Independent Study
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3210 Dance Technique III - Classical
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3214 Dance in America: Cultures, Identities, and Fabrication
This course explores dance across multiple stages—TikTok videos, concert halls, streets—to assess how people create, sustain, and challenge markers of difference (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class). How is dance appreciation different from appropriation? What are dancing avatars in video games allowed to do that real persons are not? We will examine genres such as k-pop, hip hop, salsa, modern dance, and ballroom as we develop the tools necessary for viewing dance, analyzing it, and understanding its place in larger social, cultural, historical, and political structures. We will explore how markers of difference affect the practice and the reception of dance forms, and, in turn, how dance helps shape representations of identities.

Full details for PMA 3214 - Dance in America: Cultures, Identities, and Fabrication

Fall.
PMA3226 Global Dance I
How does the social production of dance reflect its historical context? Is dance inherently political? What is the meaning of the "beautiful" in dance? Beginning with 16th century court dances, we will explore how aesthetics have been aligned both with and against politics in various periods, across borders, and genres of the performing body, looking at dance as insider's diplomacy and outsider's rebellion. Is modern dance a democratization of the art form? Is postmodern dance a discourse of traditions? This course is designed to promote a critical appreciation of dance, its values and its ambitions, by developing a historical and cultural understanding.

Full details for PMA 3226 - Global Dance I

Fall.
PMA3300 Intermediate Dance Composition I
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

Fall.
PMA3464 Representational Ethics in Film and Television
This course is designed to explore the varied ways that race and gender intersect with the media industry. While common industrial logic suggests these descriptors of identity are not a factor in terms of its business models and assumptions, the reality is much more complex. Race, as well as gender, class, and sexuality, play large parts in how media industries function and in informing and shaping audience expectations and assumptions. Thus, the time spent in class will largely consist of deconstructing several media industries, including film, television, and new media to show just how race, as well as other modes of identity such as gender, sexuality, and class, operate within it. 

Full details for PMA 3464 - Representational Ethics in Film and Television

Fall.
PMA3490 Political Theory and Cinema
An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship.  Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation.  Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek.  Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions.

Full details for PMA 3490 - Political Theory and Cinema

Fall.
PMA3531 Screenwriting
This course explores the fundamentals of writing for the screen. The course format will include creative writing assignments, class discussion, screenings and workshop. Students will produce short film scripts, film analysis papers and feedback on student work. The semester will culminate in a revision of a longer film script and presentation.

Full details for PMA 3531 - Screenwriting

Fall.
PMA3534 Television Writing
This course explores the fundamentals of writing for television. The course format will include creative writing assignments, class discussion, screenings, readings, and workshop. Students will produce short scripts, Digital Series Bible for their show concept, analysis on current shows, and feedback on student work.

Full details for PMA 3534 - Television Writing

Fall.
PMA3544 Science, Fiction, Media
From videophones to walkie-talkies, transatlantic tunnels to interstellar travel, or perpetual motion to wireless energy, science fiction frequently presents visions of the future based on radical media change. At the same time, classic works of media theory often read like science fiction: film is a "time machine"; audio recordings "bring the dead to life"; computer networks exist in "cyberspace;" electronic media spell the end of the "Gutenberg galaxy." Working with a variety of visual, acoustic, and print media, primarily from the German-speaking world, we will discuss the relationship between fantasy and ideology; problems of planning, staging, and coordinating world projects; changing evaluations of high and low culture; the discourse of "Americanization;" and critical studies of futurity.

Full details for PMA 3544 - Science, Fiction, Media

Fall.
PMA3550 Global Cinema I
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 3550 - Global Cinema I

Fall.
PMA3570 Film and Video Production I
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3571 Documentary Filmmaking
Documentary Filmmaking will equip. students with the knowledge to produce quality short, socially and culturally conscious, documentaries that express an interesting story. This course covers the aesthetic and technical fundamentals of directing and producing documentaries. It provides working tools to plan and tell your stories creatively, collaboratively, artistically and professionally. The goal is to produce quality productions designed as a stepping stone to more advanced projects. In the process, we will deeply discuss the principles, history, and ethics of documentary filmmaking.

Full details for PMA 3571 - Documentary Filmmaking

Fall.
PMA3580 Cinematography and Visual Storytelling
Film is a language that expresses the director's idea and cinematography is a key component of the language of film. You need to develop visual storytelling skills by blending lights, camera movements, frame composition, and color palette to use this film language to convey your idea. In this class we will learn the concept of visual strategies in filmmaking and cameras and lighting and research the various aspects of film cinematography.

Full details for PMA 3580 - Cinematography and Visual Storytelling

Fall.
PMA3609 Making Theatre: Rehearsal and Production Techniques
This experiential learning class offers performance opportunities in the Department of Performing and Media Arts.  Students selected for 3609 projects will learn how to think about and realize artistic choices, appreciate the discipline and demands of performance craft, be exposed to the uncertainty required to experiment and explore in rehearsal, and understand more fully the strategies of artistic collaboration. Students will be assessed on their participation in the collaboration process, their ability to reflect upon and articulate their role and growth in that process, and their contribution to public performance.

Full details for PMA 3609 - Making Theatre: Rehearsal and Production Techniques

Fall, spring.
PMA3610 Creative Apprenticeship
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3614 Creative Character Design
A course working on the creation and development of characters on paper. The character designs explored will not be bound by the limits of the human body or physical costumes, but rather will push the limits of character imagery to that which could ultimately be achieved in print illustration, sequential art, traditional animation, digital special effects and animation, video gaming, various forms of puppetry and animatronic forms, depending on the student's area of interest. (Students will not engage in animation, or three-dimensional crafting of characters, but rather will develop the design content that could then be applied to these forms).

Full details for PMA 3614 - Creative Character Design

Fall.
PMA3616 The Body of Fashion: A Head-to-Toe Journey through the History of Western Dress
This course explores the evolution of western dress from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the early twentieth century by focusing on areas of the human anatomy and how each area has been presented, comported, supported, augmented, confined, or manipulated in costume.  Rather than indulging in the strange, we will endeavor to come to an understanding of the motivation for each gesture or the catalyst for each phenomenon in the context of the period, taking into consideration social, political, economic, environmental, technological, and aesthetic influences.

Full details for PMA 3616 - The Body of Fashion: A Head-to-Toe Journey through the History of Western Dress

Fall.
PMA3680 Sound Design
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3711 Sitcom Jews: Ethnic Representation on Television,1948-Present
Jews have been on TV since the beginning of the medium – over 70 years – and have made decisions about how they are represented. What kind of Jews do we put on screen, and do they actually represent Jews in America? What about the representation of other ethnic and cultural groups? What can we learn from the history of Jewish television that might apply to Black, Latinx, Muslim, LGBTQ, Asian and other communities as they present themselves to the American public? "Sitcom Jews" uses media analysis, theoretical discussion, and student writing to examine a huge range of TV, starting with classic sitcoms ("The Goldbergs" (1948), "All in the Family, and "Bridget Loves Bernie"), continuing through current Jewish TV shows ("Broad City", "Transparent", "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), and adding a range of ethnic television ("The Jeffersons", "Black-ish", "Insecure", "Ramy", "Will & Grace", "Never Have I Ever").

Full details for PMA 3711 - Sitcom Jews: Ethnic Representation on Television,1948-Present

Fall.
PMA3750 Global Stages I
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: ritual, realism, and revolution.

Full details for PMA 3750 - Global Stages I

Fall.
PMA3758 Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen
How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond?  What role has politics played in the theatre?  How has performance been used to examine concepts of identity, community, and nationality?  And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present.  We will focus on theatre that responds directly to moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements, Women's and Gender Equality Movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.

Full details for PMA 3758 - Contemporary American Theatre on Stage and Screen

Fall.
PMA3800 Acting 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

Fall, Spring.
PMA3801 Intermediate Studies in Acting Techniques
Class members will expand their acting skills via specific projects, approaches and methodologies of the instructors' choosing to develop scripted and/or original material for in-class study and presentation.

Full details for PMA 3801 - Intermediate Studies in Acting Techniques

Fall.
PMA3880 Fundamentals of Directing I
Focused, practical exercises teach the student fundamental staging techniques that bring written text to theatrical life. A core objective is to increase the student's awareness of why and how certain stage events communicate effectively to an audience. Each student directs a number of exercises as well as a short scene.

Full details for PMA 3880 - Fundamentals of Directing I

Fall.
PMA4000 Senior Studio
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

Fall.
PMA4300 Advanced Dance Composition I
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

Fall.
PMA4451 Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema
Examines the new cinemas of Southeast Asia and their engagement with contemporary discourses of gender and sexuality. It pays special attention to the ways in which sexuality and gendered embodiment are at present linked to citizenship and other forms of belonging and to how the films draw on Buddhist and Islamic traditions of representation and belief. Focusing on globally circulating Southeast Asian films of the past 15 years, the course draws on current writings in feminism, Buddhist studies, affect theory, queer studies, postcolonial theory, and film studies to ask what new understandings of subjectivity might emerge from these cinemas and their political contexts. Films are drawn from both mainstream and independent cinema and will include the work of directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Danny and Oxide Pang, Yau Ching, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Garin Nugroho, and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Full details for PMA 4451 - Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asian Cinema

Fall.
PMA4680 Prison Theatre and the Possibilities of Transformation
To explore cultural aspects of imprisonment through a focus on theatre produced by those incarcerated.  Does making theatre in prison seem to assist in transformation? Students create work with PPTG members in lab sessions, do narrative interviews, create annotated Internet data base.

Full details for PMA 4680 - Prison Theatre and the Possibilities of Transformation

Fall.
PMA4681 Cages and Creativity: Arts in Incarceration
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA4684 The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures
This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for PMA 4684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

Fall.
PMA4692 Trance and Media
Media is a notoriously unwieldly concept, at once self-evident and generalizable beyond the bounds of conceptual utility. Yet one feature that tends to inhere in both the narrowest and broadest of definitions is media's capacity to transcend time and space. Similarly, to be a medium, in the context of ritualistic mediumship requires, at minimum, the capacity to transcend the here and now in order to mediate between disparate realms of being. Both media studies and the anthropology of "altered states of consciousness" have complicated traditional approaches to the philosophy of the subject from various disciplinary perspectives. Through film, video, and theory, this course explores trance and media in conjunction and across the globe.

Full details for PMA 4692 - Trance and Media

Fall.
PMA4711 Camp: Aesthetics and Politics
Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.

Full details for PMA 4711 - Camp: Aesthetics and Politics

Fall.
PMA4800 Advanced Scene Study
This class focuses on advanced challenges for the stage presented by particular authors or plays that have a particular stylistic or structural demand. Focuses on advanced challenges for the stage. Monologues and scenes are drawn from Shakespeare and classical sources.

Full details for PMA 4800 - Advanced Scene Study

Fall.
PMA4821 The Politics of Movement: Bodies, Space, and Motion
This course interrogates new theoretical understandings about space and how bodies marked by various types of difference (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, fatness, ability, and socioeconomic class) interact and move in it. We will uncover the visual, linguistic, and performative representations and social structures used in deciding which bodies are allowed to create and use spaces, and to what ends. We will ask questions that examine how people make claims to space. What kind of space does a performance engender? How do racialized and gendered spaces alter where performances can happen?

Full details for PMA 4821 - The Politics of Movement: Bodies, Space, and Motion

Fall.
PMA4950 Honors Research Tutorial I
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA4951 Honors Research Tutorial II
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA4952 Undergraduate Internship
Academic credit can only be awarded for unpaid internships. Students must submit an Application for Academic Credit by April 15. The Application for Academic Credit must be received/approved prior to the start of the internship. If the internship opportunity is deemed eligible for academic credit, the student pursues the internship during the summer months and enrolls in this course the fall semester immediately following the summer internship. A written evaluation of the internship experience is required. Find complete information and application forms on the department website.

Full details for PMA 4952 - Undergraduate Internship

Fall.
PMA6021 Research Methods in PMA
This class is designed to introduce doctoral students to Humanistic Research Methods. While qualitative and quantitative research methods are humanistic, this course serves as an added layer of context that integrates the rationales for why these methods aid us as researchers in thinking about structures, power, and identity. In this sense, the humanistic research methods explored in this class are designed to generate thinking about those topics as it relates to both ourselves as individuals and the societal communities we are a part of.

Full details for PMA 6021 - Research Methods in PMA

Fall, Spring.
PMA6550 Global Cinema I
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 6550 - Global Cinema I

Fall.
PMA6684 The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures
This interdisciplinary seminar brings together critical theory and global visual arts to analyze the problem of work over the long twentieth century. By focusing on the labor of visual artists and their encounters with collective work, we will tackle how our understanding of work has transformed over the last century, including new definitions of immaterial and affective labor; the challenges and pleasures of political friendships across class, race, gender, and national lines; the labor of the spectator or viewer, operational images and the optical unconscious; and anti-work imaginaries and possible futures of collective life. Throughout, we will consider how medium, coordination, and form cut across both theories of labor and the praxis of visual art.

Full details for PMA 6684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures

Fall.
PMA6692 Trance and Media
Media is a notoriously unwieldly concept, at once self-evident and generalizable beyond the bounds of conceptual utility. Yet one feature that tends to inhere in both the narrowest and broadest of definitions is media's capacity to transcend time and space. Similarly, to be a medium, in the context of ritualistic mediumship requires, at minimum, the capacity to transcend the here and now in order to mediate between disparate realms of being. Both media studies and the anthropology of "altered states of consciousness" have complicated traditional approaches to the philosophy of the subject from various disciplinary perspectives. Through film, video, and theory, this course explores trance and media in conjunction and across the globe.

Full details for PMA 6692 - Trance and Media

Fall.
PMA6711 Camp: Aesthetics and Politics
Camp is one of the predominant, organizing aesthetic structures of the twentieth century and continues to make important impacts in the twenty-first. With attention to a range of historical, philosophical, and theoretical texts, coupled with a range of artistic artifacts and phenomena, we will develop a clustered set of working definitions of camp as we also challenge some truisms about the concept: that it is or has been apolitical; that its comprehension can be disarticulated from queer cultures and experiences; that it has died and is dead. Paying close attention to systems of sex, gender, and sexuality, we will also explore their inextricable intersection with such categories of identity, relationality, and sociality as (dis)ability, age, class, ethnicity, and race.

Full details for PMA 6711 - Camp: Aesthetics and Politics

Fall.
PMA6821 The Politics of Movement: Bodies, Space, and Motion
This class interrogates new theoretical understandings about space and how bodies marked by various types of difference (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, fatness, ability, and socioeconomic class) interact and move in it. We will uncover the visual, linguistic, and performative representations and social structures used in deciding which bodies are allowed to create and use spaces, and to what ends. We will ask questions that examine how people make claims to space. What kind of space does a performance engender? How do racialized and gendered spaces alter where performances can happen? This course is part-seminar and part-practicum. 

Full details for PMA 6821 - The Politics of Movement: Bodies, Space, and Motion

Fall.
PMA7000 Independent Study for Graduate Students in Performing and Media Arts
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

Fall, Spring.
PMA7100 The Pedagogy of 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

Fall, Spring.
PMA9900 Thesis and Research Projects
Graduate student course while working on thesis and research for dissertation.

Full details for PMA 9900 - Thesis and Research Projects

Fall, Spring.
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