Courses

"We're all born naked and the rest is drag" - RuPaul. This course explores drag as a mode of queer cultural performance. Through a wide range of readings and viewings that introduce a diverse array of drag traditions and aesthetics, we will search for an understanding, even a simple definition, of drag. In so doing, we will explore drag performance as a queer cultural practice, a means of community formation, a potential disruption of gender norms and binaries, and as a radical act of liberation. By engaging in class discussion, practicing a variety of analytic writing styles, and establishing an essay drafting and revising process, students will develop and hone their college writing skills all while investigating drag performance and being absolutely fabulous.

Full details for PMA 1145 - FWS: Socks, Pads, and Other Stuff(ing): Drag Performance

What does it mean when a friend tells you to "take care" and to text them when you get home? How does showing up for and caring about each other transform our futures? Using music videos by Lil Nas X and Janelle Monaé, television shows like Pose, and films like Moonlight, this course asks what care can look like and how it helps us survive. This FWS will give you an opportunity to think critically about popular media and written texts with specific attention to the works of queer and trans BIPOC. Students will write about topics of care, self-care, and futures through close readings of various texts and media, short critical essays, and discussion board posts with creative opportunities for extra credit.

Full details for PMA 1170 - FWS: Text Me When You Get Home: Care as Survival

Can queer/BIPOC artistic practices subvert Western assumptions about identity and politics?  You do not have to be an artist to embrace the concepts, the beauty and rawness we will explore in this seminar.   We will look at artworks and at theories of queer and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color) subjectivities in the United States.  Think: Mickalene Thomas and Felix Gonzalez-Torres alongside José Esteban Muñoz and bell hooks.  Assignments may include writing for museum displays and catalogues, artist statements, and reviews.

Full details for PMA 1171 - FWS: Re/presentations: The Politics of Queer BIPOC Artists

Performative writing refers both to writing that compellingly addresses, conveys, and analyses performance practices, and writing that performs, or in other words, writing that makes something happen. In this course, students will read, discuss, analyze, and create performative writing. Through readings and writing exercises, students will explore various techniques for writing in an evocative and subjective way about the aesthetic and conceptual aspects of certain performance practices. They will also address the possibilities and challenges in writing about performance, especially on topics concerning bodily, gendered, and racial experiences. And most importantly they will identify and utilize the performative capacities of writing itself.

Full details for PMA 1172 - FWS: Performative Writing: Writing as Performance

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

Full details for PMA 1670 - Student Laboratory Theatre Company

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

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

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

This course introduces students to basic two-dimensional techniques of makeup design and application for the stage including corrective, old age, youth, likeness, cross gender, and animal makeups. The process of stylizing imagery in makeup design is explored. Students will also work with false facial hair.

Full details for PMA 2640 - Theatrical Makeup Studio

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

This intro level course introduces students to selected practical means of creating original, collaborative works of theater in response to a prompt, a theme, a text or other identified source material. In addition to their practical creative work, students study contemporary and historical figures and companies who make/have made devised theater works. Definition of devised theater: "a method of creating original performances by gathering a group of artists who bring their unique experiences to collaborate on the creation of a new product." (from Alison Oddey's Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook)

Full details for PMA 2805 - Explorations in Creative Collaboration

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

Students develop a specific dramatic text for full-scale production. The course involves selection of an appropriate text, close analysis of the literary aspects of the play, and group evaluation of its representational value and effectiveness. All students in the course are involved in some aspects of production of the play, and write a final paper as a course requirement. Credit is variable depending upon the student's role in play production: a minimum of 50 hours of work is required for 1 credit; a maximum of 3 credits are awarded for 100 hours or more of work.

Full details for PMA 3010 - Hispanic Theatre Production

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

Intermediate modern technique focusing on rhythm, placement, and phrasing for students who are prepared to refine the skills of dancing. Students are challenged by complex phrases and musicality.

Full details for PMA 3220 - Dance Technique III - Modern

This course will explore questions of how we perceive articulations of identity on the moving body. How do histories and cultural behaviors define differences? What are the conventions of race, gender, and sexuality as we follow the body in performance across borders? With the use of text, film, and the fine arts, the class will in collaboration conceive, choreograph, and perform an original body of work.

Full details for PMA 3225 - Mapping the Moving Body 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 cultivate collaborations between the practice and study of dance with fields such as architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, painting, digital arts, and other design and creative fields. The process of movement creation, spatial definition, and spatial analyses will be paralleled and interchanges will be made on a continual basis between chosen fields for each semester. Transposing between two, three, and four dimensional representations, concepts of framing, language (vocabulary), historical processes, concepts of performance and performativity, and concepts of audience are some of the topics that will be examined.

Full details for PMA 3351 - Transpositioning the Body I

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, the mafia has been the subject of numerous films over the course of 70 years, so many in fact that one might well speak of a "mafia obsession" in American popular culture. Drawing upon a large number of American and Italian films, this course examines the cultural history of the mafia through film. We will explore issues related to the figure of the gangster, the gender and class assumptions that underpin it, and the portrayal-almost always stereotypical-of Italian-American immigrant experience that emerges from our viewings. The aim will be to enhance our understanding of the role of mafia plays in American and Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Film screenings will include Little Caesar, Scarface, Shame of the Nation, The Godfather Parts I and II, Goodfellas, The Funeral, Donnie Brasco, episodes from The Sopranos, and Gomorrah.

Full details for PMA 3410 - Screening Cosa Nostra: The Mafia and the Movies from Scarface to The Sopranos

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

Full details for PMA 3421 - Literary Theory on the Edge

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 explores the history, theory, and craft of writing for film, television, and other narrative media (including documentary, reality television, interactive media, etc.). We consider the vital elements of storytelling along with structural principles, evolving industrial pressures and practices, and emerging non-linear ideas, with a regular line of up of screenings, guest speakers and practicing writers. This course includes both analytic and creative-writing assignments.

Full details for PMA 3533 - Screen and Story: Script Analysis

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

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

A co-taught exploration (Profs. Cross, Ernste) in sound making, design, capture, analysis, manipulation, mixing, and production. Topics include microphones and audio capture, recording and synthesis, signals and noise, DIY synths and sensors, mixing and live performance, as well as deeper conceptual topics such as listening and hearing, the ear and the brain, fundamentals of acoustics and localization, composition and production techniques and aesthetics, as well as live performance and installation. Students produce a series of creative projects synthesizing course concepts and student interests.

Full details for PMA 3682 - Making Noise: The Art and Process of Sound Generation

"The pleasure of the text," Roland Barthes writes, "is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do." What is this erotics of the text, and what has it been up to lately at the movies? Are new movies giving our bodies new ideas?  In the context of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st-century, how might we read and revise classic works of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory on erotic desire and cinema? We will focus especially on relatively recent metacinematic work, moviemaking about moviemaking, by such directors as Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell.

Full details for PMA 3702 - Desire and Cinema

Tragedy and its audiences from ancient Greece to modern theater and film. Topics: origins of theatrical conventions; Shakespeare and Seneca; tragedy in modern theater and film. Works studied will include: Aeschylus' Agamemnon; Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes; Euripides' Alcestis, Helen, Iphigeneia in Aulis, Orestes; Seneca's Thyestes, Trojan Women; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Othello; Strindberg's The Father; Durrenmatt's The Visit; Bergman's Seventh Seal; Cacoyannis' Iphigeneia.

Full details for PMA 3724 - The Tragic Theatre

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

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

Advanced and pre-professional advanced ballet and modern technique. This class meets 4 days per week. This course is a combination of PMA 3210 and PMA 3220 in the same semester.  Attendance to concerts and related presentations, and short critical analysis of those events are required.

Full details for PMA 4222 - Advanced Dance Technique

This course will continue the critical inquiry investigated in Mapping the Moving Body. Intended for advanced students, it will address the dialogue between contemporary choreography and current sociopolitical theory. The class will choose to study one choreographer or theorist whose negotiations across critical boundaries of the global, postmodern space will afford a framework for the making of an original, collaborative work.

Full details for PMA 4225 - Mapping the Moving Body II

Pre-professional/Advanced ballet or modern technique with modern and contemporary ballet company repertory rehearsal and performances. This class meets 2 days per week, 3 hrs. 10 minutes per day with additionally scheduled rehearsal and performance times TBA. This course is a continuation of, and supplement to, PMA 3210 and PMA 3220.

Full details for PMA 4230 - Pre-Professional Technique and Repertory

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

This course continues the work done in PMA 3351. At an advanced level, this course will further explore the choreographic and design principles of contemporary choreographer, William Forsythe, who began his tenure as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large in 2010. The course will begin by using tools developed by Forsythe in his CD ROM, Improvisation Technologies and will continue to be structured through student and faculty consultation. The long term goal is to establish curriculum that can continue to develop new performance and installation work based on Forsythe's philosophies in his various fields of interests and how they relate to concert dance. Collaborations between fields such as dance, architecture, engineering and other design fields will be cultivated.

Full details for PMA 4351 - Transpositioning the Body II

This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.

Full details for PMA 4358 - Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the digital age? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? What are the implications of such questions for what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible," for democratic consensus and dissensus? Moving among websites, social media, and streaming services, from Poetry Foundation and PennSound to podcasts and serial TV, from FaceBook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, from Netflix and Amazon to Roku and Hulu, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media and their impact in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for PMA 4461 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Radical transformations in our media landscape raise urgent questions for the field of cinema and media studies. This course focuses on a topic drawn from current scholarly research. They may include: theorizing the global, narrative and new media, queer/trans media paradigms, media and public life, media and migration, and critical race and media studies. Weekly class meetings will combine discussion and short screenings; there may be additional screenings outside of class.

Full details for PMA 4501 - Special Topics in Cinema and Media Theory

This course uses the lens of temporality to track transformations in notions of urban personhood and collective life engendered by recent trans-Asia economic shifts. We will develop tools that help unpack the spatial and cultural forms of density and the layered histories that define the contemporary urban fabric of cities such as Hanoi, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The course combines the investigation of the cinemas and literatures of the region with the study of recent writing on cities from Asian studies, film studies, queer theory, urban studies, political theory, religious studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and anthropology.

Full details for PMA 4504 - The City: Asia

This course builds on skills developed in Playwriting I. Focusing on the development of longer scripts and the process of getting them to the stage, students will write a long one act play, and the materials to market it. The class will involve daily exercises, lessons on various issues of craft and the business of playwriting, and substantial workshopping and revision. Students will learn how to research opportunities for sending their work out and will leave the class with a polished script, a sense of themselves as writers, and the skills to take their play into production.

Full details for PMA 4505 - Playwriting II

Focuses on the structure and style of the original web-series and long-form short screenplay, and incorporates extensive peer feedback, workshop, and revision. Students will produce and revise an original mid-length short film and/or show pilot, in addition to crafting a log-line, treatment, and pitch for their film.​

Full details for PMA 4532 - Advanced Screenwriting

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

A survey of the origins and applications of the term Absurdism. What is the style it provokes? This course traces the roots, definitions, and contemporary resonance of Absurdism. How and why would we stage the impossible? How could we re-new the term for the 21st century—does a post historical post apocalypse necessitate a new approach? In this class we will investigate and perform the works of Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Ruhl, Charles Ludlam, Virginia Woolf and the Cirque du Soleil. We will also examine the pathos of silent film and consider the influence and the inheritance of The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud and The Creative Mind by Henri Bergson.

Full details for PMA 4661 - Absurdism: Performance and the Uncanny

The most studied and written about work in Western Literature outside the Bible, Hamlet according to Harold Bloom, is our secular savior and our ambassador to death. This course centers on a close reading of the play. Through research and assigned readings the course tests theoretical viewpoints about the play against the text itself by reading the theory in relationship to the production history.

Full details for PMA 4670 - Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Seminar

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for PMA 4701 - Nightlife

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Full details for PMA 4841 - States of Animation

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

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

Full details for PMA 6421 - Literary Theory on the Edge

How do questions of genre persist and evolve in the digital age? To what extent do we choose our genres, and in what ways do they choose us? How do genres, platforms, and media intersect and inform one another? What hierarchies do they establish, and to what purposes? What are the implications of such questions for what Jacques Ranciere has called the "distribution of the sensible," for democratic consensus and dissensus? Moving among websites, social media, and streaming services, from Poetry Foundation and PennSound to podcasts and serial TV, from FaceBook and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, from Netflix and Amazon to Roku and Hulu, this course will explore the accelerating interplay of genres, platforms, and media and their impact in contemporary culture and politics.

Full details for PMA 6461 - Genres, Platforms, Media

Radical transformations in our media landscape raise urgent questions for the field of cinema and media studies.  This course focuses on a topic drawn from current scholarly research.  They may include: theorizing the global, narrative and new media, queer/trans media paradigms, media and public life, media and migration, and critical race and media studies.  Weekly class meetings will combine discussion and short screenings; there may be additional screenings outside of class.

Full details for PMA 6501 - Special Topics in Cinema and Media Theory

This course focuses on the structure and style of the original, long-form short screenplay and web-series (approximately 25-35 pages), and incorporates extensive peer feedback, workshop, and revision. Students will produce and revise an original short script or two episodes of a show pilot, in addition to crafting a log-line, treatment, and pitch for their film.

Full details for PMA 6532 - Advanced Screenwriting

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. Global Cinema II covers the period from 1960 to the present. Precise topics will vary from year to year, but may include: "New Waves" in Italy, France, Germany, Japan; cinematic modernism; new modes of documentary; changing technologies of sound and image; avant-garde and experimental cinema; "New" Hollywood; "counter-cinema" and underground film; feminist film theory and practice; Hollywood's enduring importance; popular cinema in China, India, Brazil; the impact of television, video and the digital revolution.

Full details for PMA 6551 - Global Cinema II

"You didn't see anything," a woman in a movie says to her dubious lover. "No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don't understand."  What is desire in a movie, and how do we know it when we see it or feel it? How do the images, sounds, and narratives of a cinematic event engage us erotically? How might we want to revise classic psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theories of desire and cinema in light of the changing art of the moving image in the 21st century? We will focus especially on metacinematic work by Pedro Almodóvar, Olivier Assayas, Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Steve McQueen, and John Cameron Mitchell, among others.

Full details for PMA 6670 - Erotics of Visuality

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks.  Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens.  Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

Full details for PMA 6701 - Nightlife

What does it mean to be-or to become-animated? How have thinkers ranging from ancient and modern philosophers to contemporary critical theorists conceptualized animated-ness as essence, feeling, form, or intensity? What relationship(s) between bios and zoe may be understood through the analytic of animation? And how does animation clarify-or render less legible-distinctions among subjects, objects, and things? Answering these and related questions about reanimation, hyper-animation, inter(in)animation, and the uncanny, we also test theoretical ideas about states of animation against a number of performance and media practices. Authors include Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Freud, Hansen, Kleist, Moten, Ngai, Schneider, and Sobchack. Art objects under investigation cross platforms and genres and span a gamut from premodern puppet theatre to The Wooster Group's Poor Theatre, Disney's Snow White to Pixar's WALL-E.

Full details for PMA 6841 - States of Animation

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