Classes

Gramophone, Radio, MP3: Selected Issues in the Techno-Politics of the Acoustic (Undergraduate)

Acoustic issues have become central to fields such as media studies, literature, art and art history, architecture and cultural theory, serving as a testing ground for anxieties and hopes about the consequences of key socio-political shifts (globalism, digitization, etc.). Analyzing the role of sound within…

Regimes of Spectacle in Weimar Cinema (Undergraduate)
Is film ideological? What is propaganda? How do mass media structure values and desires? Is there a politics of narration? These deeply contemporary questions will inform this interdisciplinary seminar in film history and theory and its interrogation of key works of expressionist, documentary, proletarian, avant-garde, queer, horror, and paranoid…
Frankfurt School Cultural Theory (Graduate; co-taught with Mike Jennings)

This seminar on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School undertakes a close examination of the textual debates between Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer and others on questions of "aesthetics and politics," a body of often polemical socio-philosophical attempts to map a…

Introduction to Media Theory (Undergraduate)
Through careful readings of a wide range of media theoretical texts from the late 19th to early 21st century, this seminar will trace the development of critical reflection on technologies and media ranging from the printing press to photography, from gramophones to radio technologies, from pre-cinematic optical devices to film and television,…
Aesthetics of Surveillance (Graduate)

Taking up Orwell's master trope of distopic futurity, this seminar in comparative media aesthetics and theory explores the paranoid logic of surveillance in its literary, architectural, artistic and, above all, technological (photographic, cinematic, digital) manifestations in order to unpack a category that is at once a political tactic, a…

Cinema Philosophy: Aesthetics and Politics (Undergraduate)

Can cinema be philosophical? What is film anyway? Is it a language and, if so, how does it produce meaning? What are the formal and cognitive features of filmic narration? What does it mean to "read" a film or to speak of "cinematic literacy"? How is film political? Is there such a thing as "responsible" or "critical" viewing? Is there a…

Signal to Noise -Vicissitudes of the Acoustic (Graduate)

Insisting on the (long-ignored) importance of the acoustic in fields such as film & media studies, architecture, literature, art history, and cultural theory, this seminar will interrogate sound as a testing ground for key socio-political shifts such as globalism, digitization, etc. Exploring the role of…

Early German Cinema (Graduate)

This seminar in media history, theory and criticism will subject a rediscovered cache of rare silent films to a variety of critical interrogations, exploring the complex intermedial dynamics (relations to theater, variété, literature), establishment of key legitimation discourses (film criticism and theory, the…

Film Theory (Undergraduate)

What is film? Is it a language? Can one speak of cinematic literacy? Does film transform perception? Is there filmic thinking? This seminar on the theory and poetics of cinema will examine the varieties of ways -- semiotic, psychoanalytic, narratological - that filmmakers, philosophers and critics have analyzed…