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World Film: Cinematic Showcasing from the Developing World
Dr. Mario Chandler, Spanish & Dr. Seema Shrikhande, Communications
This honors course will explore international film as artistic,
social and political expression. In this course, students will
engage film as a medium which powerfully expresses the human
condition as it is viewed and defined in diverse cultural contexts.
Through exposure to national cinemas from the Developing World, with
particular emphasis on Africa, Asia and Latin America, students will
be exposed to rich cultural landscapes quite different from their
own. This course will entail class discussions, written and oral
reports, presentations, supplemental readings, and critical viewing
of a selection of carefully chosen international films.
Art & Power
Dr. Stephen B. Herschler, Politics & Dr. Catherine Kelley, Art
While we generally think of art as being the free expression of
individual genius, the impetus behind and the consequences of art
are inextricably enmeshed with power. This seminar will explore the
production, dissemination, and perception of art, broadly construed,
as they relate to the construction, affirmation, and contestation of
social, political, institutional, and ideological power. Topics to
be explored will be determined largely by seminar participants, but
some examples of the range of phenomena relevant to our topic
include: the Medici’s voracious patronage of art promoting their
power and glory, the Sainte Chapelle’s stained glassed narrative
recounting King Louis IX and the Crusades as manifestations of God’s
will, the Nazi’s vehement denouncing of ‘degenerate art,’ Mao’s
prominent use of poster art to fuel mass political and economic
campaigns, the American government’s ubiquitous use of classical
architectural forms, civilizations’ efforts at self definition
through artistic depictions that often both exoticize and denigrate
‘the other,’ social and ethnic minorities’ use of indigenous art
forms to promote group identity and empowerment, the ‘self-taught’
art movement’s relationship to broader institutional power
structures of the contemporary American art scene, and, of course,
artists’ efforts to produce works that effectively challenge or
subvert the dominant political and social order of their times.
Class assignments include: readings, examination and analysis of
various forms of art, presentations, short writing assignments, and
lots of discussion.
It’s a Small World After All: Modern Networks
Dr. Mike Rulison, Physics & Dr. Brad Stone, Sociology
Networks of various kinds are all around us, and always have
been. Until very recently however, networks were thought to be sets
of random connections between ‘nodes.’ It is now becoming clear that
a stunning variety of networks are in fact not random, but rather of
a type known as “scale-free.” Understanding this revolution in our
conception of networks is critical to proper understanding of things
as apparently diverse as the Catholic Inquisition, the World Wide
Web, disease control, metabolism, business associations and
alliances, the functioning and structure of political organizations,
social networks (from cocktail parties to email linkages to sexual
relationships), and terrorist cells and networks – to name just a
few. We will investigate the underlying history and development of
our modern conception of networks, and then consider its application
to areas of interest to the participants in the seminar. Our central
text is the popular book Linked, written by the founder of modern
scale-free network theory, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. The specifics of
this seminar will be largely determined by the student participants. |
