SELECTED COURSES

• Creativity & Survival

  When dominant ideologies support the survival of some but not all, how might creative pursuits offer life-affirming counter narratives of recognition?

  This course examines this question by investigating how 20th- and 21st- century art—in literary, visual, and performative realms—illuminates the connection between creativity and survival. We will explore why experimental forms of art-making are especially important for of color, queer, trans, and/or femme-identified artists who are concerned with surviving and representing the everyday traumas of systemic oppression. Our work will be informed by intersecting critical lenses — trauma studies, queer theory, performance studies, critical race studies, and visual culture — as well as engaging experiences such as field trips. Students will focus on material from the course and beyond that speaks to their unique interests in a multi-part collaborative project that requires independent research.

• Gender & Global Modernisms

  Modernism is widely recognized as an aesthetic movement of multiple geographic, temporal, linguistic, and cultural locations, but where, in effect, is the gender of modernism? This course examines how the creative lives of certain modernist writers were defined, enabled, and sustained by transcending rigid constructions of gender as well as national identity. During the jazz age, many modernist women writers led global lives literally, by spending time in multiple countries and cultures, and/or ideologically, by refusing to subscribe to a single national logic. Writers like H.D., Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston and Eileen Chang were mobile and fluid: living in and traveling to different places at different times in their lives; their understandings of gender as well as their writerly practices were shaped by the various cultures that they experienced. We will explore the historical changes that allowed for these writers to move about as they did. On the flip side, we will carefully consider how their life choices reflect a radical feminist praxis in which they boldly challenged patriarchal constructs of gender.

• Visions & Voices: American Ethnic Literature & Art

  In this course, students will examine a range of works (fiction, poetry, memoir, photography, music, painting, new media) from ethnic American writers and artists of the twentieth-century and beyond. Our study will focus on the cross-sections of ethnicity and creative expression as it applies to questions of American identity. Major themes addressed include nationhood, immigration, marginalization, intersectionality, cultural hybridity, trauma and survival, border crossing, and heritage. Several divergent ethnic and racial groups will be explored including African American, Asian American, Jewish American, Latinx, and Native American. Throughout the semester, we’ll question how various social forces impact the cultural production, aesthetic inclinations, and philosophical perspectives of ethnic artists, and we’ll trace these forces back through the thorny history of America’s colonial past. We’ll debate the so-called “melting pot” or “multicultural” nature of America: Is the diversity of America truly celebrated? Where and why do destructive ethnic hierarchies persist? How has art been a vital platform for staging radical statements against social and ethnic injustice?

• MASS MoCA Immersion

  In this interdisciplinary course designed around the exhibitions of MASS MoCA, we will explore how visual culture encodes race, gender, sexuality, class, ability and other aspects of social life. Students will investigate whose vision is reinforced or discarded and what is seen and unseen in contemporary culture. Grounded in critical discourse and drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches (i.e. Visual Culture Studies, Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Theory, Gender & Sexuality Studies), this course will make use of MCLA’s proximity to a leading museum of contemporary art to consider pressing inquiries about the social dynamics of visuality and representation; power structures of looking; and phenomena of spectacle. The course will feature regular field trips to the museum and pedagogical engagements with MASS MoCA curators in the form of guest lectures and tours.

• Introduction to Visual Culture

  Everyday life is saturated with visual imagery. Our encounters with images profoundly impact our experiences of the world. This course introduces students to key concepts of visual culture, including the social dynamics of visuality and representation, power structures of looking, and phenomena of spectacle. Students will examine how images encode race, gender, sexuality,  class, and ability while investigating whose vision is reinforced and discarded and what is seen and unseen. Grounded in critical discourse and drawing from a variety of disciplinary approaches, this course explores diverse modes of visual expression and communication from photography to film and television to new media and web design to literary constructions of sight and the visual culture of activism. Students will participate in visual meaning-making through experiential learning opportunities at neighboring museums and galleries.