If the 20^th century is remembered as the age of extremes, it has also initiated an age of commemoration.  This course examines the role that museums and memorials have played in shaping the general process of coming to terms with past acts of state-sponsored violence, war and genocide.  This course will engage with literature from museum studies, from the study of trauma and from the study of history and memory.  We will ask throughout the semester important questions about who is doing the memorializing, what purpose does the commemoration serve, and how effective is the effort?

As a part of the Introduction to Cultural Studies sequence this course will introduce students to some of the leading scholars and thinkers in the fields of critical race theory, nationalism, post-colonial studies, and ethnic/transnational studies. Readings may include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Gloria Anzaldúa, Omi and Winant,  Eric Lott, Terence Ranger, Eric Hobsbawm, Immanuel Wallerstein, José David Saldívar, Etienne Balibar, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhaba,  and Lisa Lowe.

This course examines the work of Freud, Lacan, Foucault and Copjec on the topic of the gaze:  should we think of it as an all-seeing eye that, by disciplining those whom it monitors, serves a conservative political function;  or should we think of it as unsettling point of failure in the visual field that disrupts the system of law and order?

 

Genocide, while not an invention of the 20th Century, saw its greatest proliferation between 1915 and the present.  We will begin this class with a look at the ways in which contemporary scholars have tried to categorize and understand genocide, what regimes perpetrate them and why.  We will examine the wide literature that explores social, political, personal and psychological conditions that were fundamental in producing genocidal acts.  We will also examine efforts to respond to the killings.  How is justice meted out?  How does one punish nations and individuals?  Lastly, we will engage the question of the uniqueness and similarity of genocide.

 

 

This course offers an overview of digital media production, specifically digital video cameras, sound recording devices, digital editing software, and digital imaging for video and the web. The focus will be for students to use media as a tool to discuss cultural analysis, questions, and arguments of their Cultural Studies research. The student’s media productions will be drawn from their own research but largely informed by course screenings, readings, and presentations. At the end of the semester, students will do a short presentation on their research that includes audio, video, and digital imaging elements.

 

 

 

Note: Class meets Jan 20, Feb 3,17, Mar 3,24, Apr 7,21,28.

 

This class is open to all Cultural Studies students, but is highly recommended for Masters students in their final year. The class meets bi-weekly rather than weekly. The dynamic of the class is not a traditional seminar setting, instead it is designed as a writer’s workshop in which students serve as peer-evaluators and class-time is used to workshop individual writing projects. Students will develop their own original project that can be either a Thesis/Dissertation Proposal, Article for Publication, Literature Review, or Thesis/Dissertation Chapter. For students who have completed their Dissertation Proposal in CLST 370-A, they will be encouraged to develop a project related to the dissertation. In sum, the class will enable students to analyze and improve, in the practical environment of their own academic work, their capacity and potential as scholars and writers. The course will prepare students on the mechanics of research procedures; issues in interdisciplinary work; re-working seminar papers into scholarly texts (i.e. thesis/dissertation chapter and/or article for publication); presentation of academic research and scholarship in various contexts; publication challenges and opportunities for young scholars.

 

In this course we will explore the complex, fluid and productive function of the body as object of knowledge as well as feminist and queer theory's contribution to producing new bodies of knowledge. We will discuss feminist and queer theory in relation to questions of the historical production of knowledge and as they illuminate pressing contemporary issues. While the primary focus of this class is on questions of gender and sexuality, this class is conceived with the assumption that it is impossible to understand the theoretical issues and concepts of gender without also discussing it in relation to race, class and sexuality.

 

This course aims to acquaint students with the work of key figures who have contributed to the development of Cultural Studies, such as Ien Ang, Julie D’Acci, John Fiske, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Paul Gilroy, and Judith Williamson, as well as key figures upon which CS has drawn, such as Theodore Adorno, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, and Slavoj Žižek..   We will use a mixture of primary source materials and an introductory text by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall et al.

 

 

 

This class will examine late 20th and 21st century films and novels, some of which would include Morrison's Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Garden in the Dunes, Alan Brennert's Molokai, and Deadwood (HBO), that represent the 19th Century in order to analyze what such representations say about our relationship to the past and how we use the past to address contemporary concerns.

 

 

The Internet today teems with new forms of social media, including the digital publishing structures of blogs and wikis, a wide range of photo and video sharing services, and a growing number of social networking systems.  This course will approach the study of these systems through their backstories, paying attention to the pre-history of the Internet systems we are now familiar with, the theoretical modes of reading that computer technologies have helped give birth to, and the social and political effects that these technologies produce.

 

 

 

These courses are approved for graduate students in the media studies concentration. The spring 2010 course schedule is not yet finalized, the Claremont College Calendar will be published by the end of November.

 

 

Two additional courses may be offered: