Creative & Critical Studies

First-Year Class

You'll investigate current themes and issues in art and design and read works in a variety of genres—including literature, journal articles and online writing—and dialogue with them in your own writing. This class offers a workshop environment and emphasizes ongoing revision and peer feedback as a means of exploring relationships between writer and audience. You will have the opportunity to practice a variety of forms and discourses throughout the semester as you develop writing skills and learn rhetorical strategies that are foundational to any career in art and design.

First-Year Class

This introductory course to the history of art employs thematic, contextual and critical approaches to interpreting images and understanding contemporary critical discourses about art. Students will examine art from the earliest human civilizations through the medieval period and investigate cross-cultural themes of social identity, constructions of the body and the use of art as public signifier. At the same time, students will address the interaction of art and technology, considering the topics of artistic practice from the development of fiber arts and architecture to the invention of writing, coinage and the concept of the multiple.

First-Year Class

This course provides each student with the opportunity to pursue sustained research in an area of their own interest, guided by a conceptual framework determined by the class with the instructor. Exploring a single question related to a relevant topic in culture or literature, students will engage independently in their own process of inquiry as they study, evaluate, analyze and synthesize source materials and learn how to incorporate them effectively in their own writing. Students will also examine issues of context and ethics in both academic and professional writing as they become artists and designers who write with integrity.

First-Year Class

This course explores the concept of what it meant to be "modern" in Western culture, from its inception in the 14th century through its escalating importance by the mid-19th century. Students will examine the agents and engines of artistic and social change, as well as shifting perspectives on the role of artists in society. Tracing the means by which artistic styles and ideas increasingly crossed national boundaries as global communication became progressively more possible, we will consider the rapid expansion of new technologies, and the emergence of the artist as prophet, celebrity and social critic.

Second-Year Class

This course is designed to introduce students to the wider world of cultural production beyond the Western emphasis of other core art history courses. We turn to the field of visual/cultural anthropology to offer models for ways to decenter the West as the primary prism of attention. In line with this more contemporary way of thinking about the complexities of multiculturalism, the focus will be on cultural contexts. Course focus will cover all aspects of visible culture: the built environment, ritual and ceremonial performance, dance, art and material culture. The specific focus for each semester will be determined by the direction of individual faculty interests and expertise.

Second-Year Class

This special topics course investigates the intersecting forces of gender, race, class, and power in relation to a historical event, theoretical framework, or cultural phenomenon. The course emphasizes critical analysis, historical contextualization, and interdisciplinary connections. Topics and instructors may vary per semester. 

Second-Year Class

This course examines decisive moments and issues from the history of art in the 20th and 21st centuries to provide students with a critical understanding of emerging practices in modern and postmodern art. A wide range of media and artistic strategies is explored through thematic weekly topics that ground recent art in its historical, intellectual, political and social context, while also addressing important aspects of its curatorial display and reception. The course incorporates art criticism and critical theory to frame modern and postmodern art within broad aesthetic and intellectual traditions, ensuring that students can effectively discuss, critique and review contemporary art.

Maya Angelou said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Share your stories with the world! This class teaches the craft of story building and narrative construction. Students learn the essential components, approaches, and techniques that convey entertaining and unforgettable narratives to audiences including plot design, character development, world building, and story techniques such as foreshadowing, misdirection, exposition, metaphor, cliffhanger, theme, flashback/forward, time jumps, etc. The skills and knowledge gained in this course can be applied to a variety of media – film and screenwriting, animation and game design, creative writing, illustrations and graphic novels, social media, promotional videos, trailers, etc. 

What can the insides of our closets tell us about the ways in which we carry out our beliefs and practices in daily life? This course introduces students to anthropological inquiry about dressing our bodies - what it means to us as individuals and also what it means to others. We will address historical and ethnographic approaches to cloth and clothing to understand why this perspective is a useful lens for understanding meaning making in everyday life. We will critique, through synthesis of theory and cross-cultural comparative analysis, how what we wear has social, economic, political, and moral implications. The course considers a range of topics relating to the dressed and adorned body from cloth itself, to ideas about the embodiment of aesthetics and fashion in dress, and ultimately how "choice", in its availability, contributes to determination of self. 

This course critically examines Whiteness in our society and how it gets systemically structured, reproduced, and naturalized. Through writings by Sara Ahmed, Laila Saeed, Peggy McIntosh, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D’Angelo, Danez Smith, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Claudia Rankine, and the Racial Imaginary Institute, among others, we will engage the following questions: How does White Supremacy systemically work? What does it look like and feel like in schools, literature, museums, and public spaces? How is it entangled in broader structural inequities? How has Whiteness been resisted, and what can we learn from those examples to guide our own lives? Rooted in the belief that language has the power to do violence and the power to work as an antidote to violence, this course pays critical attention both to the subject of Whiteness and to the capacities of language in remedying the problem. The course culminates with a group plan of action or antiracist proposal that contributes to the decolonization of our campus community. Course objectives: Identify and examine the characteristics of Whiteness as theorized in the course readings as a systemic mechanism for maintaining power relations and for “orienting bodies in specific directions” (Ahmed, 2007) Demonstrate an understanding of the social and cultural workings and effects of Whiteness through active dialogue with the critical theory and literature presented in the course Synthesize critical ideas about the role and functions of Whiteness into a purposeful final project that manifests the course content into an action-oriented publication or creative work. 

Topics in Literature: Mythic Literacy and World Building Through the Lens of Afrofuturism is a writing-intensive literature course that introduces students to significant literary works, presenting central themes from literary history while focusing on the continued development of students' own writing and oral presentation skills. Afrofuturism is "a social movement and cultural aesthetic movement in literature, music, art, film and philosophy, featuring futuristic or science fiction themes which incorporate elements of black history and culture". Afrofuturism combines liberation theory and speculative thinking to transform limitations of reality and to create new worlds of one's own design. A core reading list of literary works in mythology and definitive texts in Afrofuturism will inform students weekly writings and shape final projects in storytelling and "universe" design. Class explorations in film, gaming and virtual reality (VR) narratives serve to expand student knowledge of diverse expressions and applications of world-building and to deepen their understanding of mythic literacy. 

Students will read and engage a range of children’s literature, focusing on the craft and capacities of the text. How can we develop engaging characters, a good story, effective pacing, and distinctive voice through writing? Through a range of assignments, students will practice the craft of children’s book writing and prepare for Spring Course, where they will bring that writing into relation with visual illustrations. 

Visual Poetries will function as a workshop in which students write their own poetry while examining the work of a variety of modern and contemporary poets. Readings will focus on poems that emphasize visual elements, including imagist, symbolist, concrete, and “language” poetry, and explore how poetry takes inspiration from other forms of art such as painting, graphic design, and illustration. Students will consider how each poet makes use of the page as a material canvas and how the placement of words, punctuation, and white space affects the meaning of a poem. Creative experiments assigned throughout the semester will help each student write, design, and present her own brand of visual poetry. Based on the scope of a student's project or level of study there may be additional costs for materials and supplies. 

This course examines global art production and cultural themes through a lens of critical indigeneity. Diverse modes of artistic expression related to Indigenous sovereignty and agency will be explored through areas of study that vary in historical scope and site-specific context, semester to semester. A close study of specific global cultural productions in their intrinsic context takes precedence, but broader critical themes may include: the diasporic experience, colonial and post-colonial critique and resistance, decolonization practices, as well as the politics of encounter, identity and related issues of nationalism and effects of globalization on indigenous cultural production. Regardless of time and place, the central goal of this course is a critical study and celebration of indigenous art and culture on the six continents that have experienced human habitation. 

In this course we will read and write literature that doesn’t behave—love poems disguised as comic books, fairy tales that elope with memoirs, pulp fiction that steals techniques from documentary film. These texts refuse to stay put in one category of literature or another; instead, they overstep the very boundaries that define them. As you read this diverse roster of disobedient writers, you too will learn all the rules fit to be broken. The course will be conducted as a writing and reading laboratory in which you will spawn your own literary crossbreed and foster the conditions in which your classmates’ rare species can thrive. Based on the scope of a student's project or level of study there may be additional costs for materials and supplies. 

This course traces fantasy as subject and strategy in the visual arts from 1850-present. Beginning with a close examination of paintings, literary illustrations, pulp magazines, and book covers from the 1840s through the mid-20th century, the course pivots to a study of how post-war culture, the emergence of a globalized postmodern condition and its associative technological innovations re-shaped and evolved the potential of fantasy narratives, settings and characters in the visual arts. Close readings of modern literary theory, beginning with J.R.R. Tolkien’s foundational ideas on subcreation and Primary and Secondary Worlds outlined in “On Fairy Stories,” will open a critical discussion of how artists exploit character traits, settings and worldbuilding to revise, re-interpret and overcome strongly rooted stereotypes and tropes while challenging real world social and political issues. Recent cultural and intellectual histories such as the psychedelic movement, rising critiques of gender and race (and inclusion more broadly), and the potential of virtual reality technologies and the posthuman will provide tools to critique and analyze the persistent, and diversifying, role and power of fantasy subject matter to the human condition. 

Students will study concepts of women in literature that still influence modern thinking, juxtaposing portrayals of women by male and female authors throughout Western literature. Beginning with interpretations of Eve and her role in "Genesis," the class will move quickly from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, examining texts that reflect women's struggle to define themselves. Readings will be selected from a variety of genre and may include authors such as Christine de Pisan, Moliere, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Andre Gide, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Katherine Ann Porter, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ursula Hegi. Based on the scope of a student's project or level of study there may be additional costs for materials and supplies. 

Modern American Politics is a participatory and experiential exploration of the American political process as exists today and as it has developed historically. The class will examine the theory and practice of politics but each student will directly experience some dimension of the political process with a choice of a partisan or non-partisan role. Based on the scope of a student's project or level of study there may be additional costs for materials and supplies. 

Visual Anthropology introduces students to a broad range of cultural constructs and ideas, examining how film, photography and other media have been used for anthropological studies. Based on the scope of a student's project or level of study there may be additional costs for materials and supplies.