Fall 2021

COM ARTS 359

Examines sports media using the frameworks of media and cultural studies. The relationship between sports and popular culture provides an important site for understanding and critiquing the media’s relationships to social, cultural, economic, and political …

COM ARTS 355

Theory and practice of media production and screenwriting.

COM ARTS 354

Explores six major film genres — musical; thriller; comedy; horror; drama; and melodrama — investigating their narrative and stylistic conventions and the principles underlying them. Critical, historical, and theoretical approaches examine definitional criteria and ambiguities; …

COM ARTS 351

Critical overview of the cultural industries driving television in the United States, from broadcast networks and cable to downloading and streaming, focusing on economic and regulatory structures, programming practices, labor, globalization,audiences, and adaptations to changing …

COM ARTS 350

Explains how films work using classics such as CITIZEN KANE, VERTIGO, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, THE MATRIX, and DO THE RIGHT THING (all shown during the “lab” screenings). Students study film as an art form and a …

COM ARTS 346

Traces the Internet’s history, reception, audience, industries, rhetorics, fictional and filmic narratives, and potential as a purveyor and transmitter of culture and values.

COM ARTS 345

Examines how personal relationships unfold in online communication contexts (social network sites, online dating, video games). Topics include impression formation and management, deception and trust, self-perception and identity, social support and relationship maintenance.

COM ARTS 325

Investigate the ways in which individuals use, create, and respond to media content in the context of increasingly blurred boundaries between “mass” and “interpersonal” media. We will consider social scientific theories and research on a …