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 structures. Topics for discussion will include sports media industries and technologies; representations of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and …
Theory and practice of media production and screenwriting.
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; key elements, functions, goals, and effects; and significant subgenres, cycles, and trends.
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 conditions in the digital age.
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 medium, cover all the major film types (silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film), …
Traces the Internet’s history, reception, audience, industries, rhetorics, fictional and filmic narratives, and potential as a purveyor and transmitter of culture and values.
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.
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 wide array of topics, including media uses and effects with regard to social connection, learning, judgments, perceptions, stereotypes, violence, consumption, …
Students explore a topic in film and media studies, history, and theory; the topic varies from semester to semester.
Students explore a topic in rhetoric or communication science; the topic varies from semester to semester.