ITAL 201-1: Intermediate Italian Prof. Barbara Turoff, Spring 2025 Wednesday, 2:00-3:20/Thursday, 9:30-10:50 Do you already know some Italian and want to improve your fluency? Have you already completed the Rome program or are planning to go? Why not continue improving your Italian? Intermediate Italian I is open to students who have taken Italian 101 and 102 or who already have a knowledge of Italian.

Julia Comita (MA in Media Studies graduate student) has released a photo series and accompanying essay in The Advocate (November 29, 2024). Prim ‘n Poppin’ is an ongoing photographic series highlighting inclusivity in beauty advertising through a vintage lens. The project features 9 all-original “ads” based on existing beauty advertisements from the 1970s, but flipping the often discriminatory imagery and languaging on its head to address current issues such as transgender rights and body positivity. Prim ‘n Poppin’ can be viewed in full, along with interviews provided by all cast members, on the website www.prim-poppin.com. You can read the essay here: https://www.advocate.com/voices/beauty-ads

HMS-342S/640S-02: French New Wave Cinema Mon 7:00p-9:50pm Professor Ethan Spigland The French New Wave is one of the most fascinating and influential of all film movements, celebrated for its exuberance and experimental approach to aesthetics. This class offers a fresh look at the socio-economic and cultural context that shaped French cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. We will track the precursors to the French New Wave, then focus on the core group of critics-turned-directors from the journal Cahiers du Cinéma (François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette) who would become the leading lights of the movement. We will study the relation between aesthetics and politics in their work as well as the depiction of gender and the construction of sexual identities. We will also examine the subgroup of French filmmakers known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Agnès Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais.

HMS 390A/600S-02: Poetry Across Media Sacha Frey Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50pm (Online) 3 Credits What is a poem? Who is a poet? What are the limits of the poem? In this course we will look and listen for poems and the poetic across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works published as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, internet and video) and works typically presented as representative of other art forms (such as sculpture, painting, music, video art, conceptual art, net art, and dance). We will discuss these works in the context of poetry criticism and media theory.

HMS 405A:The Harlem Renaissance Wed 5:00pm - 7:50pm Professor Dexter Jeffries What is the public responsibility of the American artist? How can artists, poets, and novelists envision the proper role which identity plays in determining the bounds of creative expression? By studying The Harlem Renaissance during the transformative epoch of 1890 to 1940, this course will unpack these very questions by focusing on the racial, cultural, and political forces which defined an unparalleled, contentious period in African American Literature. We will begin by reading foundational thinkers like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson, who paved the way for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, as competing artistic conceptions of racial identity played out across nearly half a century. New York City itself emerges as a main stage for this unfolding drama, as Harlem became a hub of African American cultural foment in the Roaring ‘20s, home to voices as diverse as the prolific N.A.A.C.P leader W.E.B Dubois and the Jamaican-born, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Back To Africa Movement, thinkers who publicly dueled over the present and future of Black America. These debates will be reassessed through Modernist literature, film, jazz, and poetics, as manifestos such as T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) parallel Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) — treatises that demand the artist face the role of personal identity and its manifold influence on creativity.

HMS-440S-02: Gender and Sexualities in Latin American Cinema Th 2:00pm-4:50 pm Professor Mónica-Ramón Ríos An in-depth look at the history, regions, and social contexts of Latin American cinema via key women directors and screenwriters and the analysis of female, femme, and masc representations. The course includes materials that can be accessed in Spanish or English, and thus gives students with advanced or mid-level knowledge of Spanish the opportunity to engage with texts and conversations in Spanish. No prior knowledge of Spanish is required.

HMS 492A/592A: Animation Narrative: Historical and Theoretical Contexts Ellery Washington Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50 3 credits This course focuses on the fundamentals of narrative theory and practice, with an emphasis on how to employ strong narrative elements in visual work, especially animation and film, and on translating theory into practice. As a starting point, the course examines traditional stories and their underlying structures, looking closely at ancient mythologies from various world cultures and the common narrative elements they share, while comparing visual representations that correspond to these elements. The course advances to less traditional narrative structures (i.e. nonlinear, antiheroic, sensory, etc.), the more complex and often abstract visual representations these structures have evoked, and the narrative theories that engage them.

HMS360A/PPS 661S: The New Circus Jennifer Miller Tuesday 02:00-04:50pm 3 Credits In The New Circus we will combine practical circus skills with a study of the historical and theoretical issues involved in the evolving new queer circus movement. Practical skills include, juggling, slack rope walking, object balancing, object puppetry and basic partner acrobatics, and clowning. We will explore performance styles ranging from Judson influenced improvisation and pedestrian movement to clown shtick and the grand circus Ta-Da. We will look at queer performance theory, traditional circus history, history of the sideshow, pageantry, political theater, writings on freaks and otherness, contemporary performance art, and clowning. We will touch on several aspects of show creation as we prepare for an end of semester show. Students will be expected to work on all of the skills offered in the class and to master at least one. Wholehearted participation in both studio work and discussion is expected. All students will participate in creating a grand final performance.

HMS 491A/591A: Contemporary Artist’s Book in Historical and Theoretical Contexts Youmna Chlala Tuesday 2:00 - 4:50pm 3 Credits This course develops critical frameworks for interpreting and creating artists’ books; that is, artworks in which the book is a medium. We will study such books alongside histories of the field, theoretical writings, and critical commentaries. These studies will inform our endeavors to create, catalog, and/or critique artists? books in which visual, verbal, and material elements are interwoven. Advanced students from various fields are encouraged to use and expand their own disciplinary perspectives. Visits to collections around New York City will supplement Pratt’s resources.