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At Pratt, we take a capacious approach to “media” that encompasses traditional and digital forms: books, newspapers, television, film, music, video games, mobile, memes, and social media. You’ll come to understand media, media structures, histories, content, and consequences.

artwork, painting of wood blocks arranged to stand on each other

The Media Studies Minor (15 credits total) is designed for students who want to develop their knowledge of how media shapes our identity, culture, and society. It includes a study of a wide range of media from various theoretical, historical, and creative approaches. The minor involves one required course, “Contemporary Media Theory,” four electives, and a qualifying paper/project. You may declare the minor at any point; courses already taken can be counted.


Minor Coordinator

Paul Haacke

phaacke@pratt.edu

718.636.3790

students gathered around a picnic table, on campus
@hmspratt
hmspratt

@hmspratt

  • HMS 452P/652P: Writing for Interior Design
Pierre De Looz
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:50pm
3 Credits

Writing for Interior Design ranges from the conceptual and creative (incorporating writing into the design process itself) to the practical (the kinds of writing involved with communicating in the professional arena). This course activates core language and research skills from the Humanities in order to help advanced design students recognize and understand design literature, to use writing as a process tool, and ultimately to write about their own theoretical and real-world design work.
  • HMS 451/651: Art and Politics of Public Writing
Minh-Ha Pham
Tuesday 09:30 - 12:20pm
3 Credits

Are you an avid reader of art and cultural criticism, whether in newspapers, magazines, blogs., or elsewhere? Do you have a perspective about art, culture, and society that you want to share with the public? Are you interested in sharpening this perspective through research and revision?

This course will teach students how to write about the arts and culture for a general audience. We will read and write essays that go beyond personal opinion and shallow moralizing. Students will learn how to draw on research and revision to produce strong, persuasive, and clear points of view about the arts and/or cultural product, practice, or phenomenon.

We will read essays on a wide range of topics (e.g., food, TV, fine art, social injustice, and more); discuss the contents and craft of a compelling piece of art and cultural criticism; as well as practice writing, revising, and pitching these articles to editors.
  • HMS 441A/541A: Global Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 5:00 - 7:50pm
3 Credits

A film studies research course which aims to further understand the relationship of theory to practice through the work of contemporary independent international films. The theme of the family in selected films across cultures, such as “The Headless Woman” by Lucretia Martel (Argentina), “Dogtooth” by Yorogos Lathimos, (Greece),
•’A Separation”” by Ashgar Fahardi, (Iran), “The Apple” by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), “The Wonder” by Sebastian Lelio (Chile), “Parasite” by Bong Joon Ho (South Korea), and other excerpts from international auteurs, will allow us to investigate the signature styles of pioneering contemporary filmmakers. 

Close readings will focus on their innovative use of engagement, displacement, disruption, and spectatorship in poetic storytelling, to call into question relationships between experience, cinematic storytelling, and the social order. Various modes of inquiry, including seminar style class discussion, brief, focused written responses, presentations, and video studies, will culminate in a final creative project.”
  • HMS 440K/640S: Intensive Film Theory
Ali Sengul
Thursday 5:00-7:50pm
3 Credits

With an emphasis on the socially, politically and aesthetically situated character of film theory and theorizing, this course offers a critical survey of the history of film theory beginning with the early realism-modernism debate to medium-specificity and to the contemporary debates on digital (non)indexicality and algorithmic images Through seminal primary texts, manifestos, movements and turning points, the students will also study the intersection of film theorizing and social theory through psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, feminism, queer studies, political economy and critical race theory. 

With weekly film screenings, we will discuss a) the role and importance of film theory and theorizing in our current social-political moment and b) how this current moment would inform the way we can revisit the history of film and film theory.
  • HMS 440F/540F: Women in International Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 9:30am - 12:20pm
3 Credits

What is body? What is gender? What is a woman? How does this impact representation? How have the historic women filmmakers across cultures inform contemporary filmmaking by women? What do these works suggest about new paradigms for women, representation and filmmaking? How can we consider these impulses in our own work? 

These are some of the questions our viewing of a pioneering filmmakers from Kinyuo Tanaka (Japan), Yasmin Ahmad (Malaysia) Tatania Huezo (Mexico), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Ghana) to Barbara Loden (USA), Shirin Night (Iran), Celine Sciamma (France), Rebecca Hall (UK) and others will focus on. We will pay particular attention to gaze, agency, the abject, and intersectionality as cinematic vocabulary and subject. Close readings of films brief focused writing, research and presentations, and video studies assignments will allow us to respond with our own textual and visual works.
  • HMS 440E/540E: Poetics of Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 2:00-4:50pm
3 Credits

All art and design mediums use poetics. In search of new ways of enlivening our own creative practices, we will mine the immersive language of cinema - image, gesture, time, space, and sound to expand our understanding of the relationship of spectator, narrative, character and composition. Shifting between close reading of short and long form poetic narrative films by innovative pioneers from Terrence Malick to Rungano Nyoni, Julian Schnabel to Alice Rohwacher, and cinematic and textual experiments of our own, will ground our understanding of these concepts as resources relevant to our own practices. No prior film/poetics experience necessary.
  • HMS 407P/630S: Queer Archives
Dalia Davoudi
Thursday 2:00-4:50pm
3 Credits

“Queer Archives” offers a set of methods and forms for engaging with the material remains of lesbian, gay, trans, intersex, and nonbinary histories.
In doing so, we look at repositories for these materials, including both physical archives in New York City such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive and the Schlesinger Library, as well as virtual and digitized archives such as NYC Trans Oral History Project. 

Besides developing archival skills and learning how to liaise with museums and archives to work with historical materials, this course considers the ways that these materials have been remediated and incorporated into a variety of forms and adaptations, highlighting film, literature, exhibits, and video essays.

Our theoretical grounding will be in queer and feminist media studies, queer-of-color performance studies, as well as affect theory and theories of temporality, play, and ritual. Assignments for this course include one analytical essay, a creative re-mediation assignment, and a BYO (Build-Your-Own) Archive assignment.
  • HMS-390A-01/ HMS-600S-02: Poetry Across Media
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:50pm
Room: Online
Sacha Frey

“Who is a poet? Are the answers the same for all people, in all times? ... Is the Baptist preacher who describes the Last Judgment or the Valley of the Dry Bones a poet? Is the blues singer / composer a poet? Is Melvin Tolson a greater poet than James Brown?” - Stephen Henderson 

What are the limits of the poem? In this course we will look and listen for poems and notions of “the poetic” across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works published as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, Internet, & video) and works typically presented as representative of other artforms (ie: sculpture, painting, music, media art, and dance) that we will read as poetry.
Students will gain practice in the writing and reading of media theory and poetry criticism and the building of poemsin or into their creative practice.
  • HMS 342S/640S-02: French New Wave Cinema
Ethan Spigland
Monday 7:00 - 9:50pm
3 Credits

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 452P/652P: Writing for Interior Design
Pierre De Looz
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:50pm
3 Credits

Writing for Interior Design ranges from the conceptual and creative (incorporating writing into the design process itself) to the practical (the kinds of writing involved with communicating in the professional arena). This course activates core language and research skills from the Humanities in order to help advanced design students recognize and understand design literature, to use writing as a process tool, and ultimately to write about their own theoretical and real-world design work.
HMS 452P/652P: Writing for Interior Design Pierre De Looz Wednesday 2:00 - 4:50pm 3 Credits Writing for Interior Design ranges from the conceptual and creative (incorporating writing into the design process itself) to the practical (the kinds of writing involved with communicating in the professional arena). This course activates core language and research skills from the Humanities in order to help advanced design students recognize and understand design literature, to use writing as a process tool, and ultimately to write about their own theoretical and real-world design work.
14 hours ago
View on Instagram |
1/9
HMS 451/651: Art and Politics of Public Writing
Minh-Ha Pham
Tuesday 09:30 - 12:20pm
3 Credits

Are you an avid reader of art and cultural criticism, whether in newspapers, magazines, blogs., or elsewhere? Do you have a perspective about art, culture, and society that you want to share with the public? Are you interested in sharpening this perspective through research and revision?

This course will teach students how to write about the arts and culture for a general audience. We will read and write essays that go beyond personal opinion and shallow moralizing. Students will learn how to draw on research and revision to produce strong, persuasive, and clear points of view about the arts and/or cultural product, practice, or phenomenon.

We will read essays on a wide range of topics (e.g., food, TV, fine art, social injustice, and more); discuss the contents and craft of a compelling piece of art and cultural criticism; as well as practice writing, revising, and pitching these articles to editors.
HMS 451/651: Art and Politics of Public Writing Minh-Ha Pham Tuesday 09:30 - 12:20pm 3 Credits Are you an avid reader of art and cultural criticism, whether in newspapers, magazines, blogs., or elsewhere? Do you have a perspective about art, culture, and society that you want to share with the public? Are you interested in sharpening this perspective through research and revision? This course will teach students how to write about the arts and culture for a general audience. We will read and write essays that go beyond personal opinion and shallow moralizing. Students will learn how to draw on research and revision to produce strong, persuasive, and clear points of view about the arts and/or cultural product, practice, or phenomenon. We will read essays on a wide range of topics (e.g., food, TV, fine art, social injustice, and more); discuss the contents and craft of a compelling piece of art and cultural criticism; as well as practice writing, revising, and pitching these articles to editors.
16 hours ago
View on Instagram |
2/9
HMS 441A/541A: Global Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 5:00 - 7:50pm
3 Credits

A film studies research course which aims to further understand the relationship of theory to practice through the work of contemporary independent international films. The theme of the family in selected films across cultures, such as “The Headless Woman” by Lucretia Martel (Argentina), “Dogtooth” by Yorogos Lathimos, (Greece),
•’A Separation”” by Ashgar Fahardi, (Iran), “The Apple” by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), “The Wonder” by Sebastian Lelio (Chile), “Parasite” by Bong Joon Ho (South Korea), and other excerpts from international auteurs, will allow us to investigate the signature styles of pioneering contemporary filmmakers. 

Close readings will focus on their innovative use of engagement, displacement, disruption, and spectatorship in poetic storytelling, to call into question relationships between experience, cinematic storytelling, and the social order. Various modes of inquiry, including seminar style class discussion, brief, focused written responses, presentations, and video studies, will culminate in a final creative project.”
HMS 441A/541A: Global Cinema Amy Guggenheim Monday 5:00 - 7:50pm 3 Credits A film studies research course which aims to further understand the relationship of theory to practice through the work of contemporary independent international films. The theme of the family in selected films across cultures, such as “The Headless Woman” by Lucretia Martel (Argentina), “Dogtooth” by Yorogos Lathimos, (Greece), •’A Separation”” by Ashgar Fahardi, (Iran), “The Apple” by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), “The Wonder” by Sebastian Lelio (Chile), “Parasite” by Bong Joon Ho (South Korea), and other excerpts from international auteurs, will allow us to investigate the signature styles of pioneering contemporary filmmakers. Close readings will focus on their innovative use of engagement, displacement, disruption, and spectatorship in poetic storytelling, to call into question relationships between experience, cinematic storytelling, and the social order. Various modes of inquiry, including seminar style class discussion, brief, focused written responses, presentations, and video studies, will culminate in a final creative project.”
19 hours ago
View on Instagram |
3/9
HMS 440K/640S: Intensive Film Theory
Ali Sengul
Thursday 5:00-7:50pm
3 Credits

With an emphasis on the socially, politically and aesthetically situated character of film theory and theorizing, this course offers a critical survey of the history of film theory beginning with the early realism-modernism debate to medium-specificity and to the contemporary debates on digital (non)indexicality and algorithmic images Through seminal primary texts, manifestos, movements and turning points, the students will also study the intersection of film theorizing and social theory through psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, feminism, queer studies, political economy and critical race theory. 

With weekly film screenings, we will discuss a) the role and importance of film theory and theorizing in our current social-political moment and b) how this current moment would inform the way we can revisit the history of film and film theory.
HMS 440K/640S: Intensive Film Theory Ali Sengul Thursday 5:00-7:50pm 3 Credits With an emphasis on the socially, politically and aesthetically situated character of film theory and theorizing, this course offers a critical survey of the history of film theory beginning with the early realism-modernism debate to medium-specificity and to the contemporary debates on digital (non)indexicality and algorithmic images Through seminal primary texts, manifestos, movements and turning points, the students will also study the intersection of film theorizing and social theory through psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, feminism, queer studies, political economy and critical race theory. With weekly film screenings, we will discuss a) the role and importance of film theory and theorizing in our current social-political moment and b) how this current moment would inform the way we can revisit the history of film and film theory.
2 days ago
View on Instagram |
4/9
HMS 440F/540F: Women in International Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 9:30am - 12:20pm
3 Credits

What is body? What is gender? What is a woman? How does this impact representation? How have the historic women filmmakers across cultures inform contemporary filmmaking by women? What do these works suggest about new paradigms for women, representation and filmmaking? How can we consider these impulses in our own work? 

These are some of the questions our viewing of a pioneering filmmakers from Kinyuo Tanaka (Japan), Yasmin Ahmad (Malaysia) Tatania Huezo (Mexico), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Ghana) to Barbara Loden (USA), Shirin Night (Iran), Celine Sciamma (France), Rebecca Hall (UK) and others will focus on. We will pay particular attention to gaze, agency, the abject, and intersectionality as cinematic vocabulary and subject. Close readings of films brief focused writing, research and presentations, and video studies assignments will allow us to respond with our own textual and visual works.
HMS 440F/540F: Women in International Cinema Amy Guggenheim Monday 9:30am - 12:20pm 3 Credits What is body? What is gender? What is a woman? How does this impact representation? How have the historic women filmmakers across cultures inform contemporary filmmaking by women? What do these works suggest about new paradigms for women, representation and filmmaking? How can we consider these impulses in our own work? These are some of the questions our viewing of a pioneering filmmakers from Kinyuo Tanaka (Japan), Yasmin Ahmad (Malaysia) Tatania Huezo (Mexico), Akosua Adoma Owusu (Ghana) to Barbara Loden (USA), Shirin Night (Iran), Celine Sciamma (France), Rebecca Hall (UK) and others will focus on. We will pay particular attention to gaze, agency, the abject, and intersectionality as cinematic vocabulary and subject. Close readings of films brief focused writing, research and presentations, and video studies assignments will allow us to respond with our own textual and visual works.
2 days ago
View on Instagram |
5/9
HMS 440E/540E: Poetics of Cinema
Amy Guggenheim
Monday 2:00-4:50pm
3 Credits

All art and design mediums use poetics. In search of new ways of enlivening our own creative practices, we will mine the immersive language of cinema - image, gesture, time, space, and sound to expand our understanding of the relationship of spectator, narrative, character and composition. Shifting between close reading of short and long form poetic narrative films by innovative pioneers from Terrence Malick to Rungano Nyoni, Julian Schnabel to Alice Rohwacher, and cinematic and textual experiments of our own, will ground our understanding of these concepts as resources relevant to our own practices. No prior film/poetics experience necessary.
HMS 440E/540E: Poetics of Cinema Amy Guggenheim Monday 2:00-4:50pm 3 Credits All art and design mediums use poetics. In search of new ways of enlivening our own creative practices, we will mine the immersive language of cinema - image, gesture, time, space, and sound to expand our understanding of the relationship of spectator, narrative, character and composition. Shifting between close reading of short and long form poetic narrative films by innovative pioneers from Terrence Malick to Rungano Nyoni, Julian Schnabel to Alice Rohwacher, and cinematic and textual experiments of our own, will ground our understanding of these concepts as resources relevant to our own practices. No prior film/poetics experience necessary.
2 days ago
View on Instagram |
6/9
HMS 407P/630S: Queer Archives
Dalia Davoudi
Thursday 2:00-4:50pm
3 Credits

“Queer Archives” offers a set of methods and forms for engaging with the material remains of lesbian, gay, trans, intersex, and nonbinary histories.
In doing so, we look at repositories for these materials, including both physical archives in New York City such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive and the Schlesinger Library, as well as virtual and digitized archives such as NYC Trans Oral History Project. 

Besides developing archival skills and learning how to liaise with museums and archives to work with historical materials, this course considers the ways that these materials have been remediated and incorporated into a variety of forms and adaptations, highlighting film, literature, exhibits, and video essays.

Our theoretical grounding will be in queer and feminist media studies, queer-of-color performance studies, as well as affect theory and theories of temporality, play, and ritual. Assignments for this course include one analytical essay, a creative re-mediation assignment, and a BYO (Build-Your-Own) Archive assignment.
HMS 407P/630S: Queer Archives Dalia Davoudi Thursday 2:00-4:50pm 3 Credits “Queer Archives” offers a set of methods and forms for engaging with the material remains of lesbian, gay, trans, intersex, and nonbinary histories. In doing so, we look at repositories for these materials, including both physical archives in New York City such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive and the Schlesinger Library, as well as virtual and digitized archives such as NYC Trans Oral History Project. Besides developing archival skills and learning how to liaise with museums and archives to work with historical materials, this course considers the ways that these materials have been remediated and incorporated into a variety of forms and adaptations, highlighting film, literature, exhibits, and video essays. Our theoretical grounding will be in queer and feminist media studies, queer-of-color performance studies, as well as affect theory and theories of temporality, play, and ritual. Assignments for this course include one analytical essay, a creative re-mediation assignment, and a BYO (Build-Your-Own) Archive assignment.
3 days ago
View on Instagram |
7/9
HMS-390A-01/ HMS-600S-02: Poetry Across Media
Tuesday 2:00pm-4:50pm
Room: Online
Sacha Frey

“Who is a poet? Are the answers the same for all people, in all times? ... Is the Baptist preacher who describes the Last Judgment or the Valley of the Dry Bones a poet? Is the blues singer / composer a poet? Is Melvin Tolson a greater poet than James Brown?” - Stephen Henderson 

What are the limits of the poem? In this course we will look and listen for poems and notions of “the poetic” across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works published as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, Internet, & video) and works typically presented as representative of other artforms (ie: sculpture, painting, music, media art, and dance) that we will read as poetry.
Students will gain practice in the writing and reading of media theory and poetry criticism and the building of poemsin or into their creative practice.
HMS-390A-01/ HMS-600S-02: Poetry Across Media Tuesday 2:00pm-4:50pm Room: Online Sacha Frey “Who is a poet? Are the answers the same for all people, in all times? ... Is the Baptist preacher who describes the Last Judgment or the Valley of the Dry Bones a poet? Is the blues singer / composer a poet? Is Melvin Tolson a greater poet than James Brown?” - Stephen Henderson What are the limits of the poem? In this course we will look and listen for poems and notions of “the poetic” across a variety of contexts. Among our poetic texts will be works published as poems in different media (ie: print, audio, Internet, & video) and works typically presented as representative of other artforms (ie: sculpture, painting, music, media art, and dance) that we will read as poetry. Students will gain practice in the writing and reading of media theory and poetry criticism and the building of poemsin or into their creative practice.
3 days ago
View on Instagram |
8/9
HMS 342S/640S-02: French New Wave Cinema
Ethan Spigland
Monday 7:00 - 9:50pm
3 Credits

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 342S/640S-02: French New Wave Cinema Ethan Spigland Monday 7:00 - 9:50pm 3 Credits 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.
3 days ago
View on Instagram |
9/9