The Digital Doppelgänger

Senior seminar on the rise of agential AI and how this new development in generative media threatens to transform labor, loss, and subjectivity.

Introduction to Media Studies

General introduction to the field of media studies organized by history and medium. Required course.

Paranoid Aesthetics: Conspiracy Theories and False Idols

A seminar exploring the aesthetics of paranoia through a study of conspiracy theories as a media phenomenon, engaging Baudrillard, Steyerl, Latour, and Lynch.

David Lynch

A seminar dedicated to the work of David Lynch, organized chronologically according to his filmography using the themes of dreams and the unconscious.

Possession, Control, and Liberation

Explores the idea of possession on a spectrum of phenomenological experience in which the self loses itself — from art, religion, and anthropology to politics and media, with regular screenings ranging from horror films to experimental media.

Digital Media and Race

Starting from the notion that race functions as a technology in modern culture, this class explores the many intersections of race and digital technology.

Visuality and Data

Looks at data visualizations as an object of study, exploring the ways that visual culture and information culture come together in a unique form of representation. Taught jointly with the School of Media Studies as a graduate seminar.

Generative Media and Artificial Intelligence: Digital Theories of Autonomy and Alienation

An exploration of generative media beginning with artificial neural networks and moving into speculations about AI. Taught as a graduate/undergraduate seminar.

Economies of the Self

Exploring the ways that the self is targeted by neoliberalism as its primary interface.

Folk Horror

A course on film genre that seeks to understand the emerging sub-genre of folk horror and its popularity within contemporary culture.

The Zombie: Living and Dead Labor in Modernity

Looks at the zombie from its origins in colonial Haiti to its recent incarnations in TV, movies, and video games.

Black Horror

Looks beyond the experience of Blackness in an anti-Black world as an allegory of horror to consider what Black Horror can teach us about life and death, difference and sameness, haunting and trauma.

Theory + Production: Polanski, Lynch, Kubrick

Co-taught with Prof. Talia Lugacy, this pilot seminar brought together theory and production faculty to explore filmmaking and aesthetics.

Exploitation Cinema

Explores the history and appeal of exploitation films, looking at their origins to present nostalgic representations of the genre.

Embodied Media

Approaching the body as a medium, this course explores bioart, genetics and biotechnology, and themes of embodiment within contemporary culture.

Body Genres

A seminar on body genres, defined as any genre that elicits an involuntary response from the viewer.

Media/Theory/Technology

Starting with examples of media and technology that seem popular, puzzling, or downright alarming, the course brings clarity to these concerns by framing them with appropriate theories, both classical and contemporary.

Visuality and Data

Seminar and emphasis area course exploring data visualizations as an object of study.

Contemporary Film and Media Theory

Film theory course beginning with film theory in the 1970s and moving into the present.

History of Film after Midcentury

Film history class on contemporary cinema, from 1945 to the digital.

The Zombie (Film and Society)

Film history course on the zombie movie within the horror genre.

Undead Media: Beyond Living in Modern Culture

Hybrid graduate/undergraduate seminar exploring the notion of undeadness and its thematic and historical connections to media technology.

Body Genres: Moving Images and Moving Bodies

A film genre seminar focusing on horror, melodrama, pornography, and comedy.

Introduction to Film

Core introduction to the film studies curriculum, a survey of film studies moving historically through various methodologies.

Classical Film Theory

Film theory course focusing on early film theory to the mid-century.

Memory and Modern Media: Permanence and Presence in Film and Digital Media

Explored the intersections of media and memory, looking especially at the ways that media technology seemed to automate and expand upon our capacity to remember.

Digital Media and Race: Ethnicity, Technicity, Embodiment

Exploring the intersections of digital technology and ethnicity, looking to early digital media for examples of shared concepts between computers and the body.

Zizek: Beyond Truth and Hype!

A seminar on the work of Slavoj Zizek, employing experimental methodologies to provide an in-depth introduction to his body of work.

Moving Images and Moving Bodies: Film and Genre

Seminar on genre and embodiment, looking specifically at body genres.

Mediating Bodies: Power and Technology in the Biopolitical Age

Designed as part of doctoral work and dissertation research; first standalone class.