Spring 2023 Course List

Core Classes

CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema

MoWe 1:25PM – 2:15PM

Martin L. Johnson

In this course, we will consider the Lumière’s vision of a truly global cinema, one that accommodates a diversity of cultures in a medium that has enduring worldwide appeal.

ENGL 680 Film Theory

TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM

Rick Warner

This course offers a rigorous survey of film theory from the 1920s to the present. We will begin by reconsidering classical debates about medium specificity as the relate to the close-up, montage, and realism. We will then range across several approaches including feminism, psychoanalysis, affect theory, critical race theory, queer theory, sound studies, phenomenology, ecocriticism, and post-cinema.

300- and 400- Level ECL Classes

ENGL 381 Literature and Cinema

TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Henry Veggian

This course will explore early theories of the relationship between words and images and the limits they place on understandings of intermedial relations, but also the opportunities they create. Over the course of the semester, we will study and discuss intertextuality, misappropriation versus faithfulness to a source text, literary cinema and cinematic literature, cross-cultural considerations in adaptation, and matters of authorship.

ENGL 389 Major Directors: Hitchcock and His International Legacies

TuTh 11:00AM – 12:05PM

Rick Warner

The course takes the work and legacy of Alfred Hitchcock as an occasion to examine authorship in film. Class discussions will concern the usefulness, as well as the shortcomings, of the concept of the auteur. The class will balance that perspective with other critical methods that range from gender studies and psychoanalysis to genre criticism.

ENGL 390 Studies in Literary Topics: Dis/ease, Dis/order, and Dys/topia in Latinx Fiction and Film

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Ylce Irizarry

This course will explore how post-1992 Latinx fiction and film portray “misbehaving bodies.”

CMPL 520 Grids, Media, and Power

Mon 3:35PM – 6:35PM

Gregory Flaxman

This course will consider the grid as a technology of space, perception, and thought. The class will begin by surveying the invention and dissemination of grids in a variety of contexts and media.

Film Studies Electives

ENGL 280 The Western and Science Fiction

Tues 3:30PM – 6:00PM

Gregory Flaxman

This course will consider the unsuspected and often intimate relations between the western and science fiction.

ENGL 257 Video Games and Narrative Cinema

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Steven Gotzler

In this hands-on gaming course, students decipher the narrative design of video games while exploring the legacy of cinema to game play.

Other Film Studies Courses

ENGL 143 How to Watch Video Games

TuTh 5:00PM – 6:15PM

Doug Stark

This course will explore the aesthetic principles and political implications of watching video games by introducing students to both new work in game studies and longstanding film studies frameworks.

GERM 265 Hitler in Hollywood, Cinematic Representations of Nazi Germany

MoWeFr 11:15AM – 12:05PM

Priscilla Layne

In this course, we will view and analyze films selected from the vast array produced in Germany, the U.S. and several other countries affected by WWII.

FREN 389/CMPL 389

TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM

Hassan Melehy

In this course we will study some of the outstanding and memorable films from roughly the last sixty-five years of French cinema, beginning with the postwar boom in the film industry, including the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 60s, and continuing through subsequent decades to the present.

ASIA 235/JWST 235/PWAD 235 Israeli Cinema: Nation, Gender, and Ethnicity

TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM

Yaron Shemer

This class will explore the modes of expression by which contemporary Israeli films often depict a multifaceted and conflicted nascent society.