Spring 2026 Courses
SPRING 26 COURSES
Any course on this list may count as an elective for the Global Cinema Minor or the Film Studies concentration in English and Comparative Literature. Some of these courses, however, will not automatically count, and in those cases you will need to request a Tar Heel Tracker adjustment.
***Also keep in mind that some restrictions may apply to production courses. Be sure to check Connect Carolina for specifications by the department offering the course.
For those following the Film Studies Concentration
Methods
ENGL 680 Film Theory (Warner)
Suvey I
CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema (Pollmann)
Survey II
ENGL 380 (Warner)
Depth
CMPL 280 (Veggian)
CMPL 420 (Flaxman)
ENGL 681 (Gadson)
Writing-Intensive
ENGL 323 (Flaxman)
ENGL 380 (Warner)
Research-Intensive
CMPL 420 (Flaxman)
ENGL 464 (Irizarry)
ENGL 680 Film Theory (Warner) (may require Tar Heel Tracker adjustment)
For graduate students
Note that if you are a graduate student in English and Comparative Literature, or if you are pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Film Studies, you may take any ENGL or CMPL course numbered 400 or above for graduate credit.
In addition, we urge you to consider taking this course, GERM 880 Cinematic Atmospheres: Mood, Mediation, Critique, taught by Dr. Pollmann
ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema (001 LEC)*
MoWe 10:10AM – 11:00AM
Inga Pollmann
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of global cinema and, thence, to the methods of comparativist film study.
*Students enrolled in CMPL 143 are required to register for a recitation (REC) slot.
CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema (601 REC)
Fr 9:05AM – 9:55AM
Alex Story
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of global cinema and, thence, to the methods of comparativist film study.
CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema (602 REC)
Fr 10:10AM – 11:00AM
Alex Story
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of global cinema and, thence, to the methods of comparativist film study.
CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema (603 REC)
Fr 10:10AM – 11:00AM
Dana Maller
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of global cinema and, thence, to the methods of comparativist film study.
CMPL 143 History of Global Cinema (604 REC)
Fr 11:15AM – 12:05PM
Dana Maller
This course is designed to introduce students to the field of global cinema and, thence, to the methods of comparativist film study.
CMPL 232*
TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM
Jonathan Kief
This course introduces students to modern Korea through the lens of the city. It explores the changing shape of urban space on the Korean peninsula as well as the central role that visions of the city and of city life have played in the development of modern Korean literature, television, and film.
*Combined section with KOR 232 IMAGINING THE CITY – MOD KOREA
CMPL 280 Film Genres
TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM
Henry Veggian
This course introduces students to the methods of genre theory and analysis as they pertain to cinema. The course may either provide a survey of several different genres or examine a particular genre in depth as it has evolved historically. National and/or transnational dimensions of popular genres may be emphasized.
This course is dedicated to the genre of mystery cinema, with emphasis on film noir and its progeny in American cinema, with some occasional detours to other national traditions. The course will proceed chronologically through the history of cinema, in survey form. First it will examine early cinema of the silent era, then shift attention to the sound era during Hollywood¿s Golden Age. There, the influence of German expressionist cinema will be studied where it merges with the American mystery in modern cinema to shape film noir. We will then proceed to the post-war era, and shift our focus to the counter-culture and how it adapted earlier forms. We will examine the work of canonical directors such as Hawks, Huston, Altman, Polanski, the Coen Brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson, to name a few.
While primarily a film course, CMPL 280 will include tangents into other aspects of modern media history in order to explain how mystery cinema forms part of a media constellation. Students may also adopt inter-disciplinary methodologies in this regard, as we will discuss media other than film (including literary print) as well other forms of aural/visual adaptation, and because mystery cinema draws heavily on literary source works, their relationship will be considered as well, with a small handful of selected readings.
CMPL 420 Film, Photography, and the Digital Image
Gregory Flaxman
Mo 3:35PM – 6:35PM
This course examines the shifting nature of the cinematic medium in relation to both traditional photography and newer digital forms of image production. The aesthetic, ethical, and ontological aspects of cinema are explored in light of emergent technological and cultural conditions that demand a full-scale reconsideration of cinema’s specificity.
ENGL 143 Film and Culture
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Nicole Berland
Examines the ways culture shapes and is shaped by film. This course uses comparative methods to contrast films as historic or contemporary, mainstream or cutting-edge, in English or a foreign language, etc.
ENGL 256 Crafting the Dramatic Film: Theory Meets Practice
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Bradley Hammer
This course places students behind the camera and in front of the screen as they alternate between creative and critical approaches to cinema. They learn how to practice the basic principles of narrative film production (producing, directing, cinematography, editing, and sound design) while engaging critically with key debates in film theory and criticism (semiotic, cognitive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and phenomenological).
ENGL 257 Video Games and Narrative Cinema
MoWeFr 9:05AM – 9:55AM
Steven Gotzler
In this hands-on gaming course, students decipher the narrative design of video games while exploring the legacy of cinema to gameplay. They also apply critical gaming concepts (agency, world-building, point of view, authorship, representation, narrative choice, play) to evaluate cinema as a ludic and participatory artform beyond conventional narrative elements.
ENGL 323 American Cinema of the 1970s: New Hollywood and Beyond
TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM
Gregory Flaxman
This course examines one of the most adventurous decades in U.S. film history, from the “Auteur Renaissance,” to independent cinema, through to the politically conscious reconfiguration of popular genres. Films are discussed in the context of social changes and anxieties in the years surrounding Watergate and the Vietnam War.
ENGL 380 Film History: Retro Aesthetics from Teen Movies to Period Pieces
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Rick Warner
This wide-ranging course investigates coming-of-age films, teen movies, and period pieces. We will have ample occasion to think about how these popular genres thematically bring to the fore questions of memory, nostalgia, history, and age. Under the general heading of “retro aesthetics,” this course also considers how cinema, as a time-based audiovisual medium, has unique ways of revisiting, reviving, reimagining, and critiquing the past. The first half of the course will focus on the defining forms and conventions of the teen movie, ranging from comic to tragic examples as the films probe the conflicts and moods that tend to mark the transitional years from adolescence to adulthood. The second half of the course will then turn to the aesthetic strategies of the period piece—films that not only take place in a past historical moment but that also channel the feel of the past through their production design. We’ll consider how the very choice in cinematographic format (digital or photochemical) can have a significant impact on the ambitions of a period film. Indeed, the revival of analog film as a capture medium in the twenty-first century, at a time when digital tools are dominant, will attract our critical attention at various turns. In short, this course not only offers a study of popular genres. It undertakes an intensive examination of the craft and aesthetics of cinema, attends to the politics of representation, and acutely reflects on the sensory, emotional, and psychological dimensions of spectatorship.
ENGL 464 Latinx Hybrid Narrative: Experimental Fiction and Film
MoWeFr 1:25PM – 2:15PM
Ylce Irizarry
Latinx narrative in fiction and film has continually challenged the form and function of “genre”. This course will examine books, films, and videos that are narrative in nature. We will focus on cultural productions reflecting some of these innovations to consider how authors and film makers engage concerns intersecting at different points of self-conception, including but not limited to experiences of dis/ability, diaspora, gender, geography, race, nationality, sexuality, spirituality, and transnationalism.
ENGL 680 Film Theory
TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM
Rick Warner
This course offers a rigorous, wide-ranging survey of film theory from the 1920s to the present. We will begin by reconsidering the question of medium specificity that preoccupies much of classical film theory as it seeks to establish the aesthetic legitimacy of cinema relative to the other arts. In particular, we will consider theoretical approaches that emphasize certain devices and resources of cinema, namely the close-up, montage, the long take, and what French theorists and directors of the 1920s mysteriously call photogénie. We will also compare constructivist and realist theories of cinema in the classical stage, noting their political and aesthetic disagreements. Our conversations will shift to the politics of representation through discussions of race, gender, and sexuality. From there, we’ll increasingly focus on contemporary approaches that prioritize the embodied role of the spectator, such as affect theory and phenomenology (which, in essence, is a philosophy firmly grounded in embodied experience). Questions of mood, atmosphere, and the multisensory impact of cinema—including sound—will be our focus in this phase of the course. We will have a unit on documentary that will challenge the conventional separation of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking. In the last stretch of the semester, we will reflect on how the introduction of digital technology across every aspect of production and reception has impacted theories of cinema. What happens to “film” when it no longer has light-sensitive celluloid as its defining material and technological support—when the film strip is replaced by a computational language of 1s and 0s? Is classical film theory still relevant in today’s media environment where digital streaming has become the main locus of film viewing, and where film is tied to television and videogames in increasingly complex ways? We will consider how theories of post-cinematic media have addressed these questions. The environmental, ecological dimensions of cinema will also attract our attention near the end of the course.
Theorists we will read: Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, Roland Barthes, Manthia Diawara, Bertolt Brecht, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and many more. The films we will study in this course will not simply be subordinate to the theories we read; we will consider films and film theories on equal footing. Films we will likely watch include Arrival (Villeneuve), Adaptation (Jonze), Moonlight (Jenkins), Paprika (Son), Dunkirk (Nolan), Vivre sa vie (Godard), Jeanne Dielman (Akerman), Two Days, One Night (Dardennes), Aftersun (Wells), Stalker (Tarkovsky), To Sleep with Anger (Burnett), Three Colors: Blue (Kieslowski), Transit (Petzold), Old Joy (Reichardt), Burning (Lee), La Jetée (Marker), It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Heller), Boogie Nights (Anderson), The Watermelon Woman (Dunye), The Matrix (Wachowskis), The Beast (Bonello), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
ENGL 681 (E)motion Pictures: Race, Performance & the Body
TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM
Daelena Tinnin-Gadson
How does it feel to be seen? this course explore issues of race, racial meaning, embodiment, and the aesthetic form as a way to rethink and reorganize American culture’s fixation on visibility as an answer to historical and ongoing issues of social, political, and economic upheaval. This course takes engages in criticism and indisciplinary theory to consider film, performance art, television, popular musical performance, and the music video as cultural forms, ontological interrogations, and circuits of feeling that make and unmake media’s dominant constructions – race and the body.
GENERAL COURSE LIST
AAAD 51 First-Year Seminar: Masquerades of Blackness
TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM
Charlene Regester
This course is designed to investigate how race has been represented in cinema historically with an emphasis on representations of race when blackness is masqueraded.
AAAD 202 Africa Through Film
MoWeFr 12:20PM – 1:10PM
Victor Alabi
AAAD 202 explores African society and culture as portrayed in cinema. The course approaches film as a critical medium of studying social, cultural, and political practices, as well as a vehicle of knowledge and history in Africa. First, the course surveys how colonial cinema represented Africa and African subjects. Then, it expands on how African filmmakers tapped into indigenous traditions and media to author agentive narratives in context of postcolonialism, migration, and globalization.
AMST 268 American Cinema and American Culture
TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM
Tony Royle
Examines the relationship between cinema and culture in America with a focus on the ways cinema has been experienced in American communities since 1896.
AMST 455 Documentary Production and Social Issues
Tu 9:00AM – 12:00PM
To Be Announced
Students analyze how archives shape our understanding of history, study contemporary creative approaches to documentary, and learn practical skills for film production.
ASIA 61 A Tour of South Asia’s Regional Art Cinemas
TuTh 8:00AM – 9:15AM
Pamela Lothspeich
Students watch and analyze art films by filmmakers working in various languages and regions of South Asia. Students are introduced to the aesthetics and themes that have shaped the various regional cinemas of South Asia. Course materials introduce students to some of the formal elements of filmmaking and provide cultural and historical context.
ASIA 231 Bollywood Cinema (LEC)*
MoWe 5:50PM – 6:20PM
Afroz Taj
This course explores the development of the Indian cinema, with particular emphasis on the Hindi-Urdu films produced in Mumbai (Bollywood).
*Students enrolled in CMPL 143 are required to signed up for a recitation (REC) slot.
ASIA 231 Bollywood Cinema (601 REC)
TBA
Fr 9:05AM – 9:55AM
This course explores the development of the Indian cinema, with particular emphasis on the Hindi-Urdu films produced in Mumbai (Bollywood).
ASIA 231 Bollywood Cinema (602 REC)
TBA
Fr 11:15AM – 12:05PM
This course explores the development of the Indian cinema, with particular emphasis on the Hindi-Urdu films produced in Mumbai (Bollywood).
ASIA 231 Bollywood Cinema (603 REC)
TBA
Fr 12:20PM – 1:10PM
This course explores the development of the Indian cinema, with particular emphasis on the Hindi-Urdu films produced in Mumbai (Bollywood).
ASIA 425 Beyond Hostilities: Israeli-Palestinian Exchanges and Partnerships in Film, Literature, and Music*
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Yaron Shemer
Focuses on the various collaborations, exchanges, and mutual enrichment between Israelis and Palestinians in the realm of culture, particularly literature and cinema. These connections include language (Israeli Jewish authors writing in Arabic and Palestinian writers who choose Hebrew as their language of expression), collaborating in filmmaking, and joint educational initiatives.
*Combined section with JWST 425 Israeli-Palestinian Exchanges
COMM 330 Introduction to Writing for Film and Television (LEC 001)
MoWe 1:25PM – 2:40PM
Michael Acosta
An introduction to screenwriting for film and television with strong emphasis on the scene.
COMM 330 Introduction to Writing for Film and Television (LEC 002)
TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM
Robert Bowman
An introduction to screenwriting for film and television with strong emphasis on the scene.
COMM 330 Introduction to Writing for Film and Television (LEC 003)
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Nizar Wattad
An introduction to screenwriting for film and television with strong emphasis on the scene.
COMM 335 Film Story Analysis (LEC 001)*
MoWe 1:25PM – 2:40PM
Joy Goodwin
A variety of feature films (both domestic and foreign) are screened in class and analyzed from a storytelling perspective. Emphasis is on the range of possibilities the screenwriter and film director face in the process of managing the audience’s emotional involvement in a story.
*Students enrolled in COMM 335 are required to register for a recitation (REC) slot.
COMM 335 Film Story Analysis (REC 601)
We 5:05PM – 7:05PM
Joy Goodwin
A variety of feature films (both domestic and foreign) are screened in class and analyzed from a storytelling perspective. Emphasis is on the range of possibilities the screenwriter and film director face in the process of managing the audience’s emotional involvement in a story.
COMM 345 Gender and Film*
MoWe 5:00PM – 6:15PM
Sarah Bloesch,Jaclyn Olson,Kari Lindquist
This course examines the representations of women in contemporary American film and also considers women as producers of film.
*Combined section with WGST 345
GERM 255 The Twilight of the World: Ecological Crises in German Literature and Film
TuTh 9:30AM – 10:45AM
Aleksandra Prica
This seminar explores how German authors and film makers have grappled to come to terms with ecological crises from early Romanticism to the present. We will examine philosophical, literary, and cinematic investigations of natural and nuclear catastrophes, pollution, waste, mass extinction, and climate change. Students may not receive credit for both GERM 255 and GSLL 52.
GERM 880 Topics in German Cinema
We 4:40PM – 7:10PM
Inga Pollmann
Selected topics in German cinema. Topics will vary by offering.
GSLL Close your Eyes and See a Film: The Documentary in Central Europe
TuTh 2:00PM – 3:15PM
Eliza Rose
Aesthetic experiment, agit-prop tool, and instrument of social critique: documentary film is a flexible form. In the Socialist Bloc, documentary was sanctioned by the state but often used to undermine state power. This course is a survey of Polish, Czech, Yugoslav and Hungarian documentary film. We will explore studio productions alongside home movies, amateur films, and art films. Does documentary simply record reality, or can it change reality too? Readings & discussions in English.
ITAL 388 Environmental Issues in Italian Literature and Film
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Serenella Iovino
Prerequisite, ITAL 204 or permission from instructor for students lacking the prerequisite. This course examines how Italian literature and film convey relevant insights about ecological crises and planetary communities, contributing to shaping environmental imagination. Repeatable for credit. In Italian.
JWST 425 Beyond Hostilities: Israeli-Palestinian Exchanges and Partnerships in Film, Literature, and Music*
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Yaron Shemer
Focuses on the various collaborations, exchanges, and mutual enrichment between Israelis and Palestinians in the realm of culture, particularly literature and cinema. These connections include language (Israeli Jewish authors writing in Arabic and Palestinian writers who choose Hebrew as their language of expression), collaborating in filmmaking, and joint educational initiatives.
*Combined section with ASIA 525 and PWAD 425
PORT 370 Modern Brazil through Literature and Film in Translation
MoWeFr 1:25PM – 2:15PM
Richard Vernon
This course is devoted to the study of Brazilian culture and history through representative works of the late 19th- and early 20th-century literature with supplemental films. Taught in English. Available for major/minor credit in Portuguese if readings and written work are done in Portuguese.
PORT 388 Portugues, Brazilian, and African Idenity in Film
MoWeFr 12:20PM – 1:10PM
Nilzimar Vieira Hauskrecht
Study of the literary and cultural film production of the Portuguese-speaking world on three continents. Films in Portuguese with English subtitles.
PWAD 425 Beyond Hostilities: Israeli-Palestinian Exchanges and Partnerships in Film, Literature, and Music*
TuTh 11:00AM – 12:15PM
Yaron Shemer
Focuses on the various collaborations, exchanges, and mutual enrichment between Israelis and Palestinians in the realm of culture, particularly literature and cinema. These connections include language (Israeli Jewish authors writing in Arabic and Palestinian writers who choose Hebrew as their language of expression), collaborating in filmmaking, and joint educational initiatives.
*Combined section with ASIA 525 and JWST 425
RUSS 282 Russian Literature in World Cinema
TuTh 12:30PM – 1:45PM
Stanislav Shvabrin
Survey of masterpieces of Russian literature in the context of their transcultural cinematic adaptations. Lectures and readings in English.
RUSS 455 20th-Century Russian Literature and Culture
TuTh 3:30PM – 4:45PM
Stanislav Shvabrin
As Russia became a laboratory for sociopolitical experiments of global significance, its culture reflected on the most spectacular of its aspirations and failures. Course surveys 20th-century literary, musical and cinematic artifacts that emerged to affect the world profoundly. Taught in English; some readings in Russian for qualified students.
WGST 345 Gender and Film*
MoWe 5:00PM – 6:15PM
Sarah Bloesch, Jaclyn Olson,Kari Lindquist
This course examines the representations of women in contemporary American film and also considers women as producers of film.
*Combined section with COMM 345 – 001