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Pomona College

ARHI 140 PO-01: The Arts of Africa

  • Instructor: Jackson, Phyllis
    • Tuesday, 1:15- 4:00 PM
    • LE Room 110 (LeBus Court)
    • Elective or Art History

Survey exploring aesthetic, formal, cultural and national diversity of African arts and architecture. Emphasis on the social, political and religious dynamics fostering art production, iconographic themes, and aesthetic philosophies at specific historic moments in West, Central and North Africa. Critical study of Western art historical approaches and methods used to study diverse traditional African arts and post- independence cinema. Letter grade only.

ARHI 186W PO-01: Interog Whiteness: Race, Sex, Rep

  • Instructor: Jackson, Phyllis
    • Thursday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • LE Room 110 (LeBus Court)
    • Media Theory or Art History

Interdisciplinary course studying select African disaporan visual arts interrogating linguistic, conceptual, and visual solipsisms contributing to the construction and reproduction of whiteness in aesthetics, studio art, film, video, and social media. Course assignments and activities develop critical visual literacy employing a constructionist approach to the production of knowledge and cultural criticism. Students encouraged to decode and deconstruct interlocking binary oppositions, such as blackness/whiteness, female/male, propaganda/art, modernity/postmodernity, citizen/immigrant, which dominate in Euroethnic intellectual thought, our racially-gendered relations of power, representational practices, and contemporary [white] nationalist visual grammar. Letter grade only.

ART 021 PO-01: Foundations of 2D Design 

  • Instructor: Allen, Mark
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 9:35-10:50 PM
    • STAR Room 215 (Studio Arts)
    • Intro to Production

Foundations of 2D Design is a hands-on introduction to the principles of visual design.

ART 123 PO-01: Mending: Practical & Symbolic

  • Instructor: O’Malley, Michael
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 9:35-12:05 PM
    • STAR Room 206 (Studio Arts)
    • Elective

Mending is a course that engages material through the cultural lens of repairing, cobbling and honoring. Students will learn both the practical skills of mending while directing the narrative implications. The class draws on a long tradition of mending, from fixing furniture to Kintsugi and enlists material culture in cyclical rather than linear terms.

MS 049 PO-01: Intro to Media Studies

  • Instructor: Long, Andrew
    • Monday/Wednesday, 11:00-12:15 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Intro to Critical Studies

Introduction to Media Studies. Presents a comprehensive view of the issues important to media studies, including the development of new technologies, visual literacy, ideological analysis and the construction of content. Read theory, history and fiction; view films and television programs; and write research and opinion papers. Same course as SC 49.

MS 049 PO-02: Intro to Media Studies

  • Instructor: Boyer, William
    • Monday/Wednesday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 02 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Intro to Critical Studies o

Introduction to Media Studies. Presents a comprehensive view of the issues important to media studies, including the development of new technologies, visual literacy, ideological analysis and the construction of content. Read theory, history and fiction; view films and television programs; and write research and opinion papers. Same course as SC 49.

MS 051 PO-01: Intro to Digital Media Studies

  • Instructor: Esmaeli, Kouross
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 9:35-10:50 AM
    • CR Room 207 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Introduction to Critical Studies

Introduction to Digital Media Studies. An interdisciplinary introduction to the study of digital and electronic media, exploring the relationships between old and new media forms, the historical development of computer- based communication and the ways that new technologies are reshaping literature, art, journalism and the social world.

MS 072 PO-01: Representing Britain

  • Instructor: Long, Andrew
    • Monday/Wednesday, 1:15-2:30 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media History

This course is about the intertwined representation of immigration, race, and class in post-World War II Britain, a tracing which gives us insight into the present Brexit moment. Specifically, we will address how these issues were represented and understood separately and then together from the arrival of the passenger ship the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948 followed by immigration from South Asia, the Troubles of Northern Ireland, all the way to the Parliamentary Brexit vote of 2020. We will discuss and analyze films, literature, pop music, and television from this near 60-year period, though we will build towards and follow from Britain in the 1970s.

MS 085 PO-01: Dialectical Image

  • Instructor: Esmaeli, Kouross
    • Friday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 207 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

The course aims to guide students to understand the process where visual media participate in changing the world around them and to see themselves as producers of media that is part of that social change. So we will look at theories of social change and theories of visual culture. The students will be expected to experiment with the ideas they read through short media production assignments throughout the semester. The final project of the class will be a written theoretical essay where they will synthesize the theories they have learned and explain, in the form of an artist statement, the way these theories informed their media production.

MS 131 PO-01: The “Two” and Media

  • Instructor: Engley, Ryan
    • Monday/Wednesday, 11:00-12:15 PM
    • CR Room 02 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

This course focuses on theoretical questions regarding the “two”: the social tie, friendship, confession, and the relationship between the individual subject and the group. This class will ground its inquiry in the fundamental question: what do we make of the encounter between the one and an(other)? To answer this, we will examine a challenging set of philosophical texts and a range of media that revolve around the intersubjective relation (or non-relation) of two central characters or figures. Objects of study will include Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series Fleabag, Season 1 of Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial and Fumito Ueda’s classic minimalist video game Icon. Letter grade only. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO or MS 050 PO or MS 051 PO or MS 092 PO or equivalents.

MS 148D PO-01: Powers of Pleasure

  • Instructor: Friedlander, Jennifer
    • Friday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

This course interrogates John Fiske’s contention that “pleasure may be the bait on the hook of hegemony, but it is always more than this; it always involves an element that escapes the system of power.” With this claim in mind, we will: 1) evaluate key arguments in the field regarding pleasure’s complicity with dominant ideological frameworks–particularly with regard to normative views of gender, race, class and sexuality; 2) consider ways in which the critique of pleasure itself may collude with patriarchal, racist, clasist and heteronormative systems of thought; and 3) explore the possibilities for pleasure to undermine established systems of power. Letter grade only. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, and MS 051 PO.

MS 149G PO-01: Theory & Aesthetics- Television

  • Instructor: Engley, Ryan
    • Monday/Wednesday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

This advanced Media Studies course deepens the study of television from an aesthetic, theoretical, and critical perspective. Students will learn a number of terms, theoretical concepts and methodological approaches to critically evaluate and analyze television texts. This course will build on the concepts taught in MS092 by expanding inquiry into studies of industry and technology, narrative and form, and audiences and social reception. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO and MS 092.

MS 149T PO-01: Seminar: Critical Studies- Core Theories in Media Studies

  • Instructor: Friedlander, Jennifer
    • Tuesday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

An overview of core traditions in Critical Media Studies through in-depth engagement with key texts. This course serves as preparation for the Senior Seminar by consolidating a foundation in critical theory. Areas of focus include the following: The Frankfurt School, The Chicago School, Pragmatism, Structuralism and Post- Structuralism, Semiotics, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Psychoanalytical Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Critical Race Theory. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO, and one upper level theory class (MS 147 PO – MS 149 PO). May be repeated once for credit.

MS 153 PO-01: The Original Television Series

  • Instructor: Klioutchkine, Konstantine
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • MA Room 5 (Mason Hall)
    • Media History

The Original Television Series from “The Sopranos” to “Mad Men.”. The course examines the original television series, a prominent development in U.S. television and, more broadly, in American culture during the last decade. We discuss representative texts in this genre, among them The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, and examine the genre’s distinctive features. We also look at how television series engage with American culture. Prerequisite: One of the following: 49, 50, 51, 91.

MS 175 PO-01: “Horror” and The American Horror

  • Instructor: Wynter, Kevin
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 10 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

Of all the film genres that partition and divide the products of American cinema, the horror genre has proven to be the most durable and the most easily adaptable to the shifting historical circumstances and socio-political anxieties to which it runs parallel. This course examines some of the key factors that have contributed to the horror genres capacity to maintain its continued viability in popular culture across a wide range of media including graphic novels, video art, and interactive gaming. Beginning with the modern period of the American horror film and then expanding beyond its physical and ideological borders, this course is designed to encourage students to challenge the ideas that have become associated with the term “horror,” and to consider whether some other term or terms may be better suited to describe the types of feelings horror films and its related forms of media actually inspire. We will consider some of the following questions: What is horror? Do horror genre films truly inspire horror or are we, as participants, moved by some other affect or response? Is it possible to locate cinematic representations of horror and its experience outside of the horror genre? Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, or MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO or equivalent. Letter grade only.

MS 183 PO-01: Cinema and AI

  • Instructor: Wynter, Kevin
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • Thursday, 7:00-10 PM
    • CR Room 10 (Crookshank Hall)

This course provides students with a survey of representations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Hollywood cinema and beyond. Through close engagement with select films supported by weekly readings, we will explore the emergence of AI in the context of narrative cinema and examine the evolving dynamics between humans and machine intelligence on screen from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to present day films like The Creator and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. As we track the development of AI across film history, we will ask why dystopic themes and the threat of human annihilation or replacement tend to recur in AI related films. How does the role of AI shift in narrative cinema as technological advancements in machine learning develop? How do relationships between AI and humans change across genres? How has Hollywood envisioned, and continues to envision, a future where AI is integral to everyday life? In this course, students will be asked to utilize AI and machine learning programs throughout the semester to engage with the questions raised in class.

MUS 096B PO-01: Electronic Media Studio

  • Instructor: Flaherty, Thomas
    • Monday/Wednesday, 1:15-2:30 PM
    • Music Studio (Thatcher Music Building)
    • Elective

Laboratory course designed to continue developing electronic compositions using techniques of analog and digital synthesis. Permission of instructor required. Prerequisite: MUS 096A PO.

SPAN 106 PO-01: Images of Latin America

  • Instructor: Montenegro, Nivia
    • Monday/Wednesday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • MA Room 04 (Mason Hall)
    • Elective

Images of Latin America in Fiction and Film. Explores the construction and dissemination of predominant images of Latin America through topics such as women, family, sexuality, religion and violence. A close examination of both narrative and film. Emphasis on the development of oral and writing skills, including oral presentations. Prerequisite: 44 or 50.

THEA 001A PO-01: Basic Acting: Tools & Fundamentals

  • Instructor: Ratteray, Carolyn
    • Monday/Wednesday, 10:00-12:30 PM
    • Room 122, Seaver Theater
    • Elective

Basic Acting: Tools & Fundamentals. This introductory course explores the fundamentals of voice, movement, relaxation, text analysis, characterization and sensory and emotional-awareness exercises. Course material includes detailed analysis, preparation and performance of scenes.

THEA 001A PO-02: Basic Acting: Tools & Fundamentals

  • Instructor: Knox, Jill
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 1:15-3:45 PM
    • Room 122, Seaver Theater
    • Elective

Basic Acting: Tools & Fundamentals. This introductory course explores the fundamentals of voice, movement, relaxation, text analysis, characterization and sensory and emotional-awareness exercises. Course material includes detailed analysis, preparation and performance of scenes.

THEA 001A PO-01: Basic Acting: Tools & Fundamentals

  • Instructor: Staff TBD
    • Monday/Wednesday, 10:00-12:30 PM
    • Room 120, Seaver Theater
    • Elective

Basic Acting: Tools & Fundamentals. This introductory course explores the fundamentals of voice, movement, relaxation, text analysis, characterization and sensory and emotional-awareness exercises. Course material includes detailed analysis, preparation and performance of scenes.

THEA 002 PO-01: Intro to Theatrical Design

  • Instructor: Bransky, Amelia
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 9:35-10:50 AM
    • Room 200, Seaver Theater
    • Elective

This course is an introduction to the design process for a wide range of performance-based productions including theatre, dance, opera, and film. Readings, discussions, and writing are supplemented by creative projects, interviews with Designers in each field and attendance at live performances when possible.

THEA 012 PO-01: Intermediate Acting

  • Instructor: Klein, Talya
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 1:15-3:45 PM
    • Room 120, Seaver Theater
    • Elective

This course continues the investigation of the tools and techniques explored in the Beginning Acting class. Students will delve into scene study, improvisation, and Stanislavski-based analysis techniques as well as deepen the connection between the truth of their emotional life and how it is expressed vocally and physically. May be repeated twice for credit. Letter grade only. Prerequisites: THEA 001A PO or THEA 001G PO.