College of Arts and Sciences

Communication

Advanced Topics in Communication:
The Political and Cultural Rhetoric of the 1960s

Kirt Wilson
Professor of Rhetoric
Pennsylvania State University

COMM 4000, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 12020
COMM 4300, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 12021
Session A: June 3–July 5, 2013
Examines the major controversies, political discourse, and cultural phenomena of the 1960s. Its purpose is to understand not just the historical events of that period but also how the rhetoric of the decade shaped a generation and America’s culture and politics. By focusing on the public discourse that surrounded events such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, the Vietnam War and anti-war protests, the New Left and Feminism, this class seeks to uncover the complex dynamics of a decade that forever altered U.S. public life. Reviews current theory and research on topics such as rhetoric and publics, rhetoric as an interpretive social science, and rhetoric of social movements and political campaigns. May be taken twice for credit on different topics. Prereq., COMM 3300.

Professor Wilson is a rhetorical critic and theorist. He has taught courses on African American civil rights discourse, argument theory, and U.S. public address. He has received numerous awards for his research, publications, and teaching. He received the McKnight Presidential Fellow (University of Minnesota) and the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric.

English

Later Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Performance

Harry Berger, Jr.
Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History
Fellow of Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz

ENGL 3573, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 17993
Session A:  June 3–July 5, 2013
Focuses on Shakespeare the dramatist, who wrote for live performance, with special attention on the three Shakespearean plays to be produced by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. In addition to exploring the text, the historical context, and performance conventions c. 1600, students will meet with the CSF teams (professional directors, dramaturgs, designers, and actors), and have the opportunity to see the plays in rehearsal.

Harry Berger, Jr., a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is one of the most celebrated and influential living scholars and teachers of Renaissance literature and art. He has produced 12 books with two more in press. He is an award-winning teacher of several generations of students.

Survey of Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory:
Technologies of Writing

Tim Armstrong
Professor of Modern Literature
University of London

ENGL 5019, 3 semester hours, Section 200, Class No. 17683
Session B: July 9–August 9, 2013
An advanced introduction to the consideration of two interrelated fields of research: the relationship between literature and technologies of communication, and literature considered as technology or media. Students will examine and critically appraise the work of a number of media theorists and apply those ideas to selected literary texts in the period of literary modernity and postmodernism. Students will investigate the way in which ideas about modern technology influence conceptualizations of the mind, subjectivity, and communication. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours.

Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. In his early life in New Zealand, he worked as an abalone diver and as a diplomat. He has taught at University College, London, where he did his doctoral work. He is a committed teacher and a significant scholar in his field.

Studies in Special Topics:
The Graphic Self–Telling Lives in Words and Pictures

Charles Hatfield
Associate Professor of English
California State University, Northridge

ENGL 5529, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 17684
Session A: June 3–July 5, 2013
Comics blur cultural boundaries even as they mix words and images, challenging the borders between low and high culture; popular and avant-garde art; mass appeal and the handmade power of zines, graffiti, and other homegrown media. This class introduces graduate students to the study and teaching of, and the process of working in, this lively art form. The class will focus on three areas: the analysis of the comics form; the history and criticism of autobiographical and other fact-based comics; and the students’ own use of comics to tell their personal stories. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours. Same as ENGL 5549 and 5559.

Charles Hatfield, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, is the author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby; Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature; and numerous articles. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming titles: The Superhero Reader and The Cambridge Companion to Comics. He serves on the executive committee of the Modern Language Association’s Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives as well as the editorial boards for several comics’ studies journals.

Film Studies

Topics in Film Studies-Critical Studies:
Serial Television

Linda Williams
Professor of Film and Media Studies and Rhetoric
University of California, Berkeley

FILM 4043, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 17290
ARTF 5043, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 17291
Session A: June 3–July 5, 2013
What it is about the long form of televisual serial drama that has so hooked viewers, causing some of them, like the great avant-garde filmmaker, Chris Marker, to claim that television is the place to feed our “hunger for fiction.” Why has this serialized form, once located in lowly soaps, become the most complex and interesting aspect of television? Our primary case study will be the five complete seasons of David Simon’s The Wire. The Wire will constitute the course’s primary case study, with readings including Jennifer Haywood’s Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera; Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine’s Legitimating Television; Jason Mittell’s Complex Television; and Potter and Marshall’s The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. This course prepares students for advanced Film Studies critical studies courses. Subject matter varies each semester. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours, provided the topics are different.

Linda Williams received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969, and her PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1977. The author of five books and more than two dozen essays on themes as diverse as surrealist film theory, pornography, and serial television, Dr. Williams is one of the most highly regarded and most cited scholars on feminist film theory, genre theory, and theories of pornography.

Political Science

Problems in International Relations

Dario Battistella
Professor
Institut d’Etudes Plitiques de Bordeaux, France

◆PSCI 3143, 3 semester hours, Section 200, Class No. 10695
Session B: July 9–August 9, 2013
Analyzes the various theoretical and policy challenges facing the post-Cold War world while examining alternative conceptions of and approaches to such challenges. Given current events in Europe regarding both military and financial issues, students will explore alternative viewpoints. Prereq., PSCI 2223. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: contemporary societies.

Professor Battistella is a specialist in international relations. He has published widely on international relations topics. His interest is in democratic peace, a theory that claims democracies tend to be more peaceful in their foreign relations, and the return of the war state. His most recent book, The Return of the State of War, is a theoretical analysis of Iraqi Freedom. This is his second visit as a FIRST scholar.

Psychology

This course has been cancelled.

Special Topics in Psychology: Internet Research

Ulf-Dietrich Reips
Ikerbasque Research Professor
Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain

PSYC 4541, 3 semester hours, Section 002, Class No. 14559
PSYC 5541, 3 semester hours, Section 002, Class No. 14558
Session M (Maymester): May 13–31, 2013
Introduces the methodology of Internet-based research. Students will be provided with an up-to-date overview of basics, methods, techniques, tricks, and tools for Internet research. Students will learn how to conduct online experiments, use psychological tests on the Internet, and data mine search engines like Google. May be repeated up to 6 total credit hours, provided the topics vary.

Dr. Ulf-Dietrich Reips is a Research Professor at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, where he leads the iScience group (http://iscience.deusto.es). He is working on Internet-based research methodologies and the psychology of the Internet. In 1994 he founded the Web Experimental Psychology Lab, the first laboratory for conducting real experiments on the Web, and provides many web services for researchers and students via his iScience Server at www.iscience.eu. He has taught in several European countries as well as in the United States. When not on the Internet, he enjoys playing boules. This is his second summer as a FIRST scholar.

Religious Studies

Topics in Religious Studies: Disney to Avatar:
Nature, Spirituality, and Popular Culture

Bron Taylor
Professor of Religion and Environmental Ethics
University of Florida

RLST 3820, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 14454
Session A: June 3–July 5, 2013
Focusing on the period since Walt Disney began making animal-focused documentaries and animated films in the 1930s, up through the blockbuster motion picture Avatar (2009), this course examines religious, spiritual, and political dimensions of artistic productions, scientific representations in museums, and other cultural inventions (such as theme parks), in which nature takes center stage. The class will explore the cultural tributaries, influences, and controversies such productions engender, for they are an important way that environmental ethics, and the quest for environmentally sustainable livelihoods and lifeways, are expressed and promoted. The course will enhance students’ ability to interpret these cultural productions and their evocative power, and to explore their reactions to these social phenomena. This course provides intensive study of a selected area or problem in religious studies. May be repeated up to 9 total credit hours as topics change.

Bron Taylor is Professor of Religion and Environmental Ethics at the University of Florida, and a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. His research focuses on the emotional and spiritual dimensions of environmental movements, and he has led and participated in a variety of international initiatives promoting the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. His books include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010)) and the award-winning Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005). He is also the founder of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, and editor of its affiliated Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.

Sociology

Sociological Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
Professor
American University

SOCY 3161, 3 semester hours, Section 001, Class No. 17674
Session M (Maymester): May 13-31, 2013
As a general overview of what constitutes race and ethnicity in the U.S., the course will familiarize students with the basic premise of social analyses of distinctive racial and ethnic groups. The class will discuss some of the current understandings of race; explore the continuous role immigration plays in redefining social and ethnic categories; and begin to notice how whiteness studies have emerged. Recommended prereq., SOCY 1001.

Professor Vidal-Ortiz is currently at American University. He has received many awards for his research, including a Fulbright Scholarship in Bogotá to study sexuality, race, and migration. He has been a pioneer and leading figure in the teaching of gender, sexuality, and migration. He is an excellent classroom teacher. This is his second summer as a FIRST scholar.

Theatre

Introduction to Theatre

Jane Page
Professional Director
Assistant Professor and Head of the Directing Program
University of California, Irvine

◆THTR 1009, 3 semester hours, Section 100, Class No. 17169
Session A: June 3–July 5, 2013
A unique opportunity to take a class taught by a master director. Students will have the added advantage of a “window” into the workings of a professional theatre company and will attend Colorado Shakespeare Festival rehearsals and hear from guest speakers who are artists working for the CSF. This class introduces the varieties of theatrical art, past and present, contributions of the various theatrical artists to the total production, and the place of theatre art in today's society. Designed for nonmajors. Approved for arts and sciences core curriculum: literature and the arts.

Jane Page is a professional director whose work is well known across the U.S. and abroad. After a long career as a freelance director, she recently assumed a position at University of California, Irvine as Assistant Professor and Head of the Directing Program. She will direct Macbeth for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 2013.

◆=Arts and Sciences Core course