Graduate Courses Open to Undergraduate Students

Through studying life-history narratives (one person’s life as narrated to another), autobiographical memoir, archival documents, and more experimental forms in print and on screen, we will explore the diverse ways that life courses are experienced and represented. Throughout our readings, we will carefully examine the narratives themselves, paying attention to the techniques of life-history construction and familiarizing ourselves with ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges. We will consider a number of questions about telling lives: What is the relationship between the narrator and his or her interlocutor(s)? How does a life-history approach inform debates about representation? What can the account of one person’s life tell us about the wider culture of which he or she is a part? How can individual life narratives shed light on issues such as poverty, sexuality, colonialism, disability, racism, and aging? The selected texts attend to lives in various parts of the world, including Australia, Great Britain, the Caribbean, East Africa, and the United States. Students will also analyze primary sources and create a life history as part of their work for the course.

In her study of transnational adoptees, Eleana Kim noted differences in the ways Americans talk about the immigration of Chinese brides to the United States on the one hand and those describing the arrival of adopted Chinese baby girls on the other: the former with suspicion and the latter with joy. We tend to assume that family-building involves deeply personal, intimate, and even “natural” acts; but, in actual practice, the pragmatics of forming (and disbanding) families are much more complex. There are many instances where biological pregnancy is not possible or not chosen, and there are biological parents who are unable to rear their offspring. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups, depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. Western notions of marriage prioritize compatibility between two individuals who choose each other based on love; but, in many parts of the world, selecting a suitable spouse and contracting a marriage is the business of entire kin networks. There is great variability, too, in what constitutes “suitable.” To marry a close relative or someone of the same gender may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies; but marriage across great difference—such as age, race, nation, culture, or class—can also be problematic. And beyond the intimacies of couples and the interests of extended kin are the interests of the nation-state. This class, then, examines the makings and meanings of kinship connections at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Our examples will include materials on Korea, China, India, Italy, Ghana, the US, and the UK.

This seminar will look at Italian art in the 15th and 16th centuries to reflect on the complex relationship of art and politics, poised between patronage and imposition, artistic autonomy and subservience, worldly interests and spiritual preoccupations. Within the larger picture of Renaissance Italian art and its chronological development, we will investigate specific artistic episodes against the backdrop of political motivations and ideological tensions of both patrons and artists. We will focus on selected artworks to discover messages and meanings embedded in their style and iconography and to understand how art objects were used to promote specific ideologies and leaders but also as tools to negotiate with God and the divine power— invoking favor and, occasionally, giving thanks. This course will involve one field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Preserving monuments and collecting old artifacts is an important characteristic of complex societies since their inception. Collecting antiquities and investigating the past was a crucial aspect of Medieval and Renaissance European culture. In the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, collecting and studying the material legacy of the Christian past became an important component of European antiquarianism. This seminar class will explore practices of antiquarianism from the Medieval world to the modern era, with a main focus on Renaissance and post-Reformation European culture. We will examine changing motivations behind the preservation and collection of the old, as well as different types of collections. The creation of museums of ancient objects in the West in the 19th century will also receive attention, along with the problematic relationship between museums and European colonialism. A conversation with an expert on the contemporary crisis of antiquities in the Middle East and on what can be done to protect and preserve endangered archeological sites and objects in the area will end this course.

Art of Teaching Graduate Seminar, taken in our students’ final semester, is designed to support the integration and synthesis of students’ inquiry into teaching and learning, conducted throughout their time in the graduate program, as they prepare to enter their own classrooms. Students will make connections and reflect across their experiences in Field Work, Student-Teaching, and other coursework. They will gain further insight into various areas of content, pedagogy, and professional topics in the field of education. The course is conducted in collaboration with our Early Childhood Center faculty and staff and offers the students additional opportunities to learn from them through hands-on, reflective workshops on a variety of topics in Early Childhood and Childhood Education. In addition, Sarah Lawrence College faculty, Art of Teaching alumni and other guest speakers will lead sessions on topics within particular content-area disciplines. Students will also use the course as a primary space for collaboration and feedback (in addition to individual advising) on the development and preparation of their Masters Oral Thesis presentations.

This course emphasizes the role of children’s literature in classrooms and schools. We look at story as world-making; as an opportunity to encounter the experience of others; as a window on play, place, and period; as a reflection of cultural heritage; and, finally, as a motivation for literacy. Readings pair picture books and novels with nonfiction texts. There will be samples of simple narratives for the emerging reader and novels for fluent elementary-school students. The place of literature in the classroom involves careful choices on the part of teachers, who must support the interests and heritage of young readers, intrigue them through pictures and text, and eventually lead them to discover new worlds within the covers of books. Throughout the course, we will consider the importance of reading aloud (both fiction and nonfiction) and the ways in which stories inspire artistic expression.

How do varying childhood experiences impact children’s mental health and wellbeing? What happens when the course of development is affected by trauma or depression? This seminar will focus on challenges that arise in child and adolescent development, drawing upon approaches in clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and cultural psychology/clinical ethnography. We will analyze how particular psychological experiences and behaviors have been typically understood as abnormal or pathological and how they are intertwined with the experience of child development. We will also explore how these challenges are diagnosed, as well as critical commentaries on clinical diagnosis and treatment in order to analyze the merits and drawbacks of the common approaches to these issues. Students will learn about the clinical categories of conditions such as ADHD, autism, depression, and anxiety, as compiled in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), as well as how these disorders are assessed and treated in clinical and educational settings. We will look at case examples to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of such psychological conditions in childhood and adolescence. Through readings and course discussion, students will be invited to question the universal applicability of Western clinical approaches that rest on particular assumptions about normality, behavior, social relations, human rights, and health. We will also explore how diagnostic processes and psychological and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to the client’s race/ethnicity, class, and gender and how clinicians might effectively address such disparities in diagnosis and care. Students will complete conference projects related to the central themes of our course and may opt to work at the Early Childhood Center or a local community program that serves children or adolescents.

This small seminar will explore several early-intervention approaches for young children and their families, with a particular emphasis on the theory and technique of play therapy. While this course will focus mostly on child-centered play therapy (CCPT), we will also look at the methodology of other types of approaches, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and DIR/Floortime. In addition, course material will highlight cultural considerations, therapeutic work with parents and caregivers, challenges in therapeutic treatment, self-reflection, self-regulation, and interoception. Readings, class discussions, group play-based activities, and video illustrations will provide students with both a theoretical and introductory clinical basis for play-based therapeutic work with young children in early intervention.

This course surveys the historical, social, cultural, political, economic, and philosophical foundations of education, with an emphasis on the role of American education in an interdependent world and the multicultural character of American classrooms. Implications for addressing the inherent inequities in urban education are stressed. This foundational course will examine urban education from the perspectives of what it means to teach in urban environments, issues that impact urban schools, policies and practices that influence teaching, families and urban communities, and classroom management. It will focus on a broad interdisciplinary view of school as an educational institution and its relationship with urban society and communities. Sociological and philosophical views are used to examine how history, race, class, politics, and media have influenced the structure and function of urban education systems. Students will be challenged to critically reflect on how their schooling experience, sociocultural identity, and philosophical beliefs regarding urban education might impact their success in urban settings and their pedagogical approaches. 

This course explores how people develop, influence, and shape their social settings–families, communities, and educational institutions in childhood and adolescence. We will focus on theories of individual and family development; the local and global dynamics of learning; and cognition and social relations across culture and society. Physical health, adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and learning are intertwined in the context of the child’s social, emotional, intellectual, and physical development, and affect children’s learning and development. We will also examine the development of multiple identities (racial/ethnic, gender, social class) in young children. This interdisciplinary focus draws from current theory, research, and practice from areas as diverse as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies, among other disciplines. This class is appropriate for those interested in child development, early childhood and elementary education, special education and/or adolescent development and secondary education.

Inclusive Emergent Curriculum and Responsive Environments is a semester-long course in which children’s interests and approaches to learning are at the forefront. Central to the course is understanding how to create curriculum that is driven by ideas - striving for wholeness, integration, coherence, meaning – and focused on assisting children in applying knowledge and thinking to real-life problems. During the semester, we will focus on curriculum development, planning, and multiple strategies for teaching diverse students within the full range of abilities. We will learn how to develop curricula that are culturally, emotionally, and developmentally responsive with multiple entry points that are inclusive of all students' strengths and interests. We will explore teaching methods that expand children’s knowledge and modes of thinking and learning along with strategies to respond to the unique needs of all children. We will discuss how children’s interests and questions connect to the large ideas and questions at the core of the subject matter disciplines using the Understanding by Design framework. You will learn effective practices for individualizing instruction and creating safe, positive and collaborative learning environments. We will focus on how to create responsive classroom communities in which the full spectrum of children are positively seen, included and supported. We will incorporate the tenets of Universal Design for Learning in order to honor our students' individual strengths and interests and provide multiple means for engagement, representation, and expression. Classroom design and organization, media and materials, and approaches to teaching and learning across disciplines will be discussed. Value will be placed on enabling in-depth inquiry, experimentation and discovery, and on establishing inclusive classroom communities based on collaborative learning. New York State Standards for the Arts, Social Studies, and Sciences will be examined, critiqued, and integrated into our work. We will also explore how to integrate assistive technology and technology for instruction in order to develop students skills in acquiring information, communicating, and enhancing learning. We will discuss curriculum and teaching strategies for individual subject areas, with an emphasis on the connections among disciplines, building toward an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum and instruction. The roles of the teacher as observer, provisioner, collaborator and facilitator will be discussed. During the semester, we will engage in hands-on inquiry in workshop settings, reflecting on our own learning and that of our peers. Implications will be drawn forward regarding the teacher’s role in accommodating different approaches to learning.

This two-semester course focuses on the making of meaning and knowledge through listening, speaking, reading, and writing in early childhood and childhood. All children—English speakers and English-language learners—are recognized as capable of learning and of becoming competent English-language and -literacy users. Emphasis is on teaching that takes into account each child’s approach to learning and pace in learning, valuing the complexity in developing instruction that builds upon what the child already knows and can do.

• Learning is a process by which each person actively constructs meaning from experience, including encounters with print and nonprint texts.
• Language and literacy are social acts.
• Language and literacy develop in the pursuit of real-life enterprise.
• Reading and writing, as with spoken language, are best learned in rich, interactive environments where they serve real purposes.
• Reading and writing do not develop in predefined stages; rather, literacy understanding is complex and unique to the individual.
• Language and literacy cannot be separated from the total expressiveness of the person.
• Literacy is power, and children must have every opportunity to know its power.
• Literacy teaching and learning must be re-envisioned to accommodate a multimodal, multilingual, multimedia world.

We will build our knowledge of language and literacy learning upon these assumptions by reflecting on ourselves as readers, writers, and language users. We will explore how children learn to read and write by observing them as they use language and literacy for real purposes. We will consider new media and technologies as modes of communication and expression and consider how they are reshaping the future of literacy. Our observations of children and our own literacy stories will help us understand the range and complexity of meanings and approaches among any group of learners. Our observations and recollections also will provide an entry point for discussions regarding differences in race, class, ethnicity, gender, and learning style. The challenge for schools to be inclusive of the diversity—to enable each child to differ, yet belong to the community of learners—lies at the core of our work. We will—through our child studies, our recollections, and the readings—begin to develop a picture of inclusive classrooms and schools in which children have the “space to dance with others” and the “room to differ” (Patricia F. Carini). The course paper will be an in-depth inquiry focused on language and literacy teaching and learning and on classroom practice and work with children, as examined through the lens of your own philosophy, thought, values, and standards.

This course will place strong emphasis on students’ own understanding of mathematics as directly related to the mathematics that they will be teaching in early-childhood and elementary-school classrooms. The course will focus on core concepts of mathematics teaching and learning: the science of patterns and number relationships. Patterns and functions will serve as the lenses through which students will examine connections and applications of the topics to the early-childhood and childhood school curricula. Students will develop understandings of the content, concepts, computation, and teaching and learning strategies of mathematics in schools. Emphasis will be placed on constructivist teaching and learning; inquiry-based learning; problem solving; and mathematical reasoning, connections, and communication. Students will be exposed to techniques in differentiating instruction that addresses learning differences and the special needs of English-language learners, as well as ways to identify tasks that challenge and augment mathematical understandings. The use of technology as an integral support for the understanding and application of mathematics will also be a focus of the course. Each class session will provide students with opportunities to engage in authentic mathematical activities, followed by sharing those experiences and ways to implement similar, engaging mathematical tasks in classrooms. As part of their conference work, students will create a concept teaching game and a presentation of the solutions to complex problems.

All children have strengths and vulnerabilities. Children have areas where they excel and areas where they feel insecure. There are times when learning is difficult; however, all children have the capacity to be creative and to learn. Understanding the individual differences of an entire class of students is a challenge. To plan and to meet the needs of the children in each classroom, we must understand what each child knows and how they learn. By carefully observing children in a variety of environments, teachers can develop responsive tools and experiences that further support each child’s development. This course will introduce students to topics related to advocacy and education of children with disabilities. We will learn about history, laws, classifications, approaches, policies and systems put in place to provide education for children with special needs. We will examine and discuss special education and its effect on the child, the classroom and school, families, and community. We will explore the concepts of inclusion, special needs diagnostic categories, designing curriculum that is responsive to children, differentiating curriculum to support skill development; keeping in mind that each child is unique. The goals of the course are to integrate our perspective of children’s individual needs while planning classroom inquiry; to explore ways of working with parents of children who require special support; to understand how to access support and feedback for children that require additional assistance; to consider implications for teaching in an inclusive classroom, school.

In the Art of Teaching and Child Development programs, we place the observation and documentation of children and their learning at the center of our work with them. The emphasis is on seeing every child as capable, unique, and knowable and on children as active makers of their own meaning and knowledge. Observing is focused on what the child can do and is interested in and on how each child thinks and learns. We assume that practitioners create their own knowledge through longitudinal observation and documentation of each child as a thinker and learner. This knowledge is the foundation for our responsive practice with them in the full range of settings as well as for curriculum development and instructional planning that accommodate individual interests and approaches to learning. The ideas and processes developed at Prospect Archive and Center for Education and Research, by Patricia Carini and others, will be the foundation of the work throughout the course. The Prospect Descriptive Processes and, in particular, the Descriptive Review of the Child will give students a formal and systematic framework for drawing together their observations of children over time. In addition, the review processes developed at Prospect Center will be discussed as avenues for collaborative inquiry and meaning-making among practitioners and families. Students will participate in a Descriptive Review and will review longitudinal collections of children’s work. They will also learn about descriptive inquiry processes for reviewing curricula and teaching practice. Students will share observations of children in both early childhood and childhood education settings and develop a language of description. We will discuss the importance of creating spaces for children where each child is visible through strength. Students will develop a child study that includes: a description of the child using the headings of the Descriptive Review, a collection of the child’s work, and reflections on the implications that the longitudinal documentation of the child holds for teaching and working with the child.

Practicum is designed to support and assist future teachers in preparing to begin working in their own classrooms. The course will provide students with resources, feedback, and the encouragement of others facing similar challenges. In our work we will seek, among other things, to gain insight into the processes and challenges of learning and teaching, both by drawing on the wisdom of those who have examined it critically and by reflecting on experience and practice in student-teaching and field work. In sum, the goal is for us all to become better “reflective practitioners” and to (re)design our teaching in response to those reflections. We will consider different approaches to teaching and pedagogic practices and explore what these might tell us about the implicit and explicit philosophies of learning exhibited in classrooms today. We will establish and clarify personal teaching values. We will hone skills and practices in the areas of class preparation and presentation; the development and assessment of curriculum; and the challenges of dealing with the contemporary, diverse student body. Other topics of importance in the course are the creation of opportunities and processes for collaboration among teachers, parents, and administrators and the development of strategies to reflect on, renew, and revise teaching with an emphasis on the importance of professional development. The roles of the family, school, and community in educating children are explored, as well as current philosophies and the climate regarding home, school, and community relationships. Overall, a primary goal is to help equip the Art of Teaching students to tackle the demands of the classroom and the needs of diverse learners. The class also aims to help students develop professional skills and burnish their teaching credentials as they consider applying for jobs. With this in mind, the class will concurrently work on the design of a teaching portfolio to submit with job applications.

What is development, and how does it occur across different children, contexts, and time periods? Does development proceed in the same manner for all children, or are there variations as a result of biological, environmental, and/or cultural differences? Are there some aspects of development that are universal, such as walking, and others that vary across children, such as talking? How might we test these questions, when the contexts in which we live influence the questions we ask about development, and the ways in which we interpret our observations?

The primary objective of this course is to learn to use developmental theory to understand the mechanisms by which developmental change occurs. We will additionally focus on the usefulness of observation and research in testing theory, as well as the usefulness of theory in structuring our observations and other forms of research with children. To do so, we will discuss several key classic and contemporary theories of development that have influenced, and/or are especially relevant to, early childhood and childhood education practice. Theories discussed will include psychoanalytic and psychosocial approaches; evolutionary and ethological approaches; cognitive-developmental approaches; information processing, dynamic systems and developmental cognitive neuroscience approaches; social, cultural and historical approaches; and cultural-ecological, bioecological, developmental systems and other holistic approaches. As we study each theory, we will focus on the kinds of questions each theory asks and the “image of the child” each puts forth. Recent challenges within the field have highlighted specific conceptual problems, which we will address. Are patterns of development universal or culture-specific? Can childhood experiences be thought of as proceeding in a series of stages? How do we construct methods for studying children that will recognize and validate the significance of differing social and cultural experiences? How can we forge a multicultural view of development such that development is understood in terms of how it is experienced within a given cultural context? As we discuss these questions, we will continually focus on the integration of theory and practice through reflections on field experiences in early childhood and/or elementary classrooms. Required papers will reflect this integration.

In 1900, China was a faltering empire ruled by an autocratic foreign dynastic house and an entrenched bureaucracy of Confucian officials. Its sovereignty heavily battered and its territory compromised by foreign powers, China was commonly called “The Sick Man of Asia.” In 2000, China was a modern nation-state ruled by an authoritarian party and an entrenched bureaucracy of technocrats and administrators. With a surging economy, swollen foreign reserves, dazzling modern cities, and a large and technologically advanced military, China is regularly predicted to be the next global superpower. Yet, the path between these two startlingly different points was anything but smooth. China’s 20th century was a tortuous one. Policymakers, elites, and the common people oscillated between the poles of reform and revolution—bouts of wild radicalism alternated with more sober policies—as they pursued changes that they hoped would bring a better society and nation. This class examines some of the major events and personalities of this arduous century and its momentous political, social, and cultural changes. We will learn and apply skills of historical analysis to primary documents (in translation), some fiction, and film. Along the way, we will encounter a rich cast of characters, including Sun Yatsen, China’s “national father”; colorful warlords; corrupt bureaucrats; fervent intellectuals; protesting youths; heroic communist martyrs; the towering and enigmatic chairman Mao; long-suffering peasants; and fanatical Red Guards. These men and women made and remade modern China. This class is history and, thus, is not primarily concerned with contemporary China; but by the end of the year, students will be well-equipped with an understanding of China’s recent past, knowledge that will help immeasurably in making sense of today’s China as it becomes increasingly important in our globalized economy and society. This seminar is open to first-year students as a First-Year Studies course, as well as to sophomores, juniors, and seniors as an open seminar. All students will complete an individual research (conference) project each semester; these projects will be guided through one-on-one meetings. For those taking this class as an FYS, conferences in the fall semester will consist of biweekly individual meetings, with a group session held on alternate weeks to discuss matters concerning all FYS students (e.g., the nature of academic work in general and the various skills related to conference work, such as research, reading, writing, and editing). All conferences in the spring, for all students, will be on the regular biweekly individual schedule.

Welcome to an exploratory journey into the heart of conservation science and practice. This course is designed to introduce students to the foundational concepts, critical thinking, methodologies, and ecological principles essential to conservation science, as we foster a profound respect for all forms of life and the ecosystems they inhabit. Through a non-anthropocentric lens, we will interrogate various conservation paradigms and explore innovative strategies that prioritize the intrinsic value of nature. Students will develop critical-thinking skills to evaluate conservation strategies and practices, recognizing the complex interdependencies between humans and the natural world. This course combines “soft” lectures, interactive discussions, case study analyses, and hands-on projects to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. Students will gain knowledge of practical methods and tools used in conservation science, including fieldwork techniques, data analyses, policy assessment, and ecological models. Students are encouraged to critically engage with the material, participate in debates on controversial topics, and collaborate on projects that propose innovative solutions to real-world conservation challenges. This course is ideal for undergraduates with a general interest in conservation and those interested in environmental science, biology, ecology, and related fields, who seek a deeper understanding of conservation science and are open to challenging traditional viewpoints to explore more inclusive and ethical approaches to conserving our planet.

Addiction is a significant problem facing our modern society. According to the World Health Organization, 2.6 million deaths a year are attributed to alcohol abuse alone, with another 0.6 million attributed to psychoactive drug use. In this course, we will explore the problem of addiction from a neuroscience perspective. We will study the brain’s learning and reward pathways and how addictive substances hijack these pathways for addiction to take place. We will discuss similarities and differences between different addictive substances, ranging from cocaine to highly palatable food, and how they affect the brain. We will also discuss the behavioral characteristics of addiction. We will learn about how the DSM 5 (the current psychological diagnosis handbook) defines addiction. We will learn about craving and withdrawal from addictive substances and what takes place within the brain during these events. Our primary texts for this course will be The Neuroscience of Addiction by Francesca Mapua Filby, along with significant readings from peer-reviewed scientific journals, to gain a well-rounded understanding of the topic of addiction.

Prior course in psychology required.

Making friends, losing friends, keeping friends...through the use of psychological and literary texts, we will explore the important functions of friendship for children and adolescents. During much of the 20th century, psychologists had assumed that adults serve as the major social influence on a child’s developing sense of self and personality, that perhaps only toward adolescence would children’s social relations with peers come to play an important role in their lives. We now know better. In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the study of friendships and peer relations throughout childhood, even in toddlerhood. The important psychological benefits of having friends are increasingly recognized. So, too, are the potential problems of its obverse: Children who are truly without friends are at greater risk for later social-emotional difficulties. We will explore the writings of major theorists such as Sullivan, Youniss, Selman, and Rubin; read and discuss the recent studies that have observed “friendship in the making”; and examine what friendship means to children and adolescents in their own words. In addition, fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center or elsewhere will be encouraged, so that students can have firsthand knowledge of children’s social relations.

What is development, and how does it occur across different children, contexts, and time periods? Does development proceed in the same manner for all children, or are there variations as a result of biological, environmental, and/or cultural differences? Are there some aspects of development that are universal, such as walking, and others that vary across children, such as talking? How might we test these questions, when the contexts in which we live influence the questions we ask about development, and the ways in which we interpret our observations?

The primary objective of this course is to learn to use developmental theory to understand the mechanisms by which developmental change occurs. We will additionally focus on the usefulness of observation and research in testing theory, as well as the usefulness of theory in structuring our observations and other forms of research with children. To do so, we will discuss several key classic and contemporary theories of development that have influenced, and/or are especially relevant to, early childhood and childhood education practice. Theories discussed will include psychoanalytic and psychosocial approaches; evolutionary and ethological approaches; cognitive-developmental approaches; information processing, dynamic systems and developmental cognitive neuroscience approaches; social, cultural and historical approaches; and cultural-ecological, bioecological, developmental systems and other holistic approaches. As we study each theory, we will focus on the kinds of questions each theory asks and the “image of the child” each puts forth. Recent challenges within the field have highlighted specific conceptual problems, which we will address. Are patterns of development universal or culture-specific? Can childhood experiences be thought of as proceeding in a series of stages? How do we construct methods for studying children that will recognize and validate the significance of differing social and cultural experiences? How can we forge a multicultural view of development such that development is understood in terms of how it is experienced within a given cultural context? As we discuss these questions, we will continually focus on the integration of theory and practice through reflections on field experiences in early childhood and/or elementary classrooms. Required papers will reflect this integration.

Prerequisite: previous college-level course work in psychology

Psychological trauma has been described as unspeakable—so cognitively disorganizing and intense that it is difficult to put the experience and the emotions that it evokes into words. Yet, the language that survivors use to describe their traumas provides insight into the impact of trauma and the process of recovery. This course will begin with an overview of theories of trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, as well as an introduction to the study of trauma narratives and how language reflects emotional and cognitive functioning. We will then explore different aspects of the cognitive, emotional, and biological impact of undergoing a trauma and how these changes are reflected in the language that trauma survivors use as they speak and write about their experiences. We will consider works by experts on trauma and language, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and James Pennebaker, as well as current research in the field of trauma and trauma narratives. Through these readings, we will address topics such as what makes an experience traumatic, how representations of trauma in popular culture color our perceptions of trauma and recovery, the role of resilience and growth following a trauma, and what we can learn from attending to the content and structure of language. This course will be of interest to students who are curious about how the words we use reflect our cognitive and emotional functioning, especially for students interested in pursuing topics such as these at an advanced or graduate level.

The creative process is paradoxical. It involves freedom and spontaneity yet requires expertise and hard work. The creative process is self-expressive yet tends to unfold most easily when the creator forgets about self. The creative process brings joy yet is fraught with fear, frustration, and even terror.The creative process is its own reward yet depends on social support and encouragement. In this class, we look at how various thinkers conceptualize the creative process—chiefly in the arts but in other domains, as well. We see how various psychological theorists describe the process, its source, its motivation, its roots in a particular domain or skill, its cultural context, and its developmental history in the life of the individual. Among the thinkers that we will consider are Freud, Jung, Arnheim, Franklin, and Gardner. Different theorists emphasize different aspects of the process. In particular, we see how some thinkers emphasize persistent work and expert knowledge as essential features, while others emphasize the need for the psychic freedom to “let it happen” and speculate on what emerges when the creative person “lets go.” Still others identify cultural context or biological factors as critical. To concretize theoretical approaches, we look at how various ideas can contribute to understanding specific creative people and their work. In particular, we will consider works written by or about Picasso, Woolf, Welty, Darwin, and some contemporary artists and writers. Though creativity is most frequently explored in individuals, we also consider group improvisation in music and theatre. Some past conference projects have involved interviewing people engaged in creative work. Others consisted of library studies centering on the life and work of a particular creative person. And some students chose to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center and focus on an aspect of creative activity in young children.

Play provides us with an amazing and informative lens for observing the development and complex inner lives of young children. Yet, play is being threatened by increasing amounts of time spent on technology and a growing societal focus on scheduled activities and academic goals. This course will offer an introduction to the many fascinating aspects of play, including the importance of unstructured free play, how play shapes the brain, sensory processing and self-regulation in play, outdoor play, cultural contexts of play, and humor development in play.  Through readings, video illustrations, and discussion of student fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center, we will explore the many ways that play contributes to the complex social, cognitive, emotional, and imaginative lives of children.  This course will provide a foundation for PSYC-7220, Early Intervention Approaches for Young Children and Families. Fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center is required for this course.  

This course explores how people develop, influence, and shape their social settings—families, communities, and educational institutions—in childhood and in adolescence. We will focus on theories of individual and family development, the local and global dynamics of learning, and cognition and social relations across culture and society. Physical health, adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and learning are intertwined in the context of the child’s social, emotional, intellectual, and physical development and affect children’s learning and development. We will also examine the development of multiple identities (racial/ethnic, gender, social class) in young children. This interdisciplinary focus draws from current theory, research, and practice in areas as diverse as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies, among other disciplines. This class is appropriate for those interested in child development, early-childhood and elementary education, special education and/or adolescent development, and secondary education.

Prior course in psychology required

For thousands of years, philosophers have struggled with the questions surrounding the issue of morality. Over the past hundred years, psychologists have joined the fray. While many theories exist, a unifying theme centers upon the notion that childhood is the crucible in which morality is formed and forged. In this course, we will explore the major theories dealing with three aspects of the development of morality: moral thought or reasoning (e.g., Piaget, Kohlberg); moral feelings (psychoanalytic approaches, including Freud, and the modern work on the importance of empathy and mirror neurons); and moral actions. In addition, we will investigate the possible relations among these three aspects of moral development; for example, how is moral thought connected to moral action? Throughout the course, we will relate moral development theory to the results of research investigations into this crucial aspect of child development, including the influence of parents and peers. Further, we will explore the influence of culture in shaping moral beliefs and attitudes. Conference work may include direct experience with children or adolescents in the form of either detailed observations or direct interaction (interviews, etc.).

By the time you read this course description, you have learned more than 40,000 English words. That’s at least an average of six words per day—and many more if you are multilingual. How is this possible? Were you born with this ability? Or did you learn it? This course is about how humans come to develop language so early and so quickly among striking environmental variation. For example, caregivers in the United States often alter and repeat their words when talking to children, while caregivers in a Tseltal Mayan community are thought to speak directly to other adults, not children. And yet, children in both settings successfully learn language on similar timescales. Importantly, no two children are alike. We will explore how the spectrum of neurodiversity sets many learners on their own communicative path. We will also consider variation in modality: Babies in deaf communities rapidly learn to comprehend and produce sign. We’ll begin by looking at the experimental data: How do you truly unlock and measure a neonate’s language abilities? Or even an adult’s? We’ll find out. Next, we’ll use play with gadgets from experimental methods, such as artificial language learning and eye-tracking, designing our own ministudies, implementing them, and collecting data. Then, we’ll propose theories of the kind of learning mechanism that can operate under such diverse inputs. We’ll evaluate the existing proposals and try to generate our own new theories of language development. We will bring these ideas beyond the seminar room, drawing connections to second-language learning in adults, early-childhood education, and social and economic structures. Students will develop conference projects that propose their own theories of language learning rooted in experimental data and in conversation with existing theories of nature vs. nurture, domain-specificity, and modality.

How do varying childhood experiences impact children’s mental health and wellbeing? What happens when the course of development is affected by trauma or depression? This seminar will focus on challenges that arise in child and adolescent development, drawing upon approaches in clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and cultural psychology/clinical ethnography. We will analyze how particular psychological experiences and behaviors have been typically understood as abnormal or pathological and how they are intertwined with the experience of child development. We will also explore how these challenges are diagnosed, as well as critical commentaries on clinical diagnosis and treatment, in order to analyze the merits and drawbacks of the common approaches to these issues. Students will learn about the clinical categories of conditions such as ADHD, autism, depression, and anxiety, as compiled in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), as well as how those disorders are assessed and treated in clinical and educational settings. We will look at case examples to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of such psychological conditions in childhood and adolescence. Through readings and course discussion, students will be invited to question the universal applicability of Western clinical approaches that rest on particular assumptions about normality, behavior, social relations, human rights, and health. We will also explore how diagnostic processes and psychological and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to the client’s race/ethnicity, class, and gender and how clinicians might effectively address such disparities in diagnosis and care. Students will complete conference projects related to the central themes of our course and may opt to work at the Early Childhood Center or a local community program that serves children or adolescents.

This seminar asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cross-cultural psychology, human development, and psychological anthropology, we will ask how people’s movement across borders and boundaries transforms their sense of self, as well as their interpersonal relations and connections to community. We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions? How might immigrants acculturate or adapt to new environments, and how does the process of moving from home or living “in-between” two or more places impact mental health? Through our close readings and seminar discussions on this topic, we will seek to understand how different forms of power—implemented across realms, including state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world and their experience of exclusion and belonging. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration. In tandem with our readings, we will welcome scholar-activist guest speakers, who will present their current work in the field.

Children’s books are an important bridge between adults and the world of children. What makes a children’s book attractive and developmentally appropriate for a child of a particular age? What is important to children as they read or listen? How do children become readers? How do picture-book illustrations complement the words? How can children’s books portray the uniqueness of a particular culture or subculture, allowing those within to see their experience reflected in books and those outside to gain insight into the lives of others? To what extent can books transcend the particularities of a given period and place? Course readings include writings about child development; works about children’s literature; and, most centrally, children’s books themselves—picture books, fairy tales, and novels for children. Class emphasis will be on books for children up to about age 12. Among our children’s book authors will be Margaret Wise Brown, C. S. Lewis, Katherine Paterson, Maurice Sendak, Matt de la Pena, Christopher Paul Curtis, E. B. White, and Vera B. Williams. Many different kinds of conference projects are appropriate for this course. In past years, for example, students have written original work for children (sometimes illustrating it, as well), traced a theme in children’s books, worked with children (and their books) in fieldwork and service-learning settings, explored children’s books that illuminate particular racial or ethnic experiences, or examined books that capture the challenge of various disabilities. At the end of each class session, we will have story time, during which two students will share childhood favorites.

This course will explore several early-intervention approaches for young children and their families, with a particular emphasis on the theory and technique of play therapy.  While this course will focus most on child-centered play therapy (CCPT), we will also look at the methodology of other types of approaches and how those approaches address treatment issues. In addition, course material will highlight cultural considerations, therapeutic work with parents/caregivers, challenges in treatment, self-reflection, self-regulation, sensory processing, interoception, and analysis of case studies. Readings, class discussions, group play-based activities, and video illustrations will provide students with both a theoretical and an introductory clinical basis for play-based therapeutic work with young children in early-intervention approaches.

What do Bitcoin, ChatGPT, self-driving vehicles, and Zoom have in common? The answer lies in this course, which focuses on how a few digital technologies are dramatically altering daily life. In this course, we will develop a series of core principles that attempt to explain the rapid change and to forge a reasoned path into the future. We will begin with a brief history of privacy, private property, and privacy law. Two examples of early 20th-century technologies that required legal thinking to evolve: whether a pilot (and passengers) of a plane are trespassing when the plane flies over someone's backyard and whether the police can listen to a phone call from a phonebooth (remember those?) without a warrant. Quickly, we will arrive in the age of information and can update those conundrums: A drone flies by with an infrared camera. A copyrighted video is viewed on YouTube via public WiFi. A hateful comment is posted on Reddit. A playful TikTok is taken out of context and goes viral for all to see. An illicit transaction involving Bitcoin is made between seemingly anonymous parties via Venmo. A famous musician infuriates his or her fanbase by releasing a song supporting an authoritarian politician—but it turns out to be a deepfake. A core tension in the course is whether and how the Internet should be regulated and how to strike a balance among privacy, security, and free speech. We will consider major US Supreme Court cases that chart slow-motion government reaction to the high-speed change of today’s wired world.

In this course, we will explore varied entry points toward the creation and practice of a personal dance teaching philosophy and pedagogy. We will interrogate our varied and unique histories, values, patterns, cultures, and aesthetic desires, observing how they illuminate or limit our teaching goals. Our experience and assumptions around teaching and being taught will help us amplify and name integral skills and tools that support our work in dance/body/movement-based classrooms. How do we build a class architecture that nurtures growth? How do we create a safe and equitable space for reciprocal learning? How do we find a balance between planning and improvising? How do we clarify and hone our intentions while using clear language and communication? These questions and many more will ignite us to observe, support, and inspire one another as we imagine new and engaged approaches to our teaching practices.

All dance is political, simply because it is created by a human being who is of a particular place and time. Thus, the work is inherently commenting on that particular place and time. Using this framework, we will take a deep dive into American dance history from Reconstruction to today, with an eye on tackling the questions: 1) How did this thing we refer to as “American dance” come to be? 2) Who or what is missing from the canon? Why? 3) How do we place ourselves inside of this lineage? With a keen understanding of the state of the world at the point of creation, students will develop a critical eye through which to view performance—the how and the why of creation having equal footing with the physical forms. Further, students will begin to develop an understanding of how contemporary American dance is in constant conversation with dance of the past.

When we write about dance, movement arts, and performance practice, how can we address and unpack the politics and power dynamics inherently at play in authorship, spectatorship, participatory experience, and research? How might our individual intersectional subjectivities be avenues into engaging the act of meaning-making while witnessing, conversing with, and archiving dance and performance? In this seminar, we will study various historical and current relationships of writing to movement-based performance practice, tracing the legacy of dance criticism and its subsequent evolution as a point of departure. We will look at a myriad of forms of dance writing that exemplify different potentials for relationship between performer and audience member or witness, including but not be limited to: dance criticism, embedded criticism, autotheory, writing on advocacy and ethics within the dance field, transcribed interviews and conversations with dance and movement artists, and artists’ “process notes.” We will also look at texts that are not directly situated within dance studies but that emerge from various feminist and queer lineages in which theory, research, and critique have become modes that evoke a deepening of relationship between subjectivity, environment, and art-making. In addition to reading and discussing various forms of dance writing, students will develop their own writing practice in conversation with filmed footage of dance performances and rehearsals and live dance performances and rehearsals.

Students in this course will develop skills to bring their artistry into a teaching setting, combining practical and theoretical studies. We will work systematically and imaginatively to develop teaching practices in dance and movement forms that move us most deeply, addressing individual and collective concerns throughout the process. We will explore strategies for teaching a variety of techniques, from codified dance forms to generative forms, including improvisation and composition. Over the course of the semester, with all members of the class serving as both teacher and student, each participant will develop a cohesive plan for teaching in professional settings. Studio practices including movement, observation, discussion; class exercises will support in-depth exploration of teaching and learning as intrinsically related aspects of education at its best. In addition to work in the studio, independent research will entail surveying literature in the field of dance education and training, as well as potential sources beyond the field, according to individual interests. Practical and theoretical research will form the basis of a final presentation (teaching one or more sections of the curricular plan) and a final written report with annotated bibliography, summarizing and documenting the development process as well as providing a basis for future promotional material. 

In this course, we will examine and hone the tools needed for propelling your creative work into the professional landscape. Taught from the perspective of an active artist/arts professional in the nonprofit sector, the course will attempt to achieve fluency for all makers by providing practical encounters with key areas of budgeting and finance, fundraising and grant writing, presenting and touring, and self-producing components (including marketing, press, audience-development and engagement strategies, digital and social interactions, and production administration). We will explore various dance and theatre financial models, from being an independent solo artist to starting your own ensemble. The class will be participatory, asking each student to craft project descriptions, grant narratives, and budgets for their thesis projects or other works shown in the previous semester or first year. We will develop and stage mock applications and peer/panel reviews for real-world funding opportunities, undertake group budgeting for productions that occur in each department, and develop concurrent fundraising plans and crowdsourcing campaigns. The aim of this course is to provide a greater level of competitive preparedness for graduating dance and performance makers on the cusp of representing themselves and their work in their chosen field(s).

Each student enrolled in a three-credit dance study, five-credit Dance Third, five-credit dance FYS, or Dance MFA program of study is REQUIRED to complete one tech/production job each semester in order to receive full credit for dance courses. In completing Dance Tech/Production, students are exposed to the "behind the scenes" operations required to put on a dance performance. All students do this work, so you may be performing on stage in one concert and working a crew position in the next. The production process is much the same here at Sarah Lawrence as in the professional world. For each concert, the technical crew works during the performances and during the “tech week” before the show. You will receive instruction for every tech job, so don’t worry if you are assigned to do something that you’ve never done before.

When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance perpetuate and/or disrupt assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical notions and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In this class, we will view examples of dancing on film, digital/Internet media, television programs and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings, along with readings of selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. Each student will develop an independent research project arising from one or more class activities.  Independent research will include reading, writing, and presentation. The central aim of this course is to cultivate generously informed conversation, using academic research and experiential knowledge to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form.

This course introduces students to singular choreographic possibilities offered by cinematographic tools, promoting new ways to engage with dance through new media and its platforms. The course focuses on “why and how” to convey a choreographic idea into a filmic practice, how the encounter between moving images and moving bodies can expand the development of a choreographic language beyond live performance. The course dwells on fundamental questions: How are we positioning our work in relation to these two fields—historically, aesthetically, and conceptually? Is there a broad and thorough blending of concepts, philosophy, processes, and tools? Moving Bodies in Frame is a mix of analytical and production classes, introducing students to the history of video/experimental film/choreocinema; moving to contemporary videos and installations,; and, finally, addressing the opportunities offered by the new platforms available at this moment in time. Students will have a series of hands-on exercises and assignments, individually and/or in groups, suggested every week. These exercises explore concepts of framing, camera movement, planes, deconstruction of space and time, the relationship of audio X image, special effects, postproduction, installation, etc. Students will create a final assignment, a project where they define a concept, shoot the video, and address postproduction decisions like sound and editing. Finally, we will discuss how the project should be presented and experienced: Is it an intimate or communal experience? Does it ask for projection or monitor, small or big screen, one or multiple screens, viewer mobility, and interactiveness? The course welcomes choreographers, performers, filmmakers, photographers, cinematographers, media artists, or anyone interested in this process. A camera will not be necessary; all assignments can be done with participants’ phones.

This conditioning uses embodied anatomy, Pilates-based strengthening, body weight exercises, information about cardiovascular fitness, and artistic reflection to build healthy groundwork from which to build a sustained physical dance practice. Each week, we will address a different area of the body with an anatomical lecture, definition and palpation of bony landmarks and activation of specific support structures, and targeted exercises to help build deeper understanding and support. This more intellectual investigation will be applied directly to movement to help develop technical training, as well as to encourage injury prevention and rehabilitation. Students will be expected to show critical-thinking skills around the concepts presented in class. They are expected to be present, attempt exercises, and develop personal modifications when necessary and to show some physical progress throughout the semester. Discussion in class is encouraged, as this is a time to display internal process. It is suggested, though not required, for students to maintain a journal throughout the semester.

This course is an introduction to designing costumes for dance/time-based art. The course will emphasize collaborations with a choreographer and include topics such as: The Creative Process of Design, Where to Begin When Designing for Dance, The Language of Clothes, The Elements of Design, Color Theory, Movement and the Functionality of Dance Costumes, Figure Drawing/Rendering Costumes, and Fabric Dictionary/Fabric Terminology. The course will also cover learning numerous hand and machine stitches, as well as various design-room techniques such as taking measurements, how to fit and alter costumes, and various wardrobe maintenance techniques. Each student in this course will eventually be paired with a student choreographer, with whom he or she will collaborate to realize costumes for the choreographer’s work and which will be presented during the fall or spring departmental dance productions. Throughout the year, students will also create, in a loose-leaf binder, their own Resource Book, which will comprise all handouts, in-class exercises, and notes. The Resource Book will be a useful reference tool as students work on various class assignments and/or departmental productions. This course is designed to give students a basic knowledge of the many intricate creative and technical steps involved in the design process when creating costumes. A deeper understanding of the various aspects of costume design for dance is an enormous tool that can not only enhance one’s overall design skills but also allow the student to communicate more fully during the creative process—whether with fellow designers or as a choreographer or director collaborating with a production team. The Resource Book will also serve as a helpful guide in the future, as the student embarks on his or her own productions at Sarah Lawrence and beyond.

Dance Meeting convenes all undergraduate students enrolled in a five-credit Dance Third, a three-credit dance study, or a one-credit dance study—along with all of the MFA in Dance graduate students—in meetings that occur roughly once a month. We gather for a variety of activities that enrich and inform the dance curriculum. In addition to sharing department news and information, Dance Meeting features master classes by guest artists from New York City and beyond; workshops with practitioners in dance-related health fields; panels and presentations by distinguished guests, SLC dance faculty, and alumnae; and casting sessions for departmental performances created by the Live Time-Based Art class.

This is a tutorial course for students in the second year of the program, to generate the written portion of the MFA in Dance thesis. In the fall semester, participants will conceptualize and submit a thesis proposal, literature review, annotated bibliography, outline of thesis, and introduction.  This may draw inspiration and/ or build upon work completed in the first year of the program.  In the spring semester, first and subsequent revised/final drafts will be completed and submitted.  With instructor’s approval, theses may be submitted for publication on the Sarah Lawrence Digital Commons platform.  At the end of the semester, all participants will make a presentation with discussion of each aspect of the thesis (choreography, performance and written material).  Preparation of the presentation will be supported through class discussion.

If ambivalence refers to “having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone,” what might dancing ambivalently imply? Why might the desire to dance ambivalently present itself? What are the social and aesthetic concerns of an ambivalent Dance historical lineage?

In Arabella Stanger’s, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession, Stanger analyzes how state and federal agencies collaborated with Euro-American Modernist pioneers of Dance and Architecture. Reviewing seminal dance works like that of Martha Graham’s, Frontier (1935), and Graham’s collaboration with the United States Indian Removal Act (IRA), Stanger illustrates how contemporary techniques of Euro-American dance and choreography, such as “taking up space”, are referential to choreographies of urban renewal and settler colonialism. Following this underside of reading Euro-American dance history, Saidiya Hartman’s, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, identifies how mandated dances served as a measure of management and surveillance upon the enslaved in the plantation economy and Great Migration passage aboard ships of the Trans-Atlantic. Within Hartman’s speculative and archival text, a counter-archive of Dance is presented to readers – an archive resistant to colonial impositions (Jasmine Johnson, Black Laws of Dance) – wherein the testimony of an enslaved woman, Mary Glover, appears through an act of refusal to dance: “[…] the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the slave owner’s effort to cultivate contented subjection. However, the complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatically, “I don't want [that kind of pleasure].” (Hartman, 11)

How might an orientation of ambivalence lead us to towards a multidirectional understanding of dance and choreography?

How might thinking with dance, beyond the dominant discourse of consent and pleasure, reveal Dance’s entanglement with aesthetic, sociopolitical, and necro-political practices for disciplining the body?

Reaching for an underside comprehension and counter-archive of Dance, inspired by the orientation of ambivalence, students will engage scholarship across forms of film, essay, poetry, image, sound, performance and choreographic exercises. A dialogical setting will allow us to familiarize ourselves to the coursework, and pose queries of its relation to our own ongoing scholarship. The conclusion of the semester will require an original work in response to the course material.

The Alexander Technique is a system of neuromuscular re-education that enables the student to identify and change poor and inefficient habits that may be causing stress and fatigue. With gentle, hands-on guidance and verbal instruction, the student learns to replace faulty habits with improved coordination by locating and releasing undue muscular tensions. This includes easing of the breath, introducing greater freedom and optimizing performance in all activities. It is a technique that has proven to be profoundly useful for dancers, musicians, and actors and has been widely acclaimed by leading figures in the performing arts, education, and medicine.

How is it possible for us to move in the countless ways that we do? Learn to develop your X-ray vision of human beings in motion through functional anatomical study that combines movement practice, drawing, lecture, and problem solving. In this course, movement is a powerful vehicle for experiencing in detail our profoundly adaptable musculoskeletal anatomy. We will learn Irene Dowd’s Spirals©, a comprehensive warm-up/cool-down for dancing that coordinates all joints and muscles through their fullest range of motion, facilitating study of the entire musculoskeletal system. In addition to movement practice, drawings are made as part of each week’s lecture (drawing materials provided), and three short assignments are submitted each semester. Insights and skills developed in this course can provide tremendous inspiration in the process of movement invention and composition.

This is an opportunity for students who have completed a full year of anatomy study in the SLC dance program to pursue functional anatomy studies in greater depth. In open consultation with the instructor during class meetings, each student engages in independent research, developing one or more lines of inquiry that utilize functional anatomy perspectives and texts as an organizing framework. Research topics in recent years have included aging and longevity in dance, discussion of functional anatomy in relation to linguistics, pedagogy, choreography and performance, investigation of micropolitics in established dance training techniques, examining connections between movement and emotion, development of a unique warm-up sequence to address specific individual technical issues, and study of kinematics and rehabilitation in knee injury. The class meets biweekly to discuss progress, questions, and methods for reporting, writing, and presenting research, alternating with weekly studio/practice sessions for individual and/or group research consultations.

Ballet students at all levels will be guided toward creative and expressive freedom in their dancing, enhancing the qualities of ease, grace, musicality, and symmetry that define this form. We will explore alignment, with an emphasis on anatomical principles; we will cultivate awareness of how to enlist the appropriate neuromuscular effort for efficient movement; and we will coordinate all aspects of body, mind, and spirit, integrating them harmoniously.

Ballet students at all levels will be guided toward creative and expressive freedom in their dancing, enhancing the qualities of ease, grace, musicality, and symmetry that define this form. We will explore alignment, with an emphasis on anatomical principles; we will cultivate awareness of how to enlist the appropriate neuromuscular effort for efficient movement; and we will coordinate all aspects of body, mind, and spirit, integrating them harmoniously.

In this course, we will examine and hone the tools needed for propelling your creative work into the professional landscape. Taught from the perspective of an active artist/arts professional in the nonprofit sector, the course will attempt to achieve fluency for all makers by providing practical encounters with key areas of budgeting and finance, fundraising and grant writing, presenting and touring, and self-producing components (including marketing, press, audience-development and engagement strategies, digital and social interactions, and production administration). We will explore various dance and theatre financial models, from being an independent solo artist to starting your own ensemble. The class will be participatory, asking each student to craft project descriptions, grant narratives, and budgets for their thesis projects or other works shown in the previous semester or first year. We will develop and stage mock applications and peer/panel reviews for real-world funding opportunities, undertake group budgeting for productions that occur in each department, and develop concurrent fundraising plans and crowdsourcing campaigns. The aim of this course is to provide a greater level of competitive preparedness for graduating dance and performance makers on the cusp of representing themselves and their work in their chosen field(s).

This course is an introduction to butoh through the lens of LEIMAY’s Ludus practice, which is the embodied research being taught today by LEIMAY Artistic Director Ximena Garnica. Butoh is a Japanese performing-art form that was created by Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1950s and 1960s. The course will start with an introduction to Hijikata’s butoh-fu, a choreographic method that physicalizes imagery through words. The course will then expand into LEIMAY’s Ludus practice, using multiple physical explorations to embody imagery and enlarge states of consciousness, enabling multiple realms of perception while challenging Eurocentric notions of body, space, and time. Each dancer’s physical potential will be cultivated to develop a unique movement language that is rooted in butoh's ideas of transformation. Simultaneously, we will focus on the conditioning of a conductive body through the identification of the body’s own weight in relation to gravity, along with the cultivation of internal rhythm and fluidity. Together, we will decentralize self-centered 34 Dance approaches to movement and explore the possibilities of “being danced by” instead of “I dance,” “becoming spacebody” rather than occupying space. We will challenge our body’s materiality and enliven our sensorium through listening to the rhythms and textures of the nonhuman. And we will use impossibility as a spark to enrich the ways in which we create and inhabit the world. This course is based on principles developed through Garnica’s nearly two decades of study of butoh. Historical and cultural context will be offered throughout the course. This class is open to dance, theatre, and any other students who are curious and interested in discovering alternative approaches to body and movement practices.

This course will examine the fundamentals of design and how to both think compositionally and work collaboratively as an artist. The medium of light will be used to explore the relationship of art, technology, and movement. Discussion and experimentation will reveal how light defines and shapes an environment. Students will learn a vocabulary to speak about light and to express their artistic ideas. Through hands-on experience, students will practice installing, programming, and operating lighting fixtures and consoles. The artistic and technical skills that they build will then be demonstrated together by creating original lighting designs for the works developed in the Live Time-Based Art course.

This conditioning uses embodied anatomy, Pilates-based strengthening, body weight exercises, information about cardiovascular fitness, and artistic reflection to build healthy groundwork from which to build a sustained physical dance practice. Each week, we will address a different area of the body with an anatomical lecture, definition and palpation of bony landmarks and activation of specific support structures, and targeted exercises to help build deeper understanding and support. This more intellectual investigation will be applied directly to movement to help develop technical training, as well as to encourage injury prevention and rehabilitation. Students will be expected to show critical-thinking skills around the concepts presented in class. They are expected to be present, attempt exercises, and develop personal modifications when necessary and to show some physical progress throughout the semester. Discussion in class is encouraged, as this is a time to display internal process. It is suggested, though not required, for students to maintain a journal throughout the semester.

This course is an introduction to designing costumes for dance/time-based art. The course will emphasize collaborations with a choreographer and include topics such as: The Creative Process of Design, Where to Begin When Designing for Dance, The Language of Clothes, The Elements of Design, Color Theory, Movement and the Functionality of Dance Costumes, Figure Drawing/Rendering Costumes, and Fabric Dictionary/Fabric Terminology. The course will also cover learning numerous hand and machine stitches, as well as various design-room techniques such as taking measurements, how to fit and alter costumes, and various wardrobe maintenance techniques. Each student in this course will eventually be paired with a student choreographer, with whom he or she will collaborate to realize costumes for the choreographer’s work and which will be presented during the fall or spring departmental dance productions. Throughout the year, students will also create, in a loose-leaf binder, their own Resource Book, which will comprise all handouts, in-class exercises, and notes. The Resource Book will be a useful reference tool as students work on various class assignments and/or departmental productions. This course is designed to give students a basic knowledge of the many intricate creative and technical steps involved in the design process when creating costumes. A deeper understanding of the various aspects of costume design for dance is an enormous tool that can not only enhance one’s overall design skills but also allow the student to communicate more fully during the creative process—whether with fellow designers or as a choreographer or director collaborating with a production team. The Resource Book will also serve as a helpful guide in the future, as the student embarks on his or her own productions at Sarah Lawrence and beyond.

Dance Meeting convenes all undergraduate students enrolled in a five-credit Dance Third, a three-credit dance study, or a one-credit dance study—along with all of the MFA in Dance graduate students—in meetings that occur roughly once a month. We gather for a variety of activities that enrich and inform the dance curriculum. In addition to sharing department news and information, Dance Meeting features master classes by guest artists from New York City and beyond; workshops with practitioners in dance-related health fields; panels and presentations by distinguished guests, SLC dance faculty, and alumnae; and casting sessions for departmental performances created by the Live Time-Based Art class.

This course is both an introduction to various skills involved in working with tactile partnership in dance and a creative laboratory to explore the expressive potential of touch. Contact Improvisation (CI) dates back to the early 1970s, but this is not a course in CI, per se. We will explore many exercises and principles drawn from CI work, as well as principles that CI has drawn from movement forms as diverse as aikido and ballroom dancing. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we already work in partnership whether dancing or walking down the street. The force of gravity is always pulling our weight toward the Earth, and the ground (or the floor) is pushing back. We’ve become so good at standing on our own two feet that we may no longer realize that we are constantly navigating this interrelationship. As we move out of balance, which is part of all dancing, we need to build skills on how to fall. As such, we’ll start this semester with a focus on floor work, challenging ourselves to move safely on and off the floor with increasing speed and force. As we build skills, we’ll gradually adapt these principles to our work in contact with our peers. While we’ll begin with a very light touch, we’ll gradually build into mutual support structures and, possibly, try out a few lifts. This adds to the complexity of navigating forces that originate from our partner. As this work progresses, the integrity of our support structure will become more and more critical. The structure of the class will alternate between skill building/practice and creative exploration with these skills. We will also learn some existing partnered sequences from my own choreography to serve as a kind of springboard to our own creative investigations. A foundation of working in physical partnership with others is navigating consent. We will begin our work together by exploring recent discourse on touch, consent, and boundaries in the fields of dance and performance. Each student will be empowered to understand and articulate his/her own boundaries, which may be constantly in flux. We will engage this as both a right and a responsibility for each of us to exercise individually so that we can build a functional, honest, and empowering community for our work together. The core work in this class is about exploring physiological touch and sharing weight with the floor and your peers, as described above. If doing so in each class session with a variety of partners throughout the semester is not of interest or does not feel safe/supportive at this time, this course might not be a good fit for you this semester. If you are somewhat unsure but want to explore touch and potentially expand your comfort zone with partner work in dance, please reach out during registration (Aug. 19-21, 2024), and we can have a conversation (jjasperse@sarahlawrence.edu). 

Each student enrolled in a three-credit dance study, five-credit Dance Third, five-credit dance FYS, or Dance MFA program of study is REQUIRED to complete one tech/production job each semester in order to receive full credit for dance courses. In completing Dance Tech/Production, students are exposed to the "behind the scenes" operations required to put on a dance performance. All students do this work, so you may be performing on stage in one concert and working a crew position in the next. The production process is much the same here at Sarah Lawrence as in the professional world. For each concert, the technical crew works during the performances and during the “tech week” before the show. You will receive instruction for every tech job, so don’t worry if you are assigned to do something that you’ve never done before.

Inspired by the work of Katherine Dunham, you will be invited to explore her movement vocabulary, often used in jazz dance, and then find the interconnections between Dunham’s contributions to film and concert stage with the current techniques used in commercial and concert dance, as well as learn vernacular Jazz movement. Open to all levels, this high-energy class inspires fun and freedom of expression through artistry, improvisation, and embellishment of choreography—regardless of skill and dance experience, yet challenging enough for more experienced dancers.  For each meeting, a classic Dunham warm-up will be given, followed by lively, Dunham-inspired jazz progressions and a combo. Join us for a transformative exploration of jazz dance, honoring tradition while embracing innovation!

This course is an experimental laboratory that aims to expose students to a diverse set of current voices and approaches to contemporary dance making. Each guest artist will lead a module of three-to-seven class sessions. These mini-workshops will introduce students to that artist and his/her creative process. Guests will present both emergent and established voices and a wide range of approaches to contemporary artistic practice.

This studio practice course introduces students to hip-hop culture through the classic hip-hop styles of dance. Cumulative technical dance training brings to light the ethos of the street-dance culture and how it counteracts and sometimes adopts mainstream media misconceptions. Through the study of classic hip-hop dance styles, students expand their awareness of connections between various dance forms that pre-date hip-hop while exploring the dilemma of belonging, yet standing apart. Through dialogue, students will begin learning about the history of the original dance styles in their communities and then discuss mainstream factors that either helped or harmed the evolution of the community. Occasional guest teachers will offer a class in a club or street style that will help students get a feel for the New York City dance scene of the 1980s, which influenced today’s trends. Students will watch Internet footage to aid them in understanding the similarities and differences between previous trends and today’s social exchanges in dance. Students will receive dance training at a beginner level done to hip-hop music from past to present. If there are intermediate-level dancers, they will be taught at respective levels in order to make advancements in their grasp of vocabulary.

This beginning-level dance class is designed to introduce students to Hawaiian hula dance through percussion, song, and dance. The hula class structure is designed to give student a hands-on journey into the heart of the hula. At the same time, in the classroom, students will explore the broader issues of culture and its artistic expressions. This multidisciplinary approach incorporates social studies, language arts, dance, visual arts, and music. The instructor and the students work collaboratively in class, bringing together their various skills and expertise. Students will focus on the arts and traditions of a cultural group, building a contextual frame for the study of the hula, its origins and meanings. In the course of the class, many basic skills are put to use—oral and written language, coordination, listening, observation, description, analysis, and evaluation. This blend of artistic and academic learning provides students with an in-depth artistic experience while also exploring the larger themes of cultures and their artistic expressions.

Improvisation is a potentially limitless resource. Arising from our perceptions of movement itself, responding to environmental elements including sound and music, taking direction from conceptual/imaginary sources, improvisation can yield raw materials for making dances and performance works in multiple disciplines. Improvisation can form the basis for community-building activities. Improvisation reliably supports refinement of our technical skills in dance, from conceptual and choreographic to performative, by giving us greater access to our unique and infinite connections to movement. In this course, we will engage in a variety of approaches to improvisation. We will investigate properties of movement (including speed, force, time, space/range, quality, momentum), using activities that range from highly structured to virtually unstructured. We will work in a variety of environmental settings, from the dance studio to outdoor sites around the campus. Throughout the year, our goals will include building capabilities for sustained exploration of movement instincts and appetites, honing perceptive and communicative skills, and learning to use improvisation to advance movement technique. All of these will support the development of a durable foundation from which to work creatively in any discipline.

In this class, graduate and upperclass undergraduate students with a special interest and experience in the creation of time-based artworks that include live performance will design and direct individual projects. Students and faculty will meet weekly to view works-in-progress and discuss relevant artistic and practical problems, both in class on Tuesday evenings and in conferences taking place on Thursday afternoons. Attributes of the work across multiple disciplines of artistic endeavor will be discussed as integral and interdependent elements in the work. Participation in mentored, critical-response feedback sessions with your peers is a key aspect of the course. The engagement with the medium of time in live performance, the constraints of presentation of the works both in works-in-progress and in a shared program of events, and the need to respect the classroom and presentation space of the dance studio will be the constraints imposed on the students’ artistic proposals. Students working within any number of live-performance traditions are as welcome in this course as those seeking to transgress orthodox conventions. While all of the works will engage in some way with embodied action, student proposals need not fall neatly into a traditional notion of what constitutes dance. The cultivation of open discourse across traditional disciplinary artistic boundaries, both in the process of developing the works and in the context of presentation to the public, is a central goal of the course. The faculty members leading this course have roots in dance practice but also have practiced expansive definitions of dance within their own creative work. The course will culminate in performances of the works toward the end of the semester in a shared program with all enrolled students and within the context of winter and spring time-based art events. Performances of the works will take place in the Bessie Schönberg Dance Theatre or elsewhere on campus in the case of site-specific work.

These classes will emphasize the steady development of movement skills, energy use, strength, and articulation relevant to each teacher's technical and aesthetic orientations. Instructors will change at either the end of each semester or midway through the semester, allowing students to experience present-day dance practice across diverse styles and cultural lineages. At all levels, attention will be given to sharpening each student’s awareness of time and energy and training rhythmically, precisely, and according to sound anatomical principles. Degrees of complexity in movement patterns will vary within the leveled class structure. All students will investigate sensory experience and the various demands of performance.

These classes will emphasize the steady development of movement skills, energy use, strength, and articulation relevant to each teacher's technical and aesthetic orientations. Instructors will change at either the end of each semester or midway through the semester, allowing students to experience present-day dance practice across diverse styles and cultural lineages. At all levels, attention will be given to sharpening each student’s awareness of time and energy and training rhythmically, precisely, and according to sound anatomical principles. Degrees of complexity in movement patterns will vary within the leveled class structure. All students will investigate sensory experience and the various demands of performance.

These classes will emphasize the steady development of movement skills, energy use, strength, and articulation relevant to each teacher's technical and aesthetic orientations. Instructors will change at either the end of each semester or midway through the semester, allowing students to experience present-day dance practice across diverse styles and cultural lineages. At all levels, attention will be given to sharpening each student’s awareness of time and energy and training rhythmically, precisely, and according to sound anatomical principles. Degrees of complexity in movement patterns will vary within the leveled class structure. All students will investigate sensory experience and the various demands of performance.

These classes will emphasize the steady development of movement skills, energy use, strength, and articulation relevant to each teacher's technical and aesthetic orientations. Instructors will change at either the end of each semester or midway through the semester, allowing students to experience present-day dance practice across diverse styles and cultural lineages. At all levels, attention will be given to sharpening each student’s awareness of time and energy and training rhythmically, precisely, and according to sound anatomical principles. Degrees of complexity in movement patterns will vary within the leveled class structure. All students will investigate sensory experience and the various demands of performance.

This course introduces students to singular choreographic possibilities offered by cinematographic tools, promoting new ways to engage with dance through new media and its platforms. The course focuses on “why and how” to convey a choreographic idea into a filmic practice, how the encounter between moving images and moving bodies can expand the development of a choreographic language beyond live performance. The course dwells on fundamental questions: How are we positioning our work in relation to these two fields—historically, aesthetically, and conceptually? Is there a broad and thorough blending of concepts, philosophy, processes, and tools? Moving Bodies in Frame is a mix of analytical and production classes, introducing students to the history of video/experimental film/choreocinema; moving to contemporary videos and installations,; and, finally, addressing the opportunities offered by the new platforms available at this moment in time. Students will have a series of hands-on exercises and assignments, individually and/or in groups, suggested every week. These exercises explore concepts of framing, camera movement, planes, deconstruction of space and time, the relationship of audio X image, special effects, postproduction, installation, etc. Students will create a final assignment, a project where they define a concept, shoot the video, and address postproduction decisions like sound and editing. Finally, we will discuss how the project should be presented and experienced: Is it an intimate or communal experience? Does it ask for projection or monitor, small or big screen, one or multiple screens, viewer mobility, and interactiveness? The course welcomes choreographers, performers, filmmakers, photographers, cinematographers, media artists, or anyone interested in this process. A camera will not be necessary; all assignments can be done with participants’ phones.

All dance is political, simply because it is created by a human being who is of a particular place and time. Thus, the work is inherently commenting on that particular place and time. Using this framework, we will take a deep dive into American dance history from Reconstruction to today, with an eye on tackling the questions: 1) How did this thing we refer to as “American dance” come to be? 2) Who or what is missing from the canon? Why? 3) How do we place ourselves inside of this lineage? With a keen understanding of the state of the world at the point of creation, students will develop a critical eye through which to view performance—the how and the why of creation having equal footing with the physical forms. Further, students will begin to develop an understanding of how contemporary American dance is in constant conversation with dance of the past.

Performance Project is a component in which a visiting artist or company is invited to create a work with students or to set an existing piece of choreography. The works are performed for the College community at the end of the semester.

Students will be introduced to the traditional Chinese practices of Tai Chi and Qi Gong. These practices engage with slow, deliberate movements, focusing on the breath, meditative practice, and posture to restore and balance energy—called chi or Qi. The postures flow together, creating graceful dances of continuous motion. Sometimes referred to as one of the soft or internal martial arts, Tai Chi and Qi Gong are foundational practices within a lifelong, holistic self-cultivation in traditional Chinese culture.

This course will use physical embodiment as a mode of learning about and understanding various West African cultures. In addition to physical practice, supplementary study materials will be used to explore the breadth, diversity, history, and technique of dances found in West Africa. Traditional and social/contemporary dances from countries such as Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast will be explored. Participation in end-of-semester or year-end showings will provide students with the opportunity to apply studies in a performative context.

This is course provides an opportunity to explore foundational texts in dance and performance, in the context of the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program.  With our programmatic focus on performance and choreography, there are significant writings and discussions in this field that will be important for students to engage as they prepare for careers in dance and performance.  Emphasis is on developing a line or lines of inquiry, devising strategies with which to effectively and meaningfully follow learning pathways to produce well-crafted writing.  Projects will evolve throughout the year, culminating in a final revision of writing and in-class presentation.  Students will also have the opportunity serve as readers for colleagues.

This is a tutorial course for students in the second year of the program, to generate the written portion of the MFA in Dance thesis. Class meetings will be combined and coordinated with Graduate Seminar: Independent Research in Dance, allowing for expanded discussion of research with all students in the MFA in Dance program. In the fall semester, participants will conceptualize and submit a thesis proposal, literature review, annotated bibliography, outline of thesis, and introduction. This may draw inspiration and/ or build upon work completed in the first year of the program. In the spring semester, first and subsequent revised/final drafts will be completed and submitted. With instructor’s approval, theses may be submitted for publication on the Sarah Lawrence Digital Commons platform. At the end of the semester, all participants will make a presentation with discussion of each aspect of the thesis (choreography, performance and written material). Preparation of the presentation will be supported through class discussion.

In this course we will explore varied entry points toward the creation and practice of a personal dance teaching philosophy and pedagogy. We will interrogate our varied and unique histories, values, patterns, cultures and aesthetic desires, observing how they illuminate or limit our teaching goals.   Our experience and assumptions around teaching and being taught will help us  amplify and name integral skills and tools that support our work in dance/body/movement-based classrooms.

How do we build a class architecture that nurtures growth? How do we create a safe and equitable space for reciprocal learning? How do we find a balance between planning and improvising? How do we clarify and hone our intentions while using clear language and communication? These questions and many more will ignite us to observe, support and inspire one another as we imagine new and engaged approaches to our teaching practices.

When we write about dance, movement arts, and performance practice, how can we address and unpack the politics and power dynamics inherently at play in authorship, spectatorship, participatory experience, and research? How might our individual intersectional subjectivities be avenues into engaging the act of meaning-making while witnessing, conversing with, and archiving dance and performance? In this seminar, we will study various historical and current relationships of writing to movement-based performance practice, tracing the legacy of dance criticism and its subsequent evolution as a point of departure. We will look at a myriad of forms of dance writing that exemplify different potentials for relationship between performer and audience member or witness, including but not be limited to: dance criticism, embedded criticism, autotheory, writing on advocacy and ethics within the dance field, transcribed interviews and conversations with dance and movement artists, and artists’ “process notes.” We will also look at texts that are not directly situated within dance studies but that emerge from various feminist and queer lineages in which theory, research, and critique have become modes that evoke a deepening of relationship between subjectivity, environment, and art-making. In addition to reading and discussing various forms of dance writing, students will develop their own writing practice in conversation with filmed footage of dance performances and rehearsals and live dance performances and rehearsals.

This course combines reading, discussion, and a supervisory lens to support fieldwork placements in a clinical setting. The course is designed to provide the student with professional orientation and direct exposure to dance/movement therapy practice, an orientation to health and educational systems, and an understanding of the role and function of the dance/movement therapist within each system.

This course is an introduction to the study of human movement/kinesiology and human anatomy. Students will gain a beginning understanding of key systems in the human body and their integral effect on functional and expressive behavior. Key anatomical landmarks and features will be highlighted in the context of both common and individual choices and characteristics. Students will explore how understanding the different body systems aids in movement observation and intervention.

This course uses a group-supervision format to support and develop the internship experience. Through the sharing of experiences from their individual internship settings, students will explore a variety of topics—such as professionalism, supervision, working in an interdisciplinary team, problem-solving in the workplace, countertransference, and kinesthetic empathy—as a way of bridging theory and practice. Through group discussion, movement experientials, weekly logs, and in-class presentations, students will continue to practice their therapeutic skills and deepen their understanding of dance/movement therapy.

This course is a continuation of Clinical Practicum I. Students will continue to deepen their comprehension of dance/movement therapy theory, as well as to expand and hone their clinical skills. Through the sharing of real-life experiences from their internship settings, students will continue to explore topics such as professionalism, supervision, transference, countertransference, and kinesthetic empathy, thus bridging theory and practice. Through group discussion, movement experientials, written papers, and in-class presentations, students will continue to practice their therapeutic skills and deepen their understanding of dance/movement therapy.

In this course, students will build on concepts learned in Graduate Seminar in Methods and Theory of DMT I and II, Human Growth, Psychopathology, and Movement Observation I and II to refine their assessment skills in developing treatment plans consistent with DSM-5 criteria and the application of dance/movement therapy principles and interventions. The role of pharmacotherapy will be included. We will also examine clinical and treatment planning, with a focus on developing clinical writing skills as they relate to specific settings and populations, including children, adolescents, adults, and geriatrics.

Fieldwork provides opportunities for students to be exposed to an early-childhood setting and to observe the role of the dance/movement therapist in that setting. Students will observe and interact with children ages six months to five years, with the goal of gaining a greater understanding of the physical, social, and emotional development that occurs during this period of growth. Additionally, students will participate in dance/movement therapy sessions, practice group leadership, and receive group and individual supervision of their work. For this first year of placement, students are expected to be participant observers, actively observing and engaging in the process of dance/movement therapy without the full responsibility of a leadership role. Students are required to complete 200 fieldwork hours in the first year of training. Those fieldwork hours must be completed before beginning the clinical internship.

This is the first part of a four-semester, process-oriented course that functions as a laboratory in which to study the methods and theory of dance/movement therapy. This course integrates didactic, experiential, and collaborative learning methods, both remotely and in the studio.  Elements of global, cultural, and anthropological perspectives of dance that are inherent in each student will be explored. Exploring one’s “dance identity” will help form a foundation for developing an inclusive and culturally humble approach to the therapeutic process in dance/movement therapy. Self-awareness, uncovering bias and preferences, exploring empathy, and one’s personal background will all be examined, both individually and interpersonally. 

This second course in a series of four on the methods and theory of dance/movement therapy for clinical practice is dedicated to learning about early dance/movement therapists, with a historical perspective of the beginnings of the profession of dance/movement therapy. Integrated throughout the semester will be readings and discussions about world dance, diaspora dance, and multicultural dance—all of which greatly influenced our understanding of dance as a healing and therapeutic art for both individuals and communities prior to the development of dance/movement therapy as a profession. The most salient aspect of this course will be the movement-based experiences in class that help students embody the essence of the theory and practice of dance/movement therapy. Embodying the “felt experience” of foundational body-movement principles will help students develop an understanding of how each person’s personal experience is woven into common conceptual and kinesthetic frameworks rooted in developmental and integrative movement.

This third course in a series of four on the methods and theory of dance/movement therapy for clinical practice will focus on the experience of embodiment and on broadening and deepening the students’ practice of dance/movement therapy, as we examine cultural, spiritual, and socioeconomic perspectives on dance and healing.

This final course in the series of four on the methods and theory of dance/movement therapy for clinical practice will examine clinical applications of expressive arts modalities—such as art, music, poetry, and drama—for the purpose of understanding their relationship to dance/movement therapy and how they can be used in conjunction with dance/movement therapy to enhance and support treatment interventions. We will also examine the use of the artistic elements of dance—such as choreography and performance—to support a variety of mental and physical health goals. The course will have several visiting faculty with expertise in the arts and creative-arts therapies.

Each student in the dance/movement therapy program is required to complete a thesis project. The thesis provides the opportunity to integrate, using research methods, theory from multiple disciplines, existing literature in dance/movement therapy, and personal experience. This course will offer students the structure to apply what they have learned in the Research Methods course toward developing their own research project, with the goal of completing and submitting a research prospectus and outline. Group support, consultation, and technical assistance will be provided in class.

Group support, consultation, and technical assistance will be provided in this class for students who will be working with their thesis advisors and second readers to continue the work begun in Graduate Thesis I and to complete their final thesis project.

In this course, students will learn the clinical skills and roles needed for the effective practice of group work as dance/movement therapists in varied clinical settings. We will examine theoretical constructs of group work that include Yalom’s interpersonal approach, Shulman’s interactional approach, Falck’s membership perspective, and Steinberg’s model of mutual aid. Students will be expected to identify the central ideas and methods of group work and to recognize its emotional, cognitive, and behavioral applications, as well as behavior that disrupts the work of group process; to demonstrate an understanding of the effects of transference and countertransference; to discuss group work theory and techniques used to facilitate problem-solving and specific skill building to reduce psychiatric symptoms; and to understand group characteristics, including multiculturalism, diversity, dynamics, and stages of development and interventions.

In this course, students will expand their knowledge of the basic theories, methods, concepts, and clinical applications learned in Group Work Theory and Practice I. We will explore the core elements of systems approaches to group-work theory and dance/movement therapy clinical practice. Specifically, we will examine the contributions of Monica McGoldrick’s influential work concerning ethnocultural aspects affecting families, including the impact of race, class, religion, historical factors, and migration experiences, as well as attitudes about sexual orientation and intermarriage. Other theoretical models will include the relational-cultural paradigm developed at the Stone Center’s Jean Baker Miller Training Institute and the principles of resilience theory that emerged from the research of Dr. Emmy Werner. These models have implications for the development of therapeutic interventions and will inform our study of the clinical roles and skills needed for the effective practice of dance/movement therapy group work with children, adolescents, and families in various clinical settings.

This course will outline the interrelationships between physiological, psychological, cognitive, and sociocultural factors and their effects on human growth, development, and behavior. Students will gain a basic knowledge of brain development and neuroscience, as well as an overview of developmental theories and their relevance to dance/movement therapy theory and practice. In particular, students will explore the developmental basis of mirroring, attunement, and kinesthetic empathy and the implications for functioning in adulthood.

This class is the first in a series of three on movement observation and assessment skills and is designed to familiarize the student with the Laban concepts and principles for the observation and description of movement, integrating other relevant perspectives for understanding human movement. Students will learn to embody and observe foundational components of physical action by exploring concepts in the categories of body, effort, space, and shape. Laban Movement Analysis provides insight into one’s personal movement preferences and increases awareness of what and how movement communicates and expresses. In addition—through readings, movement experimentation, and discussion—students will explore the principles of the Bartenieff Fundamentals, which involve concepts such as movement initiation and sequencing, connectivity, weight transference, spatial intent, effort intent, and breath support. These fundamental ideas, when present in movement, develop dynamic alignment, coordination, strength, flexibility, mobility, kinesthetic awareness, and expression and also help facilitate relationship.

The class is the second in a series of three on movement observation and assessment skills and is designed to familiarize the student with additional movement observation systems through readings, movement exploration, and discussion. Students will explore the implications of the use of movement observation systems for working with vulnerable populations and the important considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the therapeutic space.

This course is the third in a series of three classes on movement observation and assessment skills and is designed to integrate Laban Movement Analysis and Bartenieff Fundamentals and to introduce additional methods for movement observation beyond those particular systems. Students will understand how movement observation paradigms can be applied to dance/movement therapy clinical practice, professional conversations, documentation, and research.

Students will learn the fundamental tenets underlying professional ethics and ethical decision-making in the practice of dance/movement therapy. We will identify and explore ethical concepts, standards, and guidelines that will inform your clinical judgment and make you aware and mindful of the ways in which your personal ethics relate to your role as a professional dance/movement therapist. In addition to course readings, we will study the ADTA Code of Ethics and Standards of Ethical Practice and the New York State Education Department requirements and standards for licensure in creative arts therapy, including training in the identification and reporting of child abuse and maltreatment.

This course is designed to provide students with a base of knowledge in psychopathology and to familiarize students with current conceptions and empirical findings in psychopathology research. Beginning with the question of how abnormality is defined, we will explore contemporary perspectives on psychopathology and focus more specifically on psychological disorders, their development and treatment, and controversies within the field. Additionally, this course will focus on the physiologic and motoric manifestations of illness, the role of dance/movement therapy in treatment, and challenges particular to dance/movement therapy intervention. This course will use the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5. Reading of the current manual will include discussion of recent changes and the impact on diagnostic understanding and treatment formulation.

This course is an introduction to qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and techniques. Students will learn to apply research techniques, such as data collection and analysis, both as researchers and to enhance clinical interpretation and practice skills. We will explore issues around the importance of research to the field of dance/movement therapy, particular challenges and opportunities associated with dance/movement therapy research, and the history of research in the field. While this course will provide a base of knowledge for the practicing dance/movement therapist to interpret and evaluate research, the goal is to create not only consumers but also creators of research. As such, students will learn about the process of research design, including ethical and legal considerations, and will create their own research project.

This course will examine the so-called “New Hollywood Cinema”: the films and filmmakers who reinvigorated the Hollywood studio system in the late 1960s, only to be displaced by the blockbuster and “high-concept” films that followed. Films of the period will be examined within the context of industrial and cultural history, with special attention paid to the changing dynamics within the American film industry and to the cultural shifts that these films both responded to and expressed. These issues will be approached through a study of the form and style of the films of the era, with attention to how they revise or respond to more classical Hollywood approaches, how they appropriate and repurpose techniques derived from European “art cinema,” and how they develop their own genres or “cycles.” Other topics to be covered include: youth and counterculture; changing representations of gender, class, and race; the decline of long-standing forms of self-censorship; and the dramatic liberalization of attitudes toward depictions of sex and violence. Directors to be covered include Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah, Elaine May, and Robert Altman.

This FYS course will give students the foundational tools needed to write for just about any screen. Starting with simple scenes and short-form screenplays, students will learn formatting and industry standards—all while cultivating their own personal style. Students will learn the basics of dramatic structure, character development, and visual storytelling through their own work and through the analysis of published screenplays. In the first semester, students will write several short scripts, which we will table-read and workshop in class. In the second semester, we will focus our work on outlining and writing feature-length screenplays. Students will have the opportunity to pitch their projects to the class and to create look books for their screenplays. Students will meet for conference weekly in the first semester and every two weeks in the second.

This course is designed to further enhance the development of 2D animation concepts and techniques. Students are expected to have introductory knowledge of Harmony software and be comfortable with basic animation skills. As an intermediate/advanced course, students will delve deeper into animation fundamentals and explore advanced techniques, including shift and trace, motion arcs, and secondary movements. Additionally, students will expand their proficiency in Harmony software by developing advanced camera techniques, utilizing traditional and auto lip-sync tools, leveraging nodes for lighting and effects, and exploring a variety of advanced tools. Students will enrich their drawing and animation skills by understanding body mechanics and motion flow, focusing on techniques such as animated cycles, rotating forms, transformations, timing and pacing, weight, and resistance. Through the creation of multiple animation projects, intermediate students will apply these new techniques, develop scene construction abilities, and ultimately produce a final animation project. The capstone project of the semester will be the creation of a short multiscene animation. Advanced students will have the opportunity to work independently on an original concept throughout the semester, culminating in the development of a fully realized animated film. ToonBoom animation software Harmony will serve as the primary software incorporated in this course and will be provided to each student through the Animation Lab. Information and skills acquired in this class can be applied to improve drawing and animation proficiency, establish fundamentals for digital animation production, and enhance an animation portfolio.

This advanced independent animation course is tailored for students to develop, prepare, and commence the creation of a fully-realized animated film. Students will work independently to progress through the preproduction phase of their concepts and eventually initiate the animation process. In the initial stages of the semester, students will conceptualize their ideas by focusing on character designs, storyboarding, and background images. As the semester unfolds, students will establish their scenes through image sequencing and begin animating various stages of their film. Throughout the semester, students will engage regularly with the professor in conference to evaluate their progress. Additionally, there will be several group sessions led by a team of filmmaking and moving-image arts faculty, allowing for collaborative feedback and support. Students will be encouraged to continue their journey and complete their films by enrolling in the Intermediate/Advanced 2D Animation course in the spring semester.

At a time when digital, three-dimensional space has saturated our visual vocabulary in everything from design and entertainment to gaming, now more than ever it is important to explore the interface of this space and find methods for unlocking its potential. This is an introductory course for Maya (and, in the spring semester, Zbrush and Substance Painter), which are industry-standard software for 3D modeling and animation. Over two semesters, we will learn the fundamental approaches to environment building, 3D modeling, character creation, character rigging, and keyframe animation. This course will also provide a comprehensive understanding of the important process of rendering, using texturing, lighting, and staging. We will explore how all of these processes may culminate in narrative-based animations, alongside how 3D constructions can be exported into everything from film projects to physical media. Great emphasis will be placed on experimentation in navigating between digital and physical processes. Exercises and assignments will be contextualized through lectures and with readings of both historical and contemporary creators in the field.

This course is designed to further enhance the development of 2D animation concepts and techniques. Students are expected to have an introductory knowledge of Harmony software and be comfortable with basic animation skills. As an intermediate/advanced course, students will delve deeper into animation fundamentals and explore advanced techniques, including shift and trace, motion arcs, and secondary movements. Additionally, students will expand their proficiency in Harmony software by developing advanced camera techniques, utilizing traditional and auto lip-sync tools, leveraging nodes for lighting and effects, and exploring a variety of advanced tools. Students will enrich their drawing and animation skills by understanding body mechanics and motion flow, focusing on techniques such as animated cycles, rotating forms, transformations, timing and pacing, weight, and resistance. Through the creation of multiple animation projects, intermediate students will apply these new techniques, develop scene construction abilities, and ultimately produce a final animation project. The capstone project of the semester will be the creation of a short, multi-scene animation. Advanced students will have the opportunity to work independently on an original concept throughout the semester, culminating in the development of a fully-realized animated film. Harmony, Toon Boom's animation software, will serve as the primary software incorporated in this course and will be provided to each student through the Animation Lab. Information and skills acquired in this class can be applied to improve drawing and animation proficiency, establish fundamentals for digital animation production, and enhance an animation portfolio.

They say, “Producing is like trying to build a house of cards in a wind tunnel when someone hands you a stick of crazy glue and turns the lights off.” In fact, the producer is the “visionary”—typically, the one to initiate, develop, nurture, and shepherd a project, step-by-step, from its inception to its completion. Bringing all of the project’s elements into existence while being the critical glue that holds everything together…the producer knows how to “turn the lights on.” Being a producer is a magical journey of discovery: learning what stories are important to you, discovering the best way to tell them, and defining why you must be the one to bring a story to life. These are the essential pillars of producing. This immersive course provides filmmakers, directors, screenwriters, actors, or any interested student a real-world look “under the hood” into the fundamentals of creative producing—providing a comprehensive understanding of the pivotal role that the creative producer plays in the dynamic and ever-changing world of film and television. Taught through the lens of what one (or a small army of producers) actually does, this course demystifies and explores the role of the producer on a feature or on a short film, documentary, television, animated, or digital project from the moment of creative inspiration through project delivery—defining what it means to “produce.” Working individually and in teams, students will “produce” semester group projects and engage in discussions, theoretical exploration, practical workshops, and exercises that simulate real-world producing scenarios, as they develop essential skills crucial for success in the producing field. Topics covered include development, preproduction, production, and postproduction; collaborating with writers, directors, actors, and crew; script breakdown, scheduling, budgeting, financing, distribution, script coverage; and best producing practices. This course offers students a chance to explore the role of the producer and learn invaluable creative perspectives and industry insights, as students gain the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the multifaceted landscape of producing. Workshops and intimate conversations with working artists from both in front of and behind the camera allow students opportunities to engage with creatives active in the field. Course objectives include developing a holistic understanding and fundamental knowledge of the producing process; gaining a unique window into the importance of, and mechanics pertaining to, the producing discipline; and assembling an essential toolkit for creating and seeking opportunities in the filmmaking, television, and moving-image arts worlds.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of recording sound for film and moving images. Sound is crucial to immerse viewers in a performance, whether through clearly recorded dialogue or through field recordings made in a landscape. This relies on the recordings made by the sound recordist, or production sound mixer, and we will deconstruct and learn what this important role entails. We will cover different approaches to recording sound, including for documentary, narrative, and experimental works. Through hands-on practical demonstrations and class participation, we will learn how to best capture high-quality audio during production, focusing on the critical relationship between sound and image. Topics include dialogue recording, field recordings, sound effects, portable recorders, boom mic operation and techniques, lavalier microphone operation and techniques, cross-department collaboration, and synchronization with camera. Each week, we will better familiarize ourselves with different aspects of recording sound while opening up ourselves to the technical and conceptual possibilities present in the medium. By the end of the course, students will be proficient with sound recording equipment and have the tools necessary to record high-quality sound on a film set or for their next project.

In these days of technological advancement, anyone can pick up an iPhone and call themselves a filmmaker—but how many of them are actually good? In this seminar/workshop for the nascent filmmaker, we will first focus on the filmmaking fundamentals that every director needs to learn for a career in film and television: basic filmmaking terms, crew positions, camera operation, shot angles and composition, camera movement, basic lighting, sound recording, and editing. Next, students will learn how to break down a screenplay into its essential elements for low-budget shooting. They will learn how to create shot lists, floor plans, look books, and other important tools necessary for a successful shoot. As a way of developing one’s own artistic eye and voice, several independent, short, shooting assignments will be given, then viewed and discussed in class. Because collaboration is key in filmmaking, students will also be divided into groups for several weekly assignments, giving them the opportunity to serve in various roles on the crew. The idea is for students to acquire the skills needed for creating compelling cinematic work both on their own and with others. For conference, students will write, develop, and prep a short film over the course of the semester.

This course is a continuation of Advanced Short Film Projects, Part I. Part II will be a practical course, in which students (collaborating in crews) are exposed to a broad range of filmmaking skills through hands-on production experience and class discussion. The course will explore craft, aesthetic, production, and storytelling issues—all while working toward the production of projects workshopped, developed, and selected in Part I. Composed of directors, writers, producers, and technically proficient students, the faculty-selected group of 20 students will collaborate on producing eight short films, not to exceed 8-12 minutes in length. The spring session will cover preproduction planning, budgeting, scheduling, script breakdowns, shot listing, casting, rehearsing with actors, crewing, location management, script revisions, permits, insurance requirements, production-related agreements, camera preparation, lighting plans, and postproduction.

This introductory-level course will present students with the basics of cinematography and film production. They will explore cinematography as an art of visual storytelling. The cinematographer plays a critical role in shaping the light and composition of an image and capturing that image for the screen. Students will investigate the theory and practice of this unique visual language and its power as a narrative element in cinema. In addition to covering camera operation, students will explore composition, visual style, and the overall operation of lighting and grip equipment. Students will work together on scenes that are directed and produced in class and geared toward the training of set etiquette, production language, and workflow. Work will include the recreation of classic film scenes, with an emphasis on visual style. Students will discuss their work and give feedback that will be incorporated into the next project. For conference, students will be required to produce a second scene recreation, incorporating elements discussed throughout the term. Students will outline projects, draw floor plans, edit, and screen the final project for the class. This is an intensive, hands-on workshop that immerses the student in all aspects of film production. By the end of the course, students should feel confident to approach a film production project with enough experience to take on introductory positions with the potential for growth.

This course will explore the roles associated with film production, focusing on cinematography and lighting for the screen. In addition to covering camera operation and basic lighting techniques, students will explore composition, color palettes, and application of a visual style to enhance the story. The semester will revolve around weekly exercises, followed by creating and producing original work. Work will be discussed and notes incorporated into the next project. In addition to the work completed during class times, students will be required to produce a short project, incorporating elements discussed throughout the semester, as part of conference work. Students will develop, write, shoot, edit, and screen a final project by the end of the term. This is an intensive, hands-on workshop that immerses the student in all aspects of film production. By the end of the course, students should feel confident enough to approach a film production project with the experience to take on introductory and assistant positions with the potential for growth.

This introductory-level course will present students with the basics of cinematography and film production. They will explore cinematography as an art of visual storytelling. The cinematographer plays a critical role in shaping the light and composition of an image and capturing that image for the screen. Students will investigate the theory and practice of this unique visual language and its power as a narrative element in cinema. In addition to covering camera operation, students will explore composition, visual style, and the overall operation of lighting and grip equipment. Students will work together on scenes that are directed and produced in class and geared toward the training of set etiquette, production language, and workflow. Work will include the recreation of classic film scenes, with an emphasis on visual style. Students will discuss their work and give feedback that will be incorporated into the next project. For conference, students will be required to produce a second scene recreation, incorporating elements discussed throughout the term. Students will outline projects, draw floor plans, edit, and screen the final project for the class. This is an intensive, hands-on workshop that immerses the student in all aspects of film production. By the end of the course, students should feel confident to approach a film production project with enough experience to take on introductory positions with the potential for growth.

In this course, students will be required to have a short film project that they want to do, either a script or a clear and consistent idea for a short film of a maximum seven minutes. In Part I of the yearlong course, we will be tailoring the film idea into a project that is ready to shoot. Analyzing scenes, reading, and creatively putting together the mise-en-scène of the student’s original idea would be our aim. In order to build up a cinematic vocabulary for each project, we will be analyzing, in depth, the tone, style, concept, and proposal that the student is looking for—understanding the aesthetics by watching clips, shorts, and films in order to see how other authors have solved similar ideas on set. Participants will, therefore, have a profound and conceptually well-developed knowledge of each of their own shots and scenes for the projects. By the end of the semester, each student will have a project that is ready to shoot in Advanced Short-Film Projects, Part II. A jury or committee will choose about eight projects from the group to shoot in the spring semester (Advanced Short-Film Projects, Part II).

In this course, we will examine experimental documentary form as political/social/personal discourse and practice. We take as a starting point avant-garde documentary production and explore this in the manner that theorist Renov defines as “the rigorous investigation of aesthetic forms, their composition, and function,” and the manner in which, “poetics confront the problematics of power...” Throughout the semester, students will produce a series of experimental film exercises while they simultaneously research and produce a single, short, experimental documentary film for conference work. This class will acquaint students with the basic theory and purpose of experimental film/video, as compared to narrative documentary formats, and to critical methodologies that will help establish aesthetic designs for their own work. In the class, we will survey a wide range of avant-garde documentary films from the 1920s to the present, with the central focus being student’s options for film production in the context of political and cultural concerns. The various practices of experimental documentary film speak to a range of possibilities for what a movie might be. Within these practices, issues such as whose voices are heard and who is represented become of crucial importance. No prior film experience is required, though some knowledge of film editing would be advantageous.

Working within a genre can greatly assist the fledgling filmmaker by suggesting content and stylistic elements, thereby freeing the artist to focus on self-expression. While exploration of all genres is welcome, our class discussions and video exercises will explore various ideas present in the so-called “lesser genres” of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Students will shoot several short video exercises, both individually and in groups, each with a certain directing and thematic prompt. Film viewings will demonstrate how genre films handle sexual politics and repression, societal and personal anxieties, naturalism as opposed to fantasy, as well as the smart use of special effects and other strategies for the low-budget, independent filmmaker. This course does not require previous filmmaking experience. The first semester will focus on screenwriting, and the students will write short scripts that they will then produce and direct in the second semester for their conference project. Simultaneously, students will learn to use the school’s filmmaking equipment and editing software and utilize those skills in a series of short, targeted video exercises. These exercises will not only familiarize the students with the gear at their disposal but also introduce them to concepts of visual storytelling; i.e., where to put the camera to tell the story. The second semester will focus on preproduction and previsualization of the student’s conference film. Students will learn how to craft shot lists, floor plans, look books, and other tools to help them organize their film shoots. They will practice directing actors and finding a method for effective communication with their cast. And they will learn some basic production management skills, such as breaking down scripts for production and scheduling. After shooting their conference films, students will workshop their rough cuts in the classroom and fine-tune their edits in preparation for the final class—THE SCREENING!

This course introduces techniques for recording and editing sound for film and media. Through a hands-on approach using recording equipment and Pro Tools, students will explore creating and mixing sound design and effects, Foley, and dialogue/ADR for film and other media. Studio work will be supplemented with readings on fundamentals of acoustics and media theory, as well as recommended films.

In a world filled with moving images, we are all highly capable spectators as well as screenwriters. In this course, we will deepen and complement our existing knowledge of the cinematic medium, challenge our assumptions, and experiment with new ways of conceiving and making cinema. This course explores a creative and deep examination of the foundations and processes of writing with images and sounds, unveiling the knowledge that the students already have and work from there. The course provides a path to a certain type of sensitivity that helps the writer to create not just the screenplay for the course but also all of their screenplays to follow. Understanding the capacity of the medium is the most important objective: to explore its own capacity of expressing emotions by the hand of narration—but not only by it; introducing a variety of ways film can be made and seen; investigating in a creative way the mise-en-scènes aspects that can be explored in the writing process; from contemporary to classical screenwriting sensitivities; from European to Latin American filmmaking. The idea is to expand the knowledge of the variety and range of films beyond the most mainstream productions. What are the fundamental skills you need for writing a film? What is the time of observation we need to do in order to be able to translate it into words? The script is a descriptive representation of the images and sounds that the writer has created in his/her imagination, beginning with the construction of an image that nests a story and exploring its possible forms and shapes, imagining characters from the inside outward, and then situating them in the image to let them grow. In other words, to be able to pack entire worlds of thought, feeling, and imagination into the writing of scenes.

Your favorite novel has never been made into a movie, a little-known historical figure is your personal role model, or a relative’s journey of survival fascinates you. These are some of the preexisting sources that inspire us to write movies. Working from novels, biographies, historical incident, true crime, etc., students will develop feature-length screenplays. From pitching ideas, detailed outlining, and creating mood boards in order to develop cinematic storytelling skills, this course will take the student through the process of distilling the preexisting material into a three-act narrative structure. We will explore elements of screenwriting that include story structure, character development, visual storytelling, and point of view in order to expand and deepen the writer’s craft. Students will develop their screenplays in an intimate workshop, where work will be shared and critiqued in a safe and constructive atmosphere. Conference work will include customized instruction, such as preparatory writing assignments, watching films, and assigned readings.

The goal of this class is to develop, write, and workshop a short screenplay—up to 15 pages. Students will pitch stories in an open, roundtable process that will provide an opportunity for them to understand the potential and feasibility of their ideas. The class will explore the elements of screenwriting—including story structure, character development through action (behavior) and dialogue, visual storytelling, and point of view—in order to expand and deepen the writer’s narrative craft. We will schedule readings of the work in progress, followed by critique and discussion of the work. The course will culminate in a full table-read of each screenplay, a process that allows the writer to hear his/her work read aloud by classmate/actors in each role, leading to a final production-ready draft. For conference, students may choose between developing another idea for a short script or long-form screenplay. Those who need extra attention to make their in-class projects production-ready by the end of the semester may also receive that opportunity in conference.

This class is designed primarily for students who haven’t had any exposure to French and will allow them to develop, over the course of the year, an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written French. We will use grammar lessons to learn how to speak, read, and write in French. In-class dialogue will center on the study of theatre, cinema, and short texts, including poems, newspaper articles, and short stories from French and francophone cultures. During the spring semester, students will be able to conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. There are no individual conference meetings for this level. The class meets three times a week, and a weekly conversation session with a French language tutor is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. Students who successfully complete a beginning and an intermediate-level French course are eligible to study in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also develop their French writing skills, with an emphasis on analytical writing. Since the events of the French Revolution, epitomized by the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793, revolution has been a fundamental paradigm of French thought. It has been associated with an inversion of the social hierarchy and the creation of a new social order but also with violence and upheaval. In this course, we will look at revolutions of all kinds—political but also cultural, scientific, and technological—and the ways in which they relate back to and differ from the thinking that emerged from the French Revolution itself. Among the events and movements we will consider are the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the Industrial Revolution, the establishment of a secular society after the Paris Commune, French feminism, the Algerian War, May 1968 and the sexual revolution, the digital revolution, and the French Green movement. We will use a wide range of materials in our study, from political posters and treatises to films, newspaper articles, poems, plays, and novels. Readings will include excerpts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Victor Hugo, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Honoré Balzac, Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Assia Djebar, and Michel Serres. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. The Intermediate I and II courses in French are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

The Medical Genetics Seminar courses introduce students to topics relevant to clinical genetic counseling. Students learn from and interact with experts in their respective fields, gaining an in-depth understanding of fundamental genetic conditions and syndromes as well as current counseling issues and practices. Students will apply their new understanding by utilizing team-based learning activities and case discussions.

The Advanced Human Genetics course provides students with a foundation in human genetics in preparation for their clinical training and other coursework in the genetic counseling program. The Advanced Human Genetics course is organized into lectures, self-study activities, and team-based learning. The team-based learning and other student-driven activities enable students to apply in a clinically relevant way information presented in the lectures and readings.

This course frames the healthcare literature as the foundation of evidence for clinical practice. Students will understand that in order for literature to be translated into clinical practice to best serve patients, practitioners must be critical consumers of publications. To build a foundation of evidence-based practice, students will explore processes of clinical research and examine definitions of evidence. They will develop their own evidence-based practice by learning how to collate judgments about available data – judgments which are perpetually uncertain, ambiguous, and complex as research adds to and alters our present knowledge of health. By the end of the course, students will grow to be consciously critical clinical practitioners who personalize their case preparationto their patients by embodying a practice grounded in research-derived clinical skills.

Fundamentals of Genetic Counseling 1 introduces students to skills necessary for genetic counseling. The course is structured around key components of a genetic counseling encounter. Readings provide foundational knowledge of relevant concepts and class discussions encourage comparison of different perspectives and applications. Course instructors demonstrate each skill and students then engage in skill development through role-play, peer feedback, and self-assessment.

The Pathophysiology course provides students with an understanding of human anatomy and physiology of most of the major organ systems. Through course readings and oral presentations, students learn to identify, synthesize, and understand physiological mechanisms of the human body; explain a genetic condition from a physiological standpoint using both technical terminology and lay language; and identify and access information resources pertinent to physiological diseases.

The Ethics course covers the principles of medical ethics, and their application in the field of genetic counseling. The significance of current and historical examples of eugenics, and how past abuses affect the clinical practices of genetic medicine today are explored. Through a combination of lecture and discussion, the class reviews hot button issues such as abortion, ‘designer babies’ and genetic engineering. The course also covers legal and ethical dilemmas with specific relevance to genetics, including genetic discrimination, the genetic testing of minors, and the extent of a genetic clinician’s responsibility to biological relatives.

This course and practicum broadly covers contemporary topics of disability. Through guest speakers, panels, and internships, students gain an understanding of the impact of disability, improved communication skills with individuals, families, and service providers, and an increased awareness of the contributions that genetic counseling can make to persons with and without disabilities.

The Clinical Genomics course builds upon topics covered in Advanced Human Genetics. Early, current, and future uses of genomic technologies are covered, especially as they apply to clinical care. Students develop critical thinking skills related to testing strategies and genomic data interpretation, with a focus on whole exome sequencing variant interpretation. The course also explores the psychosocial, ethical, and legal factors associated with genomic testing. Students apply their learning to various case examples.

The Research Methods course serves as an introduction to the research process, with multiple connections to the development of their thesis projects. Students are encouraged to become better consumers of the scientific literature, including the use of search engines, a reference program and critical reading skills in the construction of a literature review as a first step toward study design and publication. The course includes a review of qualitative and quantitative research models, development of surveys, focus groups and questionnaires, and the basics of data analysis and working in SPSS.

Building on the skillset of Fundamentals of Genetic Counseling 1, Fundamentals of Genetic Counseling 2 develops skills relevant to clinical risk assessment. By traversing the path from calculations to care, students will understand that risks are composite predictions for future disease, assessment of those risks enables a preventive approach to healthcare, and outcomes of risk assessment are mediated by risk perceptions. Course activities include discussion, small group activities, demonstration, and role-play with peer feedback.

The Cancer Genetics course provides students with an understanding of cancer genetic counseling through case-based study of clinical services. Students are introduced to the anatomy and physiology of affected organs, screening modalities and treatment options; become familiar with the pathology and cancer genetic counseling; interpret pedigrees and utilize cancer risk models; understand testing criterion, options and interpretation of results; and explore the psychosocial aspects of hereditary cancer syndromes.

The Reproductive Genetics course prepares students for clinical practice in reproductive genetic counseling. Using sample cases, students offer and interpret genetic testing and develop case management skills. Students will be expected to read and present peer reviewed journal articles and utilize core genetics databases. Course structure includes lecture, interactive learning activities, and case discussion.

Clinical Pediatric Genetics provides students with an in-depth introduction to a pediatric genetics counseling session, including diagnostic processes and assessment and exposure to natural history of common and complex genetic conditions through course-long case scenario examples. Client and family factors are incorporated into such cases, allowing for the student to assume responsibility for their assigned client and experience the life of a pediatric genetics case from beginning to end. Course structure includes lecture, group discussion, and case presentation.

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is a fast-growing and expanding marketplace.  Many assume that DTC options will play a big role in integrating genetics into society, for better and worse.  Historically, clinical providers of genetic medicine have cast a cold eye on the commercial companies selling unmediated access to genetic testing, as have government regulators.  Today, most positions are more nuanced and the types of testing that are on offer are more varied.  Using lecture, case studies and guest speakers, we will examine a variety of the tests and modes of access often lumped together in the DTC bucket, and consider the risks and benefits of online access to genetic testing, the regulatory options, and the role that genetic counselors should play in pre- and post-test counseling for DTC results.

The Medical Genetics Seminar courses introduce students to topics relevant to clinical genetic counseling. Experts in the field lecture on topics ranging from significant genetic conditions and syndromes to current testing options. Students learn from and interact with authorities in their respective fields, gaining an in-depth understanding of the genetic conditions covered in the course and related issues they will encounter in their careers.

In this elective seminar, students will explore cognitive, emotional, cultural and socio-economic factors that may impact an individual's engagement in genetic counselling, as well as psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and mindfulness-based approaches to building an empathic and productive working alliance. Relevant history, theory, and evidence-based research will be examined and explored through relevant case studies. Students will have the opportunity to formulate case summaries considering contextual factors and working alliance.

This course traverses multiple topics that complement core genetic counseling knowledge and skills to enhance and deepen students’ personal approach to practice. Students engage in interactive workshops on narrative medicine, variant curation, cultural humility, education outreach, and professional development. Students have opportunities to compare and contrast viewpoints and experiment with applying insights from other disciplines to their work in genetic counseling.

Genetic counseling is a complicated, bifurcated profession – one that forges connections between technological sciences and lived experiences of risk, health, and illness. Health humanities is a discipline which enables us to glean insights into these experiences by interacting with the arts - by reading, writing, watching, and moving, we’ll mine for meaning and understanding, wisdom and wit. This course aims to build empathic understanding and critical consideration of genetic counseling practice by exploring genetics, genetic illness, and the profession of genetic counseling as conveyed through books, films, and other media.

The Case Management Practicum utilizes a standardized patient model to provide students the opportunity to demonstrate and assess their skill levels in competencies necessary for the practice of genetic counseling. Students participate in prepared role-playing exercises, followed by class discussion and feedback. The course structure allows students to demonstrate competence in key skills; assess their own strengths and weaknesses and those of their peers; and formulate a plan for addressing areas needing improvement.

This course concentrates on the study of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation in order to secure the basic tools of the German language. In addition to offering that introduction, classroom activities and the production of short compositions promote oral and written communication. This class will meet three times per week (90 minutes each session), twice with the main teacher and once with Ms. Mizelle, who will also meet with students individually or in small groups for an extra conference. Course materials include the textbook, Neue Horizonte (eighth edition), along with the workbook and a graded German reader. We will cover about 10 chapters from the textbook—all of the basic grammar and vocabulary that students will need to know in order to advance to the next level. There will be short written tests at the end of each chapter. Students will also be introduced to contemporary German culture through authentic materials from newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet.

This course places strong emphasis on expanding vocabulary and thoroughly reviewing grammar, as well as on developing oral and written expression. The aim of the course is to give students more fluency and to prepare them for a possible junior year in Germany. Readings in the fall will consist of short stories, fairy tales, and a graphic novel called Heimat​ (Home). In the spring semester, we will focus on 20th-century stories, historical essays, and some films in order to learn about the major phases of German history and culture between 1871 and today. All materials are linguistically accessible and promote an understanding of the culture’s fundamental values and way of looking at the world. A solid grammar review, based on the book German Grammar in Review, will help students further improve their speaking and writing skills. Regular conferences with Ms. Mizelle will supplement classwork, help improve fluency and pronunciation, and emphasize conversational conventions for expressing opinions and leading discussions.

The goal of this class is to introduce students to the best practices of oral history interviewing, theory, and methodology. Around the world, oral history has been used to uncover the perspectives of marginalized groups and to challenge “official” historical narratives. Oral history is a mainstay of social history, helping researchers uncover voices that might otherwise be ignored and giving people the opportunity to “speak back” to the past. In this regard, oral history is a crucial method in a historian’s toolkit. Life histories enable us to focus on individual experiences and consider the historical significance of one person’s life. Long used by anthropologists and sociologists, life-history methods continue to be rediscovered by historians seeking to enrich their understanding of the past. Conducting oral-history research involves a great deal more than sitting back and pressing “play” on a recording device. Researchers must approach their work with knowledge, rigor, respect, and compassion. Toward the goal of developing substantive research skills, this class will focus on several important questions associated with oral history: What is the role of memory, and how does memory function in the process of conducting oral history? What is the role of intersubjectivity, and how much does the researcher influence the interview process? How should researchers catalog and disseminate their work to make it accessible to a wide audience? What are the political and ethical considerations of doing oral-history or life-history research, and how are they different from other types of history methodologies? Final projects for this class may include podcasts, film, creative work, or an analytical paper.

In 1900, China was a faltering empire ruled by an autocratic foreign dynastic house and an entrenched bureaucracy of Confucian officials. Its sovereignty heavily battered and its territory compromised by foreign powers, China was commonly called “The Sick Man of Asia.” In 2000, China was a modern nation-state ruled by an authoritarian party and an entrenched bureaucracy of technocrats and administrators. With a surging economy, swollen foreign reserves, dazzling modern cities, and a large and technologically advanced military, China is regularly predicted to be the next global superpower. Yet, the path between these two startlingly different points was anything but smooth. China’s 20th century was a tortuous one. Policymakers, elites, and the common people oscillated between the poles of reform and revolution—bouts of wild radicalism alternated with more sober policies—as they pursued changes that they hoped would bring a better society and nation. This class examines some of the major events and personalities of this arduous century and its momentous political, social, and cultural changes. We will learn and apply skills of historical analysis to primary documents (in translation), some fiction, and film. Along the way, we will encounter a rich cast of characters, including Sun Yat-sen, China’s “national father”; colorful warlords; corrupt bureaucrats; fervent intellectuals; protesting youths; heroic communist martyrs; the towering and enigmatic chairman Mao; long-suffering peasants; and fanatical Red Guards. These men and women made and remade modern China. This class is history and, thus, is not primarily concerned with contemporary China; but, by the end of the year, students will be well-equipped with an understanding of China’s recent past, knowledge that will help immeasurably in making sense of today’s China as it becomes increasingly important in our globalized economy and society. This seminar is open to first-year students as a First-Year Studies course, as well as to sophomores, juniors, and seniors as an open seminar. All students will complete an individual research (conference) project each semester; these projects will be guided through one-on-one meetings. For those taking this class as an FYS, conferences in the fall semester will consist of biweekly individual meetings, with a group session held on alternate weeks to discuss matters concerning all FYS students (e.g., the nature of academic work in general and the various skills related to conference work, such as research, reading, writing, and editing). All conferences in the spring, for all students, will be on the regular biweekly individual schedule.

Though our nation was born in conflict and is sustained by conflict, the present always seems inevitable; surely, the United States of 2024 is but the flowering of the seeds planted so many centuries ago. To imagine that the Revolutionary War ended in failure and that the Founding Fathers were hanged and the names of loyalists such as Hutchinson and Arnold were as much on our lips as Washington, Adams, and Jefferson seems blasphemous. Or to imagine celebrating the loyalist William Franklin as a hero, rather than his father Benjamin, seems utterly absurd. The world just wouldn’t be what it is if, instead of calling ourselves American, we identified ourselves as Canadian. The melodic themes of liberty, dissent, and equality would seem less lyrical if Americans could no longer claim them as their own. But would our understanding of American identity be richer if we viewed these themes as forged in conflict? To this end, the course will focus on those groups who were on the losing side of major political conflicts from the American Revolution to the Civil War—namely, the loyalists, the Anti-Federalists, the Federalists, the Whigs, and the Confederacy. The course will also consider the ultimate losers in these conflicts—those who were denied political rights altogether and, thus, even the possibility of victory. What did the treatment of those different political groups reveal about the extent of—and limits to—American acceptance of dissent? How did a culture that placed a premium on success and achievement regard loss and defeat? How was the South able to turn the defeat of the Confederacy into a badge of honor and a source of pride through the idealization of The Lost Cause? What was the long-term legacy that those losing groups left behind? When viewed from this perspective, were those groups really losers at all? After all, without the Anti-Federalists, there would have been no Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Ultimately, the course aims to cultivate a “tragic” perspective that goes beyond viewing history in terms of winners and losers, heroes and villains, and instead recognizes that, in the final analysis, we are all in bondage to the knowledge that we possess.

When World War II ended, Europe was a continent of displaced peoples. It was a continent on the move: returning POWs, emigrating Displaced Persons, refugees, and arriving occupation soldiers. The postwar period is sometimes dubbed a history of the unwinding of populations, the return or resettlement following the logic of nation states. Yet the assumption that, once that was done and the Cold War started, populations stayed put until 1989 is misleading. Successive attempted revolutions in the East begat more political refugees. Decolonization and industrialization resulted in the immigration and recruitment of non-native European populations, as well as the return of European colonial settlers. In addition, Europeans moved to the cities, turning the continent from one in which almost half the population lived in the countryside in 1950 into a predominantly urbanized one within the span of 30 years. Political crisis abroad, Europeanization, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and globalization led to still more mobility. The so-called migration crisis of 2015 is, thus, but one of a series of migratory events and, by far, not the largest. This lecture introduces students to the history of Europe, both east and west, since 1945. The movements of peoples and borders will provide students with insight into political, cultural, and social developments of the continent following the defeat of the Third Reich.

We are surrounded—even bombarded—by information. And like a biological ecosystem, there are many interconnecting components and places in our information ecosystem. In this course, we will survey some of the different types of information. We’ll explore how to find, evaluate, and contextualize information, as well as how to use it in our research. We’ll interrogate the power structure of information classification systems, the practice of libraries and archives, and the privileging of some kinds of knowledge—and knowledge makers—over others. The course will combine theory and practice and will be applicable across all information types and fields of inquiry.

This introduction to Japanese language and culture is designed for students who have had little or no experience learning Japanese. The goal of the course is to develop four basic skills: listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing (hiragana, katakana, and some basic kanji) in modern Japanese, with an emphasis on grammatical accuracy and socially appropriate language use. Students will put these skills into practice through in-class conversation, role play and group work, and biweekly homework assignments. In addition to classes with the faculty instructor, there are weekly, one-on-one tutorials with one of the Japanese language assistants.

Students will continue to develop basic skills in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing while expanding their vocabulary and knowledge of grammar. At the end of the course, students should be able to effectively handle simple communicative tasks and situations, understand simple daily conversations, write short essays, read simple essays, and discuss their content. In addition to classes with the faculty instructors, there are weekly, one-on-one tutorials with one of the Japanese language assistants.

The aim of this seminar is to advance students’ Japanese language proficiency in speaking and listening, reading (simple essays to authentic texts), and writing in various styles (emails, essays, and/or creative writing). In addition to classes with the faculty instructor, there are weekly, one-on-one tutorials with one of the Japanese language assistants.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, a small group of American writers published a series of books that, by virtue of their quality, brought a new richness to American literature. This American renaissance, as the literary historian F. O. Matthiessen called it, had at its center a belief in “the possibilities of democracy.” It was an undertaking that sought to fulfill the hopes unleashed generations earlier by the American Revolution. This course will focus on the prose masterworks of the American renaissance writers and two of their successors, Henry James and Mark Twain. We will begin with a memoir, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, continue with Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and then move on to four novels: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The aim of this course is to look closely at a set of representative texts and to see in them a modernity in which their central characters (in the case of Douglass and Thoreau, the authors themselves) defy the limits of the society in which they grew up and—in the extreme case of The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne, who has a child out of wedlock in Puritan New England—lose the right to privacy.

This course will introduce students to the poetry produced and read in England during the period 1150–1500, with particular emphasis on the literary phenomenon of the “dream vision.” Typically, dream-vision narratives adhere to a sequence in which an anguished dreamer falls asleep, wakes in a beautiful otherworld, encounters a guide, and ultimately wakes from the dream before its significance can be explained. The audience is left to interpret the “vision.” These medieval dream-visions predate Freud’s theory of “the interpretation of dreams” by 500 years, yet they suggest eerily similar insights about personality, self-delusion, and self-discovery. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how authors such as Chaucer, the Pearl-poet, William Langland, and the anonymous compilers of Middle English romance capitalized on the dream-vision as a “safe-space” to explore controversial topics. Alongside works by these authors, we will look at scientific literature on medieval psychology, as well as digital images from the manuscripts discussed in class. In biweekly group conferences, students will interrogate the role of the medieval dream-vision through an inclusive collision of perspectives. Throughout, the course will embrace a broader set of questions: If dreams—like poems—need to be interpreted in order to be understood, does this suggest that poetry is capable of producing knowledge? What, ultimately, is the “value” or “purpose” of poetry?

Fernando Pessoa wrote, “Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.” This intriguing insight into the nature of travel offers the starting point for an exploration of a diverse selection of modern and contemporary literature. We will explore travel literature as a site for documentation and transformation of personal and collective experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will also make our own forays into travel writing with weekly field notebook exercises, involving disciplined training in practices of perception, studies of terrain, note-taking and creative nonfiction writing. Major topics of the course include exile, memory, migration, fantasy, ruins, mapping, dislocation, borders, bardo. Authors may include W.G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Christa Wolf, William Gardner Smith, Antal Szerb, E.M. Forster, Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Bhanu Kapil, Ocean Vuong, Cristina Rivera Garza, Samanta Schweblin, Yoko Tawada, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Robert Macfarlane, Saidiya Hartman, Han Kang, among others. This course will have biweekly conferences; for students in a first-year cohort, weekly conferences will be held in the first 6 weeks of the fall semester.

This course provides an introduction to the diverse field of literary theory. The elusive question—What is literature?—has been addressed in widely differently ways by linguists, historians, philosophers, writers, psychoanalysts, hackers, revolutionaries, and so on, and in different times and places. The concept of literature has at times been substituted by other words, such as text, writing, sign, machine, affect, performance, and network, to name a few, which necessarily require changes in our understanding of related concepts, such as author, audience, and context. We will explore experimental approaches to the writing of criticism as a part of our study of literary theory.

“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are dramatic—and so are the steps leading to marriage in the other classic marriage-plot novels with which this course begins. From Jane Austen’s Emma, to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the novels we read in the first half of this yearlong course reflect the thinking of the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Nothing, in short, is “conventional” about the 19th-century English and American classics of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and James that we will study. They lead directly to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and the modern novels that we will take on in the second half of the course, which range from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Love and romance are at the heart of the books that will dominate our reading, but so are laughs and gender politics in addition to the heartache that is part of any serious relationship.

From the years leading to World War II to its aftermath, French writers published some of the most important works of 20th-century Western literature; this course will explore several of these masterpieces in the cultural and historical context of that period, from existentialism in Sartre’s Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944), to the philosophy of the absurd in Camus’ The Stranger (1942) and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1949/1953), and finally the feminist revolution brought by Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1949). Other extremely important questions will also be the focus of our discussions, such as the role and influence of the French Communist party, the colonial presence of France in Algeria (we will read Kamel Daoud’s 2013 The Meursault Investigation, a response to Camus) and the active participation of France in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps. (We will read excerpts of Irène Nemirovsky’s novel Suite Française, which she was working on when she was arrested in 1942 and whose manuscript was only discovered and published in 2004.) Finally, we will also look into the importance of psychoanalysis, as developed by Jacques Lacan, and the rise of structuralism with Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, which is in part a response to Sartre’s 1948 What is Literature?

In the final chapter of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel, her heroine—while still in her 20s—looks back on her life and describes herself as being born twice. With a cheerful irony, she observes that she is now “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road.” She has, she believes, gained a hard-won perspective on herself and her world that she did not have at the start of her story. In this self-description, Plath’s heroine is like a series of figures in the classic coming-of-age novels of 20th-century American literature. She wants the kind of knowledge that will allow her to lead a meaningful life, not simply climb the ladder of success. This course will trace the history of the coming-of-age novel in 20th-century America, generation by generation, from the turn of the century through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. We will end with America’s rise as a superpower. In addition to Sylvia Plath, the authors that we study will include Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and J. D. Salinger. In its traditional form, the coming-of-age novel traces the life and education of a central figure from early childhood to early adulthood, typically ending around the central figure’s 30th birthday. In this course, a number of coming-of-age novels expand this tradition to include multiple characters and whole families. The books that we will study reflect the inequities of American society, whether rooted in race or wealth or gender; but what unifies the central figures in these books is that, in the end, they see themselves defined by their self-understanding rather than by their origins.

Some of the greatest dramatic literature is set in an era preceding its composition. This is always true of a form of dramatic literature that we usually call by a different name (Plato’s dialogues), but it is also true of some of the most celebrated drama—plays that we identify with the core of the Western theatrical tradition (for example, much of Greek tragedy)—and it is very famously true of some of the greatest works of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Corneille. We will read, slowy and carefully, Shakespeare's second tetralogy: Richard II; Henry IV, pt., 1; Henry IV, pt. 2; and Henry V. Some of the best contemporary playwrights set some of their work in the past: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia are all, in one or another sense, history plays. Setting a play in the past can create and exploit dramatic irony—the audience knows the history to come, the protagonists usually cannot—but there is no single reason for setting a play in the past. For some playwrights, history provided the grandest kind of spectacle, a site of splendid and terrible (hence dramatic) events. Their treatment of the past may not depict it as radically discontinuous with the present nor necessarily different in kind. Other playwrights may make the past little more than an allegory of the present; Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) seems to be a celebration of Victorian liberal imperialism. The playwright may set work in the past as part of an urgent analysis of the origins of his own situation: Michael Frayn’s best play, Benefactors, was written in 1984 but set in the late 1960s and attempts to locate the causes of a then-recent collapse of political liberalism, seeking in history an answer that could be found only there. But another of Frayn’s plays with a historical setting, Copenhagen, does not necessarily focus on something irretrievably past; its interests may rather be concentrated on a living problem of undiminished urgency. Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, arguably the most successful work of 1960s political theatre, was a history play focused on what then seemed the explicit and unbreakable link between late 18th-century politics and the politics of the present. And a play by Alan Bennett, The History Boys, seeks to illuminate something about the political present by examining a changing fashion in the teaching of history. In any event, we will read a number of works of dramatic literature, all of them in one sense or another history plays written for various purposes and generally of very high quality. We may or may not discover anything common to all history plays, but we will read some good books.

Comedy is a startlingly various form, and it operates with a variety of logics: It can be politically conservative or starkly radical, savage or gentle, optimistic or despairing. In this course, we will explore some comic modes—from philosophical comedy to modern film—and examine a few theories of comedy. A tentative reading list includes Simon Critchley's On Humour; a Platonic dialogue (the Protagoras); plays by Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, and Molière; some Restoration comedy; and dramatic comedies by by Oscar Wilde, David Ives, and Tom Stoppard. This reading list is subject to revision.

When used well, mathematics is a powerful set of tools for understanding the world. When used in other ways, mathematics can serve to uphold and perpetuate inequality and injustice. In this class, we will investigate how we can use mathematical tools to understand, document, and work against inequity and injustice, including topics such as voting rights, health disparities, access to education, “big data” algorithms that control aspects of our lives, the carceral system, and environmental justice. Students of all mathematical levels are welcome.

What does it mean to understand a mathematical concept? In this course, we will explore children’s mathematical thinking and how they develop understanding of foundational concepts like number, place value, counting, operations, whole numbers, fractions, proportion, and algebra. These ideas have profound and rich mathematics underlying them, sometimes in surprising ways. As you reflect on and communicate about your own mathematical thinking and beliefs, you will deepen your understanding of these ideas. We will also explore the math that children know and how they think about mathematics, how different groups of students experience mathematics learning, and what types of learning activities facilitate learning with understanding. This is not a methods course but does contain some essential elements of pedagogy and learning activities.

Courses listed below are yearlong.

MUSC 5002 - Composition

Patrick Muchmore, John Yannelli

MUSC 5010 - Harpsichord

Carsten Schmidt

MUSC 5013 - Piano

Martin Goldray, Barbara Mort-Zieff, Carsten Schmidt

MUSC 5019 - Piano (Jazz)

William I. Lester

MUSC 5020 - Voice

Kirsten Brown, Mary Phillips, Thomas Young

MUSC 5030 - Flute

Roberta Michel

MUSC 5034 - Trumpet

Christopher Anderson

MUSC 5035 - Clarinet

Benjamin Fingland

MUSC 5036 - Trombone

Jen Baker

MUSC 5038 - Saxophone

John Isley

MUSC 5039 - Bassoon

James Jeter

MUSC 5040 - Oboe

Stuart Breczinski

MUSC 5043- Organ

Martin Goldray

MUSC 5044 - Euphonium

Mark Broschinsky

MUSC 5050 - Violin

Ragnhildur Petursdottir, Richard Rood

MUSC 5052 - Viola

Junah Chung

MUSC 5055 - Violoncello

Helen An-Lin Bardin

MUSC 5057 - Harp

Amelia Theodoratus

MUSC 5058 - Contrabass

Mark Helias

MUSC 5071 - Acoustic Guitar

William K. Anderson

MUSC 5072 - Guitar (Jazz/Blues)

Glenn Alexander

MUSC 5073 - Electric Bass (Jazz/Blues)

Bill Moring

MUSC 5075 - Banjo

William K. Anderson

MUSC 5078 - Mandolin

William K. Anderson

MUSC 5080 - Percussion (Drum Set)

Matthew E. Wilson

MUSC 5080 - Percussion (Mallet)

Ian Antonio

This is a beginning course in basic vocal technique. Each student’s vocal needs are met within the structure and content of the class.

This course is for beginning students in either acoustic or electric guitar.

This course is designed to accommodate beginning piano students who take Keyboard Lab as the core of their Music Third. This instruction takes place in a group setting, with eight keyboard stations and one master station. Students will be introduced to elementary keyboard technique and simple piano pieces.

In this course, we will study elements of music such as pitch, rhythm, intensity, and timbre. We will see how they combine in various musical structures and how those structures communicate. Studies will include notation and ear training, as well as theoretical exercises, rudimentary analyses, and the study of repertoire from various eras of Western music. This course will meet twice each week (two 90-minute sessions).

As a skill-building course in the language of tonal music, this course covers diatonic harmony and voice leading, elementary counterpoint, and simple forms. Students will develop an understanding through part writing, analysis, composition, and aural skills. 

Students in this course will study the building blocks and concepts of jazz theory, harmony, and rhythm. This will include the study of the standard modes and scales, as well as the use of melodic and harmonic minor scales and their respective modals systems. The course will include the study and application of diminished and augmented scales and their role in harmonic progression, particularly the diminished chord as a parental structure. In-depth study will be given to harmony and harmonic progression through analysis and memorization of triads, extensions, and alterations, as well as substitute chords, re-harmonization, and back cycling. We will look at polytonality and the superposition of various hybrid chords over different bass tones and other harmonic structures. We will study and apply all of the above to their characteristic and stylistic genres, including bebop, modal, free, and progressive jazz. The study of rhythm, which is possibly the single most-important aspect of jazz, will be a primary focus, as well. We will also use composition as a way to absorb and truly understand the concepts discussed.

This course will be an examination of various theoretical approaches to music of the 20th century, including post-tonal, serial, textural, minimalist, and pop/rock music. Our primary text will be Joseph Straus’s Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, but we will also explore other relevant texts—including scores and recordings of the works themselves. This course will include study of the music of Schoenberg, Webern, Pink Floyd, Ligeti, Bartók, Reich, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Corigliano, and Del Tredici, among others.

If you’re wondering what class is essentially “Theory III,” it’s this one. We’ll begin with a review of diatonic harmony and voice leading, but then we’ll jump into the world of chromatic harmony. We’ll discuss sequences, as well as techniques for modulation, before moving into an in-depth discussion of many different formal structures such as fugue, through-composed songs, and sonata form. The year will end with a discussion of extensions of the tonal idea ,such as basic jazz chords and neo-tonality. Composers discussed will include the usual suspects from the common-practice Baroque, Classical, and, especially, Romantic eras but also will extend to more recent examples, such as Debussy, Ravel, Davis, Coltrane, Talma, Price, and Glass.

In this course, students will focus on the basics of arranging and orchestrating for small to medium sized ensembles. Offered in partnership with the Jazz Colloquium ensemble, students will write for the instrumentation of the ensemble and will have the opportunity to hear their arrangements performed by Jazz Colloquium. This course introduces students to the techniques of arranging and orchestration for two-horn, three-horn, and four-horn jazz ensembles. Students will study the classic repertoire of small to medium sized jazz groups, and create small ensemble arrangements in various styles. Materials for study will be drawn from throughout the history of jazz and contemporary/commercial arranging practices.

This course is a chronological survey of Western music from the Middle Ages to the present. We will explore the cyclical nature of music that mirrors philosophical and theoretical ideas established in Ancient Greece and how that cycle most notably reappears every 300 years: the Ars nova of the 14th century, Le nuove musiche of the 17th century, and the New Music of the 20th century and beyond. The course involves reading, listening, and class discussions that focus on significant compositions of the Western musical tradition, the evolution of form, questions of aesthetics, and historical perspective. There will be occasional quizzes during the fall term; short, written summary papers or class presentations are required in the spring.

A while ago I went to a visual arts museum, and they had their collection displayed in an unusual fashion. Instead of grouping art in rooms according to genre, chronology, nationality or particular artists, the art was arranged by intriguing concepts. A room might contain an O’Keeffe painting, a centuries-old indigenous piece from Australia, a Rodin sculpture and a poem that were in some way connected by a fascinating idea. I want to recapitulate something like this experience. Every class will begin with some concept from mathematics, poetry, philosophy, astronomy and more, and then we’ll gradually explore different music that engages with that concept in some way. The musical examples every week will span centuries and cultures—one week might have an avant-grade piano sonata by Boulez, a 1980s art-rock song by Laurie Anderson and a Kendrick Lamar album; the next week might have an ancient Sumerian song, a piece by Debussy and a work from the Indian Carnatic tradition. Gradually, more and more connections between the seemingly disparate topics will be revealed. So, ok, it isn’t everything exactly—and it’s more like “across the course of two semesters” rather than “all at once”—but you will know a whole lot more across a wide range of disciplines by the end. And, most importantly, we’ll listen to a metric ton of fantastic music. 

Out of one of the worst atrocities of humanity, we were gifted with the extraordinary music that would become known as the blues. In this class, we will explore and analyze the origins of the blues, the uniqueness of this great American art form, and how it is related to jazz but takes a completely different path—ultimately leading us to rock ‘n’ roll and all forms of popular music. We will dissect the unique components of the blues, which defied conventional music theory as we knew it, made it different from any music that came before it, and out of which rock ‘n’ roll was born. Through listening to and analyzing these early developments, from African drumming pieces to field hollers, work songs, spirituals, early country blues, Delta blues, urban blues, and Chicago electric blues, we will discover the African culture and musical concepts that survived and how they are the foundation of every part of popular music—be it jazz, Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, country, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, gospel, funk, rhythm & blues, hip hop, rap, Brazilian, and on and on. We will study the unique African contributions of music in form, rhythm, melody, tone, and timbre that has now permeated all styles of music. Without this incredible, invaluable, unique contribution, our music today would be very different—and there would have been no Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross & The Supremes, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and on and on and on...right up to every new artist today.

In this course, we will examine and try to understand the magic that happens when words and music combine in song. Song will be defined broadly. Most of our repertoire will be drawn from Western music history, and the range of compositions will be extraordinary: from the chants of Hildegard von Bingen to the often esoteric and intricate motets of the Ars Nova, from the late Renaissance madrigals to early and romantic opera, and from the art songs of Schubert and Debussy to experimental contemporary works. There also may be some in-class performances. Participants will be responsible for regular listening and reading assignments, listening exams, and group presentations. There will be no conferences, but we will have regular individual and group consultations to help prepare presentations and papers. For the three credit lecture, there will be a number of shorter paper assignments. 

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as a recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of songwriting technique, producing one musical milestone after the next. This class will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically through their 12 original English albums and the singles that were released alongside them. We will focus on the ways The Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, and sonority in continuously innovative ways. We will also look at some of the of musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed—from early rock & roll, Motown and the Goon Show to 1960s counterculture—and explore how The Beatles, in turn, influenced music and culture in the 1960s. There will also be guest-led discussions by other members of the music faculty on the following topics: The Beatles and the evolution of studio recording, the use of electronic music techniques (Yannelli), Norwegian Wood and the great sitar explosion (Higgins), electric guitar techniques (Alexander), and acoustic guitar techniques (Anderson). 

This course will explore the relationship of listening, music, and sound across different cultural and historical contexts. Recent scholarship on listening and sound has revealed how listening plays a crucial role in the formulation of theories about music, and we will study how various ideas about listening inform contemporary understandings of music and sound. Drawing from research from the field of sound studies, cultural theory, and ethnographic case studies from ethnomusicology and anthropology, we will understand key concepts of listening with specific musical and sonic examples. Course units may include technologies of listening, listening as an impetus for empathy and to stimulate political action, strategies for listening to cultural and musical difference, and music and sound as tools for torture and healing. Individual class sessions may include sound technologies such as the phonograph, the MP3, the recording studio, and AI; soundscapes; music therapy; and the listening contexts of individual genres, such as South African pop, Buddhist chant, Arabic maqamat, lofi hip hop, muzak, and EDM. Participation in either African Classics or the Balinese Gamelan Chandra Buana is strongly encouraged. No prior music experience is necessary.

This seminar will focus on the widely practiced creative process of musical improvisation. Using footage of live performances, reading and listening assignments, and class discussions, we will learn to hear and understand improvisation as an array of specific choices as musicians from different backgrounds progress through their performances. We will question how personal expression and cultural context shape creativity, which will reveal improvisation as an intrinsic form of adaptation that is essential to artistic expression, communication, and survival. Using a cross-cultural perspective, we will examine the similarities and differences of musical improvisation around the world, exploring themes such as freedom, community, free will, determinism, social justice, ethnicity, race, nationalism, class, gender, and sexuality. Using ethnomusicology’s interdisciplinary approach to learning about music and culture, this seminar will draw from anthropology, linguistics, social theory, sociology, psychology, and artists’ personal accounts. Class topics may include music in Turkey, Egypt, West Africa, India, Cantonese opera, 20th-century experimental art music, improvised singing games in Nepal, free improvisation, international and American jazz, and turn tabling and DJing. Participation in the Faso Foli, SLC’s African percussion ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

This course will examine punk rock as a musical style and as a vehicle for cultural opposition. We will examine the musical, cultural, and political conditions that gave birth to the genre in the 1970s and trace its continuing evolution through the early 2000s in dialogue with, and sometimes in opposition to, other musical genres such as progressive rock, heavy metal, ska, and reggae. We will begin with the influence of minimalism on “proto-punk” artists such as Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, which will provide a foundation for seeing how minimalism—as well as modernism, atonality, and electronic music—continued to resonate in punk and rock music generally. We will examine the intellectual background of early UK punk with readings by Guy Debord and Situationist International and look at the theories of Gramsci and Foucault on the question of institutional power structures and the possibility of resistance to them. To deepen our understanding of punk style and the culture of opposition, there will also be readings by Adorno, Bakhtin, Barthes, Antonin Artaud, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and others. We will trace the splintering of punk into various sub-genres and the challenges of negotiating the music industry and remaining “authentic” in a commercialized culture. Another major focus will be the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s as the catalyst for third-wave feminism. Given the DIY aesthetic at the heart of punk—in addition to listening to, analyzing, and reading about the music—students who want to get creative will be given the opportunity to work with musicians and write some punk songs. In light of the large amount of valuable documentary film footage relating to punk culture, the course will include a film viewing every other week. 

We’ll begin in Babel itself, the ancient site of Babylon, where archaeologists have discovered many tablets about music. Nearby sites have the earliest examples of musical notation, some dating as far back as 1400 BCE. We’ll learn some aspects of how their music worked and begin building a vocabulary for talking about and notating music in general. Across the course of the semester, we’ll learn many different musical languages, such as the music of Ancient Greece, the old court music of Japan, drum ensembles of central Africa, and the world of European classical music. We’ll also delve into many different modern musics, including the rise of sampling and turntablism in hip-hop, the theory of so-called “atonal” music, and the development of electronic sound. In short, the class will be devoted to learning a sampling of crucial aspects of the multitudinous vocabularies and grammars that pervade music across the world and across time. No prior study of nor ability to read music is required to take the class. By the end of the semester, students will be able to read basic musical ideas in a few different notation systems and will have some understanding of important aspects of not only standard European music theories but also many others that are too often learned only by specialists.

The Sarah Lawrence Electronic Music Studio is a state-of-the art facility dedicated to the instruction and development of electronic music composition. The studio contains the latest in digital audio hardware and software for synthesis, recording, and signal processing, along with a full complement of vintage analog synthesizers and tape machines. Beginning students will start with an introduction to the equipment, basic acoustics, and principles of studio recording; signal processing; and a historical overview of the medium. Once students have acquired a certain level of proficiency with the equipment and material—usually by the second semester—the focus will be on preparing compositions that will be heard in concerts of electronic music, student composers’ concerts, music workshops, and open concerts.

This course will focus on creating electronic music, primarily using software-based digital audio workstations. Materials covered will include MIDI, ProTools, Digital Performer, Logic, Reason, Ableton Live, MaxMsp, Traction, and elements of Sibelius and Finale (as connected to media scoring). Class assignments will focus on composing individual works and/or creating music and designing sound for various media, such as film, dance, and interactive performance art. Students in this course may also choose to evolve collaborative projects with students from those other areas. Projects will be presented in class for discussion and critique.

Students will work on individual projects involving aspects of music technology—including, but not limited to, works for electro-acoustic instruments (live and/or prerecorded), works involving interactive performance media, laptop ensembles, Disklavier, and improvised or through-composed works. Projects will be presented in class for discussion and critique.

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of recording sound for film and moving images. Sound is crucial to immerse viewers in a performance, whether through clearly recorded dialogue or through field recordings made in a landscape. This relies on the recordings made by the sound recordist, or production sound mixer, and we will deconstruct and learn what this important role entails. We will cover different approaches to recording sound, including for documentary, narrative, and experimental works. Through hands-on practical demonstrations and class participation, we will learn how to best capture high-quality audio during production, focusing on the critical relationship between sound and image. Topics include dialogue recording, field recordings, sound effects, portable recorders, boom mic operation and techniques, lavalier microphone operation and techniques, cross-department collaboration, and synchronization with camera. Each week, we will better familiarize ourselves with different aspects of recording sound while opening up ourselves to the technical and conceptual possibilities present in the medium. By the end of the course, students will be proficient with sound recording equipment and have the tools necessary to record high-quality sound on a film set or for their next project.

This performance ensemble is geared toward learning and performing various traditional, as well as hybrid, styles of blues music. The blues, like jazz, is a purely American art form. Students will learn and investigate Delta Blues—performing songs by Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Skip James, and others—as well as Texas Country Blues by originators such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Chicago Blues, beginning with Big Bill Broonzy and moving up through Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy. Students will also learn songs and stylings by Muddy Waters, Albert King, and B. B. King and learn how they influenced modern blues men such as Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughn and pioneer rockers such as Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix.

This ensemble will meet weekly to rehearse and perform a wide variety of modern jazz music and other related styles. Repertoire in the past has included works by composers Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock, as well as some rock, Motown, and blues. All instruments are welcome.

This class is intended for all instrumentalists and will provide a “hands-on” study of topics relating to the performance of jazz music. The class will meet as an ensemble, but the focus will not be on rehearsing repertoire and giving concerts. Instead, students will focus on improving jazz playing by applying the topic at hand directly to instruments—and immediate feedback on the performance will be given. The workshop environment will allow students to experiment with new techniques as they develop their sound. Topics include jazz chord/scale theory; extensions of traditional tonal harmony; altered chords; modes; scales; improvising on chord changes; analyzing a chord progression or tune; analysis of form; performance and style study, including swing, Latin, jazz-rock, and ballade styles; and ensemble technique. The format can be adapted to varying instrumentation and levels of proficiency.

No longer do vocalists need to share valuable time with those wanting to focus primarily on instrumental jazz and vice versa. This ensemble will be dedicated to providing a performance-oriented environment for the aspiring jazz vocalist. We will mostly concentrate on picking material from the standard jazz repertoire. Vocalists will get an opportunity to work on arrangements, interpretation, delivery, phrasing, and intonation in a realistic situation with a live rhythm section and soloists. They will learn how to work with, give direction to, and get what they need from the rhythm section. The ensemble will provide an environment to learn to hear forms and changes and also to work on vocal improvisation, if students so choose. This course will not only give students an opportunity to work on singing solo or lead vocals but also to work with other vocalists in singing backup or harmony vocals for and with each other. It will also serve as a great opportunity for instrumentalists to learn the true art of accompanying the jazz vocalist, which will prove to be a valuable experience in preparing for a career as a professional musician.

This ensemble, which is open to the entire Sarah Lawrence community, focuses on repertoire from all periods of classical music that is especially suited for a group of this size. Although the pieces studied will be of major composers, a special emphasis will be placed on music from underrepresented composers. The repertoire will be both accompanied and a cappella. There will be both a winter and a spring concert.

This course is an exploration of the relationship of melody, harmony, rhythm, text, and style and how those elements can be combined and manipulated to create meaning and beauty. A significant level of vocal development will be expected and required.

Students in this class will focus on the performance of instrumental and vocal repertoire from c. 1600-1750. Weekly coachings will be supplemented by sessions that introduce students to some basic principles of Baroque performance practices. The work of this class will culminate in a concert at the end of the semester.

In this course, saxophone students will prepare material arranged specifically for saxophone emsemble and drawing from all genres of music: classical, jazz, and contemporary styles. The course will stress instrumental technique, as well as ensemble and performance rehearsal methods and approaches. There will be at least one public performance per term.

This ensemble will cover the US folk-rock music movement from Guthrie through the hippies, including union songs and protest songs. Singers and guitarists at any level are welcome, as are singers who play some guitar and guitarists who sing.

For singers and/or guitarists, this ensemble will take on any Beatles songs that work with acoustic guitar. Singers and guitarists at any level are welcome, as are singers who play some guitar and guitarists who sing.

This is an experimental performing ensemble that explores a variety of musical styles and techniques, including free improvisation, improvisational conducting, and various other chance-based methods. The ensemble is open to all instruments (acoustic and electric), voice, electronic synthesizers, and laptop computers. Students must be able to demonstrate a level of proficiency on their chosen instrument. Composer-performers, dancers, and actors are also welcome. Performance opportunities will include concerts and collaboration with other programs, such as dance, theatre, film, and performance art, as well as community outreach.

Various chamber groups—from quartets or quintets to violin and piano duos—are formed each year, depending on the number and variety of qualified instrumentalists who apply. Groups will have an opportunity to perform at the end of each semester in a chamber music concert.

This component offers students the opportunity to share with the larger College community the results of their sustained work in performance study. During the semester of their recital, students will receive additional coachings by their principal teachers (instructor varies by instrument).

A gamelan angklung is a bronze orchestra that includes four-toned metallophones, gongs, drums, and flutes. Rhythmic patterns played upon the instruments interlock and combine to form large structures of great complexity and beauty. The gamelan angklung that we will play was specially handcrafted in Bali for the College and was named Chandra Buana, or “Moon Earth,” at its dedication on April 16, 2000, in Reisinger Concert Hall. Any interested student may join; no previous experience with music is necessary.

Faso Foli is the name of our West African performance ensemble. Faso foli is a Malinke phrase that translates loosely as “playing to my father’s home.” In this class, we will develop the ability to play expressive melodies and intricate polyrhythms in a group context, as we recreate the celebrated musical legacy of the West African Mandé Empire. These traditions have been kept alive and vital through creative interpretation and innovation in Africa, the United States, and other parts of the world. Correspondingly, our repertoire will reflect a wide range of expressive practices, both ancient in origin and dynamic in contemporary performance. The instruments we play—balafons, dun dun drums, and djembe hand drums—were constructed for the College in 2006, handcrafted by master builders in Guinea. Relevant instrumental techniques will be taught in the class, and no previous experience with African musical practice is assumed. Any interested student may join.

From highlife and jújù in Nigeria, to soukous and makossa in Congo and Cameroon, to the sounds of Manding music in Guinea and “Swinging Addis” in Ethiopia, the decades following World War II saw an explosion of musical creativity that blossomed across sub-Saharan Africa. Syncretic styles merging African aesthetics with European, Caribbean, and American influences and instruments resulted in vibrant new musical genres that harken back to traditional African sources while exploring bold and original musical forms. As European powers formally withdrew from their former colonies, newly inspired African musicians took advantage of broadened artistic resources and created vital, contemporary musical expressions. This performance course will explore a wide range of African musical styles that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. We will undertake a broad musical history, considering prominent groups and individual musicians during this time period, and will perform tightly structured arrangements of some of their most effective and influential pieces There will be some opportunities for genre-appropriate improvisation and soloing. A wide range of instruments will be welcome, including strings, horns, guitars, keyboards, drums, and various percussion instruments. Basic facility on one’s musical instrument is expected, but prior experience with African musical aesthetics is not assumed or required.

The music faculty wants students to have access to a variety of musical experiences; therefore, all Music Thirds are required to attend all Music Tuesday events and three music department-sponsored concerts on campus per semester, including concerts presented by music faculty and outside professionals that are part of the Concert Series. (The required number of concerts varies from semester to semester.). Music Tuesdays consist of various programs, including student/faculty town meetings, concert presentations, guest-artist lectures and performances, master classes, and collaborations with other departments and performing-arts programs. Meetings, which take place in Reisinger Concert Hall on selected Tuesdays from 1:30-3:00 p.m., are open to the community.

Master Class is a series of concerts, instrumental and vocal seminars, and lecture demonstrations pertaining to music history, world music, improvisation, jazz, composition, and music technology. Master classes take place on Wednesdays, from 12:30-1:30 p.m., in either Reisinger Concert Hall or Marshall Field House Room 1. Master classes are taught by music faculty and guest artists. The classes are open to the College community.

Music workshops are an opportunity for students to perform music that they have been studying in an informal, supportive environment. In this class, participants will present a prepared piece and receive constructive feedback from the instructor and other students. Along with the specifics of each performance, class discussion may include general performance issues such as dealing with anxiety, stage presence, and other related topics. Each term will consist of three workshops, culminating in an open concert that is a more formal recital at the end of each semester. The entire SLC community is welcome and encouraged to participate.

This FYS seminar will examine the various genres of music that have pervaded cultural life in the West, focusing on classical music, folk, rock, and punk. The first semester will begin with the foundations of classical aesthetics in ancient Greece and continue with the study of landmarks of classical music through the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods. The spring semester will begin with 19th-century romanticism and continue with the development of 20th-century modernism, the rise of mass media and technology, the splitting of culture into high and low, the rock & roll revolution, and the more recent attempts at bridging the gap between high culture and popular cultures. The students in this seminar will have weekly conferences through October Study Days and then biweekly conferences for the rest of the school year.

This course will explore the relationship between listening, music, and sound across different cultural and historical contexts. Recent scholarship on listening and sound has revealed how listening plays a crucial role in the formulation of theories about music, and we will study how various ideas about listening inform contemporary understandings of music and sound. Drawing from research from the field of sound studies, cultural theory, and ethnographic case studies from ethnomusicology and anthropology, we will understand key concepts of listening with specific musical and sonic examples. Course units may include technologies of listening, listening as an impetus for empathy and to stimulate political action, strategies for listening to cultural and musical difference, and music and sound as tools for torture and healing. Individual class sessions may include sound technologies such as the phonograph, the MP3, the recording studio, and AI; soundscapes; music therapy; and the listening contexts of individual genres such as South African pop, Buddhist chant, Arabic maqamat, lofi hip hop, Muzak, and EDM. Participation in either African Classics or the Balinese Gamelan Chandra Buana is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

A while ago I went to a visual arts museum, and they had their collection displayed in an unusual fashion. Instead of grouping art in rooms according to genre, chronology, nationality or particular artists, the art was arranged by intriguing concepts. A room might contain an O’Keeffe painting, a centuries-old indigenous piece from Australia, a Rodin sculpture and a poem that were in some way connected by a fascinating idea. I want to recapitulate something like this experience. Every class will begin with some concept from mathematics, poetry, philosophy, astronomy and more, and then we’ll gradually explore different music that engages with that concept in some way. The musical examples every week will span centuries and cultures—one week might have an avant-grade piano sonata by Boulez, a 1980s art-rock song by Laurie Anderson and a Kendrick Lamar album; the next week might have an ancient Sumerian song, a piece by Debussy and a work from the Indian Carnatic tradition. Gradually, more and more connections between the seemingly disparate topics will be revealed. So, ok, it isn’t everything exactly—and it’s more like “across the course of two semesters” rather than “all at once”—but you will know a whole lot more across a wide range of disciplines by the end. And, most importantly, we’ll listen to a metric ton of fantastic music.

This course introduces techniques for recording and editing sound for film and media. Through a hands-on approach using recording equipment and Pro Tools, students will explore creating and mixing sound design and effects, Foley, and dialogue/ADR for film and other media. Studio work will be supplemented with readings on fundamentals of acoustics and media theory, as well as recommended films.

A while ago I went to a visual arts museum, and they had their collection displayed in an unusual fashion. Instead of grouping art in rooms according to genre, chronology, nationality or particular artists, the art was arranged by intriguing concepts. A room might contain an O’Keeffe painting, a centuries-old indigenous piece from Australia, a Rodin sculpture and a poem that were in some way connected by a fascinating idea. I want to recapitulate something like this experience. Every class will begin with some concept from mathematics, poetry, philosophy, astronomy and more, and then we’ll gradually explore different music that engages with that concept in some way. The musical examples every week will span centuries and cultures—one week might have an avant-grade piano sonata by Boulez, a 1980s art-rock song by Laurie Anderson and a Kendrick Lamar album; the next week might have an ancient Sumerian song, a piece by Debussy and a work from the Indian Carnatic tradition. Gradually, more and more connections between the seemingly disparate topics will be revealed. So, ok, it isn’t everything exactly—and it’s more like “across the course of two semesters” rather than “all at once”—but you will know a whole lot more across a wide range of disciplines by the end. And, most importantly, we’ll listen to a metric ton of fantastic music. This course may be counted as humanities credit as MUHS 2040 or music component as MUSC 5276. 

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as a recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of songwriting technique, producing one musical milestone after the next. This class will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically through their 12 original English albums and the singles that were released alongside them. We will focus on the ways The Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, and sonority in continuously innovative ways. We will also look at some of the of musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed—from early rock & roll, Motown and the Goon Show to 1960s counterculture—and explore how The Beatles, in turn, influenced music and culture in the 1960s. There will also be guest-led discussions by other members of the music faculty on the following topics: The Beatles and the evolution of studio recording, the use of electronic music techniques (Yannelli), Norwegian Wood and the great sitar explosion (Higgins), electric guitar techniques (Alexander), and acoustic guitar techniques (Anderson). 

This course will explore the relationship of listening, music, and sound across different cultural and historical contexts. Recent scholarship on listening and sound has revealed how listening plays a crucial role in the formulation of theories about music, and we will study how various ideas about listening inform contemporary understandings of music and sound. Drawing from research from the field of sound studies, cultural theory, and ethnographic case studies from ethnomusicology and anthropology, we will understand key concepts of listening with specific musical and sonic examples. Course units may include technologies of listening, listening as an impetus for empathy and to stimulate political action, strategies for listening to cultural and musical difference, and music and sound as tools for torture and healing. Individual class sessions may include sound technologies such as the phonograph, the MP3, the recording studio, and AI; soundscapes; music therapy; and the listening contexts of individual genres, such as South African pop, Buddhist chant, Arabic maqamat, lofi hip hop, muzak, and EDM. Participation in either African Classics or the Balinese Gamelan Chandra Buana is strongly encouraged. No prior music experience is necessary.

In this course, we will examine and try to understand the magic that happens when words and music combine in song. Song will be defined broadly. Most of our repertoire will be drawn from Western music history, and the range of compositions will be extraordinary: from the chants of Hildegard von Bingen to the often esoteric and intricate motets of the Ars Nova, from the late Renaissance madrigals to early and romantic opera, and from the art songs of Schubert and Debussy to experimental contemporary works. There also may be some in-class performances. Participants will be responsible for regular listening and reading assignments, listening exams, and group presentations. There will be no conferences, but we will have regular individual and group consultations to help prepare presentations and papers. For the three credit lecture, there will be a number of shorter paper assignments. 

Out of one of the worst atrocities of humanity, we were gifted with the extraordinary music that would become known as the blues. In this class, we will explore and analyze the origins of the blues, the uniqueness of this great American art form, and how it is related to jazz but takes a completely different path—ultimately leading us to rock ‘n’ roll and all forms of popular music. We will dissect the unique components of the blues, which defied conventional music theory as we knew it, made it different from any music that came before it, and out of which rock ‘n’ roll was born. Through listening to and analyzing these early developments, from African drumming pieces to field hollers, work songs, spirituals, early country blues, Delta blues, urban blues, and Chicago electric blues, we will discover the African culture and musical concepts that survived and how they are the foundation of every part of popular music—be it jazz, Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, country, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, gospel, funk, rhythm & blues, hip hop, rap, Brazilian, and on and on. We will study the unique African contributions of music in form, rhythm, melody, tone, and timbre that has now permeated all styles of music. Without this incredible, invaluable, unique contribution, our music today would be very different—and there would have been no Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross & The Supremes, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and on and on and on...right up to every new artist today.

This course will examine punk rock as a musical style and as a vehicle for cultural opposition. We will examine the musical, cultural, and political conditions that gave birth to the genre in the 1970s and trace its continuing evolution through the early 2000s in dialogue with, and sometimes in opposition to, other musical genres such as progressive rock, heavy metal, ska, and reggae. We will begin with the influence of minimalism on “proto-punk” artists such as Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, which will provide a foundation for seeing how minimalism—as well as modernism, atonality, and electronic music—continued to resonate in punk and rock music generally. We will examine the intellectual background of early UK punk with readings by Guy Debord and Situationist International and look at the theories of Gramsci and Foucault on the question of institutional power structures and the possibility of resistance to them. To deepen our understanding of punk style and the culture of opposition, there will also be readings by Adorno, Bakhtin, Barthes, Antonin Artaud, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Julia Kristeva, and others. We will trace the splintering of punk into various sub-genres and the challenges of negotiating the music industry and remaining “authentic” in a commercialized culture. Another major focus will be the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s as the catalyst for third-wave feminism. Given the DIY aesthetic at the heart of punk—in addition to listening to, analyzing, and reading about the music—students who want to get creative will be given the opportunity to work with musicians and write some punk songs. In light of the large amount of valuable documentary film footage relating to punk culture, the course will include a film viewing every other week. 

This seminar will focus on the widely practiced creative process of musical improvisation. Using footage of live performances, reading and listening assignments, and class discussions, we will learn to hear and understand improvisation as an array of specific choices as musicians from different backgrounds progress through their performances. We will question how personal expression and cultural context shape creativity, which will reveal improvisation as an intrinsic form of adaptation that is essential to artistic expression, communication, and survival. Using a cross-cultural perspective, we will examine the similarities and differences of musical improvisation around the world, exploring themes such as freedom, community, free will, determinism, social justice, ethnicity, race, nationalism, class, gender, and sexuality. Using ethnomusicology’s interdisciplinary approach to learning about music and culture, this seminar will draw from anthropology, linguistics, social theory, sociology, psychology, and artists’ personal accounts. Class topics may include music in Turkey, Egypt, West Africa, India, Cantonese opera, 20th-century experimental art music, improvised singing games in Nepal, free improvisation, international and American jazz, and turn tabling and DJing. Participation in the Faso Foli, SLC’s African percussion ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

We’ll begin in Babel itself, the ancient site of Babylon, where archaeologists have discovered many tablets about music. Nearby sites have the earliest examples of musical notation, some dating as far back as 1400 BCE. We’ll learn some aspects of how their music worked and begin building a vocabulary for talking about and notating music in general. Across the course of the semester, we’ll learn many different musical languages, such as the music of Ancient Greece, the old court music of Japan, drum ensembles of central Africa, and the world of European classical music. We’ll also delve into many different modern musics, including the rise of sampling and turntablism in hip-hop, the theory of so-called “atonal” music, and the development of electronic sound. In short, the class will be devoted to learning a sampling of crucial aspects of the multitudinous vocabularies and grammars that pervade music across the world and across time. No prior study of nor ability to read music is required to take the class. By the end of the semester, students will be able to read basic musical ideas in a few different notation systems and will have some understanding of important aspects of not only standard European music theories but also many others that are too often learned only by specialists.

One of the principal activities that distinguishes us as the kinds of beings we are is that we strive to make sense of our reality: ourselves, others, the world, and perhaps even what lies beyond. Two ways that we do this are through philosophy and literature. Fairy tales, fables, myths, short stories, and novels not only fascinate and entertain but also teach us how to be in the world, present us with puzzles that deepen our understanding, and both implicitly and explicitly communicate moral lessons. Philosophy, although it assumes various forms—dialogues, meditations, phenomenologies, genealogies, pseudonymous works, aphorisms, and, of course, essays and books—aspires to offer a conceptual analysis of some of the most trenchant questions of existence: What is truth? How should we be moral? Are we free or determined in our actions? This class will investigate the intersections between these two forms of reflection. As we proceed in this investigation, we will reflect on (i) the possibility that philosophy and literature are complementary pursuits of the same end, (ii) a philosophical investigation of literature, and (iii) a consideration of philosophy itself as literature. Some topics that we will discuss are the truths communicated by ancient and modern tragedies, the various satisfactions that we derive from different forms of narrative, the structure of metaphor, the relation of a fictitious work to its author, and the ethical significance of art. We will read literary works from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ralph Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Octavia Butler, Rachel Cusk, and Maggie Nelson. Philosophical works will include Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, G. W. F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, and Cora Diamond. (Please note: This course will be reading-intensive; we will always be reading a work of fiction, and each session will have a philosophical text assigned.) Separate from the course content, we will meet biweekly as a group to discuss various topics relating to life at Sarah Lawrence. These sessions will have a particular focus on working on writing skills.

This course investigates the ways in which feminist philosophers have challenged traditional approaches to moral philosophy. We will look at feminist ethics not just as a branch of ethics (for instance, one addressing the concerns of women) but also as an approach to ethics as a whole that puts pressure on dominant moral philosophies— specifically, those inspired by Kant and Mill. Feminist philosophers have sought to correct the privileging of the male standpoint and question its characterization as neutral. Where traditional moral philosophy focuses on individual moral subjects, feminist interventions have illuminated the social and material conditions under which moral problems arise and moral actions occur. Over the course of the semester, we will consider how feminist ethics invite us to reconsider: (1) the way moral theories determine what counts as harmful or wrong; (2) how moral psychology construes our motivation to act and our responsibility for what we have done; and (3) individual social issues, including misogyny, abortion, and our thinking around sex. Our aim will be to appreciate how these thinkers expand the scope of moral consideration and to ask previously ignored or obscured questions. How does one’s upbringing shape their moral outlook, and should it change what one is responsible for? How does being oriented by care reframe what we take ethics to be about? What kinds of beings (and things) are eligible for moral consideration? Should this include animals? Or the environment? How does a feminist perspective allow us to notice systematic oppression on the grounds of race or sexuality? In working through these questions and others, some of the thinkers we will read include Elizabeth Anscombe, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Claudia Card, Patricia Hill Collins, Cora Diamond, Carol Gilligan, bell hooks, Eva Kittay, Iris Murdoch, and Margaret Walker.

Written in 1807, G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is arguably the most important book one could read to understand our modern world. The book was so pathbreaking that subsequent philosophers were compelled to contend with its claims; and it is no stretch to say that, without Hegel, there would be no Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Foucault, or even feminist theory. A book about the nature of knowledge, our relation to others, what makes an action right, the influence of culture, the value of art, and the role of religion in our lives, Phenomenology of Spirit offers a comprehensive theory of what makes life meaningful. During the course of the semester, we will read significant portions of the text as we work to comprehend Hegel’s expansive philosophical thought. Central to that thought is the contention that we achieve self-knowledge not through introspection but, rather, by looking outward to the world and to the entirety of human history. Accordingly, Phenomenology of Spirit weaves a narrative through a panoply of frameworks and practices that people have inhabited in making sense of their lives (skepticism, stoicism, science, art, religion, and philosophy). This unique narrative progresses dialectically, demonstrating how the contradictions that inhere in one framework or practice generate a new framework or practice, which ultimately gives way to “Absolute Knowing.”

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, first published in German in 1921, consists of seven main “propositions.” The first is “1. The world is all that is the case”; the last, “7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Between the two are some 90 pages of notoriously enigmatic statements—on topics ranging from religion and mysticism to science and logic, language, subjectivity, and thinking—that have fascinated readers for more than a century. While the Tractatus has become one of the canonical texts of analytical philosophy, it is also among the most influential texts of 20th-century philosophy more generally. Its laconic brevity and oracular style make it an excellent platform for practicing close, collective, philosophical reading and conversation in the seminar setting. We will read it together, line by line, in and out of class, alongside secondary texts that exemplify its range of influence and competing interpretations from analytic to continental philosophy. We will conclude the class by looking at and reflecting on Wittgenstein’s striking change of mind and style in Philosophical Investigations—his last (and only other) book. Students participating in this course must show a philosophical passion and commitment; a diligent work ethic; and a spirit of comradery, collaboration, and generosity.

Building a Professional Identity is an experience-based, Embedded Education course offered to sophomores and above (including graduate students) completing experience-based work (an internship, volunteer placement, or job) during the spring semester. Students must have experience-based work in place and complete the required preregistration form prior to registering for this course. Please see SLC EmbeddEd on MySLC for more information, including how to register for SLC EmbeddEd courses, info session dates/recordings, FAQ for students, and resources for finding experience-based work. Students are advised to begin looking for experience-based work opportunities three-six months before the spring semester, when possible.

Over the semester, students in this course explore the process of building a professional identity through reading assignments, class discussions, experience-based observations, small-group work, workshops, events, panels, and engagement with peers and alumni. Topics include imposter phenomenon; diversity, equity, and inclusion; workplace communication; online branding; professional networking; mentorship and mentoring; work-life balance; and strategies to support well-being. Students are encouraged to engage in observation journals, experiential activities, and collaborative group work. Assignments include weekly homework, an alumni series recording, and a final portfolio. The goal is for students to integrate class material with experience-based observations, engage with campus resources, and develop a community of peer and alumni support—which students may utilize this semester and beyond. SLC EmbeddEd courses are graded pass/fail and meet remotely via Zoom on Wednesday evenings. Students have the option to enroll for three or five credits (see note below). Students have the option to enroll in each course a second time, as a returning student, with an emphasis on early career leadership and mentorship. SLC EmbeddEd courses feature collaborations with campus partners, including Career Services; Community Partnerships and Engagement; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; preprofessional advisors, Alumni Relations, Health + Wellness, the Dean of Well-Being, and the Learning Commons.

This course is an SLC EmbeddEd practicum-credit course offered to sophomores and above (including graduate students) completing experience-based work (an internship, volunteer placement, or job) during the fall semester. NOTE: Students must have experience-based work in place and complete the required preregistration form prior to registering for this course. Experience-based work should begin by the end of the first week of class. Please see SLC EmbeddEd on MySLC for more information, including how to register for SLC EmbeddEd courses, info session dates/recordings, FAQ for students, and resources for finding experience-based work. Students are advised to begin looking for experience-based work opportunities 3-6 months before the fall semester, when possible.

Over the semester, students explore shifting and inclusive definitions of work, workplace culture, and strategies to support well-being through reading assignments, class discussions, experience-based observations, small group work, workshops, events, panels and engagement with peers and alumni. Topics will include workplace communication, diversity equity and inclusion, professional networking, stress management, work-life balance, sleep health, and restorative practices. Students are encouraged to engage in observation journals, experiential activities, and collaborative group work. Assignments include weekly homework, an alumni series recording and a final portfolio. The goal is for students to integrate class material with experience-based observations, engage with campus resources and develop a community of peer and alumni support that students may utilize this semester and beyond. SLC EmbeddEd courses are graded pass/fail and meet remotely via Zoom on Monday evenings. SLC EmbeddEd courses are offered in collaboration with campus partners, including Career Services; Community Partnerships and Engagement; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; pre-professional advisors; Alumni Relations; Health + Wellness; the Dean of Well-Being; and the Learning Commons.

This course is an SLC EmbeddEd practicum-credit course offered to sophomores and above (including graduate students) completing experience-based work (an internship, volunteer placement, or job) during the fall semester. NOTE: Students must have experience-based work in place and complete the required preregistration form prior to registering for this course. Experience-based work should begin by the end of the first week of class. Please see SLC EmbeddEd on MySLC for more information, including how to register for SLC EmbeddEd courses, info session dates/recordings, FAQ for students, and resources for finding experience-based work. Students are advised to begin looking for experience-based work opportunities 3-6 months before the fall semester, when possible.

Over the semester, students explore shifting and inclusive definitions of work, workplace culture, and strategies to support well-being through reading assignments, class discussions, experience-based observations, small group work, workshops, events, panels and engagement with peers and alumni. Topics will include workplace communication, diversity equity and inclusion, professional networking, stress management, work-life balance, sleep health, and restorative practices. Students are encouraged to engage in observation journals, experiential activities, and collaborative group work. Assignments include weekly homework, an alumni series recording and a final portfolio. The goal is for students to integrate class material with experience-based observations, engage with campus resources and develop a community of peer and alumni support that students may utilize this semester and beyond. SLC EmbeddEd courses are graded pass/fail and meet remotely via Zoom on Monday evenings. SLC EmbeddEd courses are offered in collaboration with campus partners, including Career Services; Community Partnerships and Engagement; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; pre-professional advisors; Alumni Relations; Health + Wellness; the Dean of Well-Being; and the Learning Commons.

In this course, you will explore your business ideas or passion interests through content creation, so that you can design a business or passion project that solves an important problem. Whether you have a business idea or a passion project that you want to bring to life, this course will help you leverage the power of content creation in order to pave a way into your field of interest while building your credibility, network, and personal brand. You will launch a podcast and interview the “who’s who” of your field of interest! Equipped with the lessons learned from your interviews, you will conceive and bring a business or passion project to life that you will pitch to a panel of judges made of up of esteemed SLC alumni. The top-voted presentation will win a cash grant to help launch the idea!

Building a Professional Identity is an experience-based, Embedded Education course offered to sophomores and above (including graduate students) completing experience-based work (an internship, volunteer placement, or job) during the spring semester. Students must have experience-based work in place and complete the required preregistration form prior to registering for this course. Please see SLC EmbeddEd on MySLC for more information including how to register for SLC EmbeddEd courses, info session dates/recordings, FAQ for students, and resources for finding experience-based work. Students are advised to begin looking for experience-based work opportunities three-six months before the spring semester, when possible.

Over the semester, students in this course explore the process of building a professional identity through reading assignments, class discussions, experience-based observations, small-group work, workshops, events, panels, and engagement with peers and alumni. Topics include imposter phenomenon; diversity, equity, and inclusion; workplace communication; online branding; professional networking; mentorship and mentoring; work-life balance; and strategies to support well-being. Students are encouraged to engage in observation journals, experiential activities, and collaborative group work. Assignments include weekly homework, an alumni series recording, and a final portfolio. The goal is for students to integrate class material with experience-based observations, engage with campus resources, and develop a community of peer and alumni support—which students may utilize this semester and beyond. SLC EmbeddEd courses are graded pass/fail and meet remotely via Zoom on Wednesday evenings. Students have the option to enroll for three or five credits. Students have the option to enroll in each course a second time, as a returning student, with an emphasis on early career leadership and mentorship. SLC EmbeddEd courses feature collaborations with campus partners, including Career Services; Community Partnerships and Engagement; the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; pre-professional advisors, Alumni Relations, Health + Wellness, the Dean of Well-Being, and the Learning Commons.

The adage, “You are what you remember,” speaks to the profound impact of autobiographical memories on our sense of self. These personal recollections serve as the building blocks of our identity, allowing us to maintain a coherent narrative of our lives across time. From our earliest childhood experiences to significant milestones, from personal triumphs to shared tragedies, autobiographical memories weave through every facet of our existence. As we age, the evolution—and sometimes deterioration—of these memories not only reflects but also shapes the ongoing story of who we are. Despite major achievements in neuroscience, researchers don't fully understand how memory, our sense of self, and the brain all fit together. The study of memory is an active area of contemporary research, including topics such as autobiographical memory, mental time travel, intergenerational memory, collective memory, and false memories. In this course, we will examine the neuropsychology and neuroscience research of the memory system’s integral role in shaping self-identity across the lifespan. We will also discuss how significant events alter our self-identity, imagined future, and emotional functioning. Through empirical research, we will also explore memory’s role in mental illness and the ways in which neuropsychologists develop therapeutic interventions. Students will learn the basic structural and functional properties of the human nervous system and their relationship to the cognitive processes of memory, in addition to the cognitive neuroscience of memory and self-identity.

Students will delve into the fundamentals of social media from both creator and user perspectives. This course offers an interdisciplinary approach, examining the history and evolution of social media platforms and their impact on cognition, mental health, and knowledge acquisition. Through a combination of psychological journal articles and mass communication resources, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of how social media influences and shapes contemporary life, making them feel knowledgeable and informed. Topics covered will include influencer culture, the 2024 election, and the effects of social media on children and adolescents, among other topics. In group projects, students will design influencer pages from conception to execution, incorporating lessons on strategic content creation, audience engagement, and ethical considerations. By integrating theory with practical application, this course offers a nuanced view of social media’s role in modern society and will equip students with the skills to effectively navigate and contribute to this dynamic digital landscape and study its effects on its use and digital safety.

For thousands of years, philosophers have struggled with the questions surrounding the issue of morality. Over the past hundred years, psychologists have joined the fray. While many theories exist, a unifying theme centers upon the notion that childhood is the crucible in which morality is formed and forged. In this course, we will explore the major theories dealing with three aspects of the development of morality: moral thought or reasoning (e.g., Piaget, Kohlberg); moral feelings (psychoanalytic approaches, including Freud, and the modern work on the importance of empathy and mirror neurons); and moral actions. In addition, we will investigate the possible relations among these three aspects of moral development; for example, how is moral thought connected to moral action? Throughout the course, we will relate moral development theory to the results of research investigations into this crucial aspect of child development, including the influence of parents and peers. Further, we will explore the influence of culture in shaping moral beliefs and attitudes. Conference work may include direct experience with children or adolescents in the form of either detailed observations or direct interaction (interviews, etc.).

Human behavior is complex, comprising stories, words, narratives, movement, and more. How can we begin to understand it? This course will introduce central concepts and practices in the analysis of qualitative and quantitative behavioral and linguistic data. We will learn how interview-based and observational data have typically been collected, organized, and interpreted. Students will use various coding techniques, such as MAXQDA software, to organize and interpret meanings and structures in participants’ narratives and responses. We will also discuss various thematic analysis approaches, including interpretive phenomenological analysis, as well as various coding techniques for observational data. Finally, we will discuss various tools used in linguistic analysis, including corpora, LSA, and LIWC. Over the course of the semester, we will work with existing datasets from classic and contemporary studies. For example, how can we use data analysis to determine if people really remember a person, word, or experience rather than simply feeling recognition of it? Students will use SPSS and eventually R software to collate and visualize data and apply traditional frequentist—as well as modern, parameter-free—statistical analyses. Students will also apply and evaluate various thematic analysis approaches and will have the opportunity to draw on various tools of linguistic analysis using existing datasets. Ethical research practices will be discussed in the context of each dataset used. In collaborative groups, students will build a plan for an existing interview, observational, or linguistic dataset, carry out preliminary analyses, and propose possible interpretations. In addition to the prerequisites for this course, a prior course in college-level statistics is a plus.

This class is meant for students who have already taken some Spanish in the past but feel that they need to review the essentials of the grammatical system in order to secure a solid foundation. The seminar will operate on several levels: Rigorous, systematic work with morphology and syntax will be complemented by the acquisition of a solid body of vocabulary. A great range of practical exercises and integrated activities will serve the function of developing effective communicative skills centered on reading, listening, speaking, and writing. All of these linguistic practices will be smoothly integrated into a balanced program. The activities jointly conducted in class will be based on the use of authentic Spanish-language materials, including films, documentaries, video clips, episodes of TV series, podcasts, lyrics of songs, comic strips, adapted/graded short stories and novellas, excerpts of graphic novels, poems, newspaper articles, and brief essays on all aspects of culture. Two important features of this class are the class journal and the open syllabus. Students will keep a record of the different class activities in a detailed journal, also known as cuaderno de clase, or “el book.” Another important characteristic of this course is the nature of its syllabus, which is open—which means that it will be jointly created by all class members in coordination with me. Thus, students will suggest films, poems, songs, short stories, and other materials to be jointly explored by the class. Besides the collective activities shared with the rest of the class, students will work in small groups to develop small projects. Groups will consists of three or four students, and students will participate in three groups in order to create a more varied linguistic exchange. A third, optional section of the cuaderno will reflect the different activities done by students individually (additional films they choose to view, newspaper articles of their interest, songs…). In sum, Spanish will be present in your lives throughout the entire academic year. A strongly recommended practice will be the incorporation of habits such as reading newspapers in Spanish on a regular basis. At the end of the semester, each student will have produced their own libro de español, in which the entire trajectory of the class will be carefully recorded. In addition to all this, you will complete a conference project, which can be individual or collaborative (with one or more class members). The topics are infinite in their scope and possibilities. One of the things that has surprised me most when I taught this class in the past was the creativity and originality of the projects developed by my students. As a result, at the end of the year you will be surprised at how intense your progress will have been. And at that time, you will be reading your first full-length book in Spanish. You will begin as an advanced beginner, but you will end at a much more solid level—ready to conduct sophisticated work in this language on your own. The contents of the class activities that follow are indicative, apart from some structural guidelines related to grammar work. You will be expected to incorporate Spanish into your daily life and start thinking in this language. All students will also attend weekly, hour-long meetings, aimed at further developing communicative skills, in conversation sessions with the language assistant.

Once students have reached the linguistic command required to work at an advanced intermediate level, they are in an ideal position to begin to explore the numerous resources that can be found on the Internet. Instrumentally, we will focus on the multiple uses of Spanish to be found in the virtual world and make use of its many possibilities, such as blogs, newspapers, magazines, and other formats. We will identify the most relevant web pages from the Spanish-speaking world, extract the adequate information, and exploit it in class jointly, making the necessary adjustments. Access to authentic sources from all over the Spanish-speaking world will give us an excellent idea of the varieties of the language used in more than 20 countries. We will explore all forms of culture, paying special attention to audiovisual resources such as podcasts, films, interviews, documentaries, TV programs, and other formats—all of which will be incorporated into the course of study, either complete or in fragments depending on the level of difficulty. Art, film, music, photography, theatre, science, politics, comics, video games, gastronomy—all forms and manifestations of culture, high or low, will be the object of our attention, as long as their vehicle of expression is Spanish. We will minimize the use of printed matter, which will be mainly devoted to a more classical exploration of grammar. The class as a whole, as well as students on an individual basis, will be encouraged to locate different kinds of materials on the Internet. Weekly meetings in small groups with the language assistants will help to strengthen conversational skills.

This course will examine the job of the theatre director as both artist and artistic collaborator. Dramatic script analysis, rehearsal preparation and process, actor/director and writer/director relationships, and the director’s artistic expression will be covered in both class discussions and exercises. Students will be exposed to a variety of directing styles and techniques through trips to New York City theatrical productions/venues and through additional field trips. Some of the plays visited will be analyzed in detail as part of the class work. A solid interest in the exploration of theatre directing is strongly recommended for students enrolling in this class. There will be weekly conferences at least for the first semester.

Students on the London Theatre Tour will attend a wide range and array of plays, and meet daily in seminar with Theatre Program faculty as part of a 12-day immersive theatre/classroom experience. The London Theatre Tour offers a unique opportunity and course of study. Students will experience first-hand and up close the distinct history and current expression of what makes London a world theatre center. Students will attend up to 10 plays, take tours of theatre and arts districts, and meet with theatre professionals, in a dynamic, comprehensive program. The London Theatre Tour offers ample free time, between seminars, plays and tours, for students to explore London on their own or in small groups. Students will attend daily classes and make presentations on chosen topics as part of a distinct curriculum built upon the plays, playwrights, styles and forms, history and expression of British Theatre, as seen through a collection of contemporary plays, adaptations, and interactive works of theatre. The London Theatre Tour runs within the first two weeks of January, 2025. Preliminary information about the program can be discussed in registration interviews. Specific information on application deadlines, logistics and cost of the program, including academic credits, show tickets and housing in London, will be discussed in an in-person introductory meeting early in the fall semester.

This course explores 2,500 years of Western drama and how dramaturgical ideas can be traced from their origins in fifth-century Greece to 20th-century Nigeria, with many stops in between. We will try to understand how a play is constructed rather than simply written and how each succeeding epoch has both embraced and rejected previous ideas of what a drama really is. We will study the major genres of Western drama, including the idea of a classically structured play, Elizabethan drama, neoclassicism, realism, naturalism, expressionism, comedy, musical theatre, theatre of cruelty, and existentialism. And we will look at the social, cultural, architectural, and biographical context for the plays in question to better understand how and why they were written as they were. Classroom discussion will focus on a new play each week, while conference work with be devoted mostly to the students’ writing about them. In this FYS course, students will meet with the instructor every week up through October Study Days and every other week thereafter through the end of the year. Students will also have the option of either writing a conventional conference paper in the spring term or an original play. Students who choose to write a play will be required to enroll in the Playwriting Techniques component in the fall term and my Playwrights Workshop component in the spring, where their plays will be regularly read and discussed in class. Our FYS conferences in the spring will explore the play’s possibilities in further depth.

From interpreting scripts to audition techniques and working professionally, this course will explore all aspects of creating a dynamic acting performance. Experienced or beginner actors will gain techniques to create grounded, specific characters. Discover how to bring YOU to each role that you portray while developing your unique acting toolbox. The semester will begin with cold readings on camera and discussions of how to look for clues in a text to create vibrant, truth-based interpretations. We will progress to prepared scene work for theatre and film auditions, focusing on the differences and similarities between the two mediums and how to transition seamlessly between the two. We will have fun with improvisational exercises and real-world, self-tape scenarios. Students will act at least every week. We will analyze existing on-camera and theatre performances by several professional actors. Students will be required to submit a one-minute clip of a performance that they admire and hope to emulate in their work. We will read about and discuss acting techniques by actors, directors, writers, and coaches such as Declan Donnellan, Michael Scherlaff, David Lynch, Yoshi Oida, Elia Kazan, Warner Loughlin, and others. Each student will depart this class with video footage of their on-camera work.

A scene-study acting class built upon a deep dive into a character’s past, their behavior, and the tactics they use to get what they need, Character Study is a dynamic, on-your-feet approach to the text that leads to vital and compelling characters. Students will play a variety of roles from contemporary plays and adaptations. The course is open to serious students who have taken an Actor’s Workshop class or other acting training.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. —Oscar Wilde

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. —George Bernard Shaw

This course is in the spirit of the Harvard Lampoon, with a twist from Sadieloo—the use of humor, irony, and exaggeration to lampoon the solipsism of ourselves, our culture, artists, and institutions. Create a comic character. Write a political sketch. Write a satire of college life, sports, or a celebrity using the events of the day. This class will begin with improvisation, move to creating material, and end with a performance of sketch and characters—all done for the sake of laughter and a better understanding of the absurdity of life.

This class is a laboratory for the actor. It is designed for performers who are ready to search for the steps to a fully involved performance. In the first semester, we will explore characters and monologues that motivate each actor’s imagination. After analysis of the text, defining the imagery, and exploring the emotional choices of the actor, we will work on self-taping our work for auditions. Second semester will be devoted to scene work: the techniques used to develop a heightened connection with your scene partner, the importance of listening, and finding your impulses as you work on your feet in the rehearsal room. We will observe the work and read the theories of Declan Donnellan’s The Actor and the Target and Stephen Wangh’s An Acrobat of the Heart.

Theatre is the art of looking at ourselves. —Augusto Boal

The unknown is where we go to find new things, and intuition is how we find them. —Viola Spolin.

In this course, we will begin with improvisations from Augusto Boals’ Theatre of the Oppressed. These exercises are developed to create empathy and connection within the participants. The goal of this work will be to experience games that a theatre artist might use to develop community and theatre material with nonactors. Once we strengthen the community of the class, we will begin to work on Improvisations for film and theatre. Through techniques developed by filmmakers and theatre directors, our work will focus on developing an actor’s freedom and emotional truth.

This class will begin with an exploration of the classic structures of stand-up comedy. The concepts of set-up and punch, acting out, and heightened wordplay will be employed. Techniques for creating and becoming comic characters will use your past, the news, and the current social environment to craft a comic routine. Discovering what is recognizably funny to an audience is the labor of the comic artist. The athletics of the creative comedic mind and your own individual perspective on the world that surrounds you is the primary objective of the first semester. We will also study theories of comedy through the writings of Henri Bergson (philosopher), John Wright (director), and Christopher Fry (playwright). The second semester will be designed for collaboration through improvisational techniques, long-form improvisational games (Harold), and performance techniques for comic sketch writing and group work, along with exercises to develop the artist’s freedom and confidence in a collaborative group setting. The ensemble will learn to trust the spontaneous response and their own comic madness, as they write, perform, and create scenarios together. At the end of the second semester, there will be a formal presentation of the comedy that will be devised during the year.

This is an immersive course, designed for actors, performers, directors, designers, and writers who seek to push the boundaries of theatre and embrace the bold world of post-Internet aesthetics—where theatre and performance meet cutting-edge digital and networked methods. You'll investigate innovative approaches to contemporary theatre, exploring new ways of storytelling that embrace technology’s boundless possibilities. Through engaging exercises, thought-provoking readings, and inspiring discussions, you’ll explore the fusion of theatre with immersive multimedia elements, AI, video mapping, motion capture, 3D scanning/rendering, game engine, and networked liveness.

Solo Performance is nothing new. This has been happening since the dawn of man, and it will continue to happen.... —Nilaja Sun

Discover the story you have to tell and own your voice, boldly enough to tell it. Unlock your creativity not only for solo performance but also for every other aspect of your creative self! This playwriting-into-performance class will first focus on the actor finding a subject matter that motivates and sustains him/her. We will discuss the actor’s strengths and weaknesses throughout the process, finding the actor’s unique voice through self-observance and self-discipline. The goal of this class is to catapult students from summary to interpretation, from regurgitation to analysis, from the simple act of seeing to the complex and bold endeavor of examination. Students are expected to actively measure relevant theoretical knowledge with critical issues pertaining to social justice and social change. Solo performance emerges out of a desire to heal. Students are invited to create their own performance piece of theatre by developing and rehearsing a script within the spring term and to have an intensive self-discovery and process. They will begin with reading and examining one-character plays. We will read the works of Spalding Grey, Anna Deavere Smith, Lemon Andersen, and many more. Then, as a class, we will discuss techniques, autobiographical subject matter, and themes. Students will create first drafts, next re-writes, and then rehearsals, culminating with a final reading and/or performance of their own work.

Drawing from various puppetry techniques, alongside the practices of Jacques Lecoq, this studio explores and experiments with puppetry and performance. Throughout the course, we will work in collaborative groups to create puppetry performance, including building the puppets and devising works that utilize puppets and objects. We will explore large-scale, processional-style puppets; puppets as objects and materials; puppeteering the performance space; and the role/relationship of the puppeteer/performer to puppet. 

This course will explore a variety of puppetry techniques, including bunraku-style, marionette, shadow puppetry, and toy theatre. We will begin with a detailed look at these forms through individual and group research projects. Students will then have the opportunity to develop their puppet manipulation skills, as well as to gain an understanding of how to prepare the puppeteer’s body for performance. We will further our exploration with hands-on learning in various techniques of construction. The class will culminate with the creation and presentation of puppetry pieces of their own making.

Those actors rooted in the tradition of playing Shakespeare find themselves equipped with a skill set that enables them to successfully work on a wide range of texts and within an array of performance modalities. The objectives of this class are to learn to identify, personalize, and embody the structural elements of Shakespeare’s language as the primary means of bringing his characters to life. Students will study a representative arc of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the sonnets.

This class is an introduction to the craft and technique of voice-over acting in various forms. It is open to performers with an interest in gaining the necessary skills to perform in the fields of animation, video games, audio books, commercials, and more. Actors will learn to differentiate between genres and how to adapt their performance approach to each. We will cover basic skills, such as warm-ups, common terminology, home-studio setup, and audition and performance techniques. We will then build on those skills by learning to break down text, apply breath, perform copy, develop specific characters, and receive feedback and direction. Actors will have the opportunity to dive deeply into a genre of their choice, find and write their own copy, and practice recording and editing takes with the goal of creating a demo reel.

This comprehensive, step-by-step course focuses on developing the skills and tools that young actors need in order to work in the fast-paced world of film and television while also learning how to write, direct, edit, and produce their own work for the screen. The first semester will focus on screen acting and on-camera auditions (in person and taped). Through intense scene study and script analysis, we will expand each performer’s range of emotional, intellectual, physical, and vocal expressiveness for the camera. Focus will also be put on the technical skills needed for the actor to give the strongest performance “within the frame,” while also maintaining a high level of spontaneity and authenticity. Students will act in assigned and self-chosen scenes from film and television scripts. Toward the end of the semester, the focus will switch to on-camera auditions, where students will learn the do’s and don’ts of the in-person and the self-taped camera audition. During the second semester, students will learn the basics of filmmaking, allowing them to create their own work without the restraints of a large budget and crew. The basic fundamentals of screenwriting, cinematography, directing, and editing will be covered, along with weekly writing, reading, viewing, and filming assignments. Students will finish class with edited footage of their work and clear next steps. For this course, students must have their own, or access to, a camera (iPhone, iPad, or other camera) and a computer with editing software (e.g., iMovie, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, etc.).

In this class, students will begin developing their own artistic practice for performance—supported by workshops on major acting methods such as Brecht, Stanislavski, and Hagen, as well as workshops on physical theatre and performance in the context of devised work. Through learning the historical and artistic context of different techniques, students will be encouraged to determine which practices are useful to them in their own work. These include vocal and physical warm-ups, relaxation, concentration, sensory awareness, listening, communication, and collaboration. Students will complete presentations that will spring from these workshops, as well as monologues and scene study. Students will work toward an awareness of their own process so that they might be confident in their ability to develop characters outside of the context of a classroom. Students will be asked to honestly evaluate their own work, along with feedback from the professor. This class is intended for first- and second-year Theatre Thirds, as well as others who have not taken many (or any) acting courses.

This course is a dynamic, script-based, acting/scene study class that springs from the works and goals of The Kilroys: “A gang of playwrights...who came together to stop talking about gender parity in theatre and start taking action.” Students in Kilroys will perform in plays written in a variety of styles by female and queer writers, with an emphasis on how characters, in all plays, craft identity and persona as a way to survive and thrive. Kilroys is open to serious actors of any and all identities.

Theatre is a tool for social change. This one-semester course looks at a dynamic collection of contemporary plays written as a means of protest and activism. The course will culminate in an open-class performance project that students will devise and create over the course of the semester. The class includes a range of vital plays and films, from HAIR, written in response to the Vietnam War, to compelling new works by Antoinette Nwandu and Dominique Morisseau that resonate in the Black Lives Matter Movement, to plays that address concerns of the LGBTQ+ communities, among others. Protest Plays is open to actors, directors, playwrights, and those with a particular interest in theatre as a means of activism and change.

Weekly class meetings in which productions are analyzed and discussed will be supplemented by regular visits to many of the theatrical productions of the current season. The class will travel within the tristate area, attending theatre in as many diverse venues, forms, and styles as possible. Published plays will be studied in advance of attending performances; new or unscripted works will be preceded by examinations of previous work by the author or the company. Students will be given access to all available group and student discounts in purchasing tickets.

In this lecture, we will focus on theatre and performance in the African diasporas. This class will discuss some of the different experiences of what it means to be of an African diaspora and to create for performance. How do you express yourself when, structurally, your environment is inhospitable to such a self? We understand that the most commonly expressed histories tend to favor Western perspectives. How then, do we understand and trust what we learn of the history of Black performance? How do we understand and trust what we hear/read about contemporary Black theatre and performance? What IS theatre, and how does that word relate to non-Western traditions of performance? This class is interested in the connection between ritual and performance, mythology and truth, house and home. It holds space for oral traditions and modes of performance not necessarily called theatre while also maintaining a weekly practice of reading and discussing published plays, theory, and criticism.

Once upon a time, a playwright said in a rehearsal, “I just think that this is the most Cubist moment of this play.” Everyone in the room fell silent and grew uncomfortable—because, what in the heck did she mean by that? And aren’t we already supposed to know? This interactive lecture course surveys the aesthetic movements throughout history and teaches you to track their impact on your work. Ideas behind each movement are examined in relation to the historical moment of their occurrence and in their formal manifestations across visual art, musical, architectural, and performance disciplines. Each student then places his/her own work within a wider context of formal aesthetic discourse—locating hidden influence and making conscious and purposeful the political resonance that is subsequently uncovered. Students are encouraged to find ways of acknowledging the responsibility that one carries for one’s work’s impact on the world and to start using terms like “Post-Modernism” and “Futurist” with confidence.

Curriculum Lab is a required weekly course for students who are sharing their theatre and creative skills in the Saturday Lunchbox Theatre Program. The Curriculum Lab will explore the creation and development of an interdisciplinary teaching curriculum for children ages 6–18. Through this weekly lab, directly connected to Lunchbox Theatre, students will gain insight into child-development principles, lesson-planning skills, and classroom-management strategies. Through inquiry and reflection, students will expand their critical thinking processes while utilizing practical teaching methods and techniques suitable for multiple learning types and levels.

This course is for undergraduate theatre artists interested in learning and sharing theatre skills in the community. Using the vocabulary of theatre, we will investigate methods and techniques, styles, and forms to create and develop theatre projects designed for specific community work. The course develops individual collaboration, experimentation, and understanding of specific community needs. Students will explore the essentials of constructing a creative practice for community engagement. In addition, students will learn to extend their personal theatre skills by developing detailed interdisciplinary lesson plans for specific workshops. Each community project is unique. Lesson plans may include a combination of theatre games, acting, music, story making, movement, and drawing. Participants are encouraged to teach what they already know, step outside their comfort zone, and learn more as they become aware of their placement’s educational and psychological needs. The course focuses on teaching methods, making mistakes, and becoming aware of individual and personal processes. This ideal combination explores education and community problems for those considering a career in early-childhood, middle-school, and high-school education and beyond. Course topics will explore community self-care, lesson planning, curriculum development, and approaches to learning. In this course, students will experience crucial connections between theory and practice through a weekly community placement. Students will learn by doing, gaining hands-on experience by collaborating as a team member at an area school, senior home, museum, or the long-running Saturday SLC Lunchbox Theatre Program, which is open to the Sarah Lawrence and Yonkers communities. In addition, students will gain valuable experience as prospective teachers and teaching artists by taking this course and developing lesson plans that will be useful and valuable beyond the Sarah Lawrence College experience. Students will better understand how civic-engagement practices encourage essential dialogues that deepen community connections and may lead to change. Many former students of this course are teaching and running educational programs at schools, theatres, and museums across the globe. Course readings will include the work of Paolo Freire, Augusto Boal, Viola Spolin, MC Richards, Vivian Gussin Paley, Pablo Helguera, and others. Budget-depending placements may offer an hourly stipend.

Students in this course will develop valuable creative resources while investigating the intersection of theatre and community. The course is open to graduate and upper-level undergraduate students interested in sharing theatre skills in the community. We will explore interdisciplinary creative processes, social-justice issues, and curriculum development focusing on the individual. We will analyze the crossovers between various teaching theories, pedagogies, and philosophies. In addition, students will explore creating theatre in the community that investigates the connection of art practices in education while respecting the emotional aspects of learning. Students will analyze, explore, and investigate social-justice pedagogies and philosophies and explore various practices and creative techniques to deepen awareness and critical thinking. We will look at strategies for classroom management and teaching methods suitable for different ways of learning. Students will actively create, develop, and share collaborative theatre lessons while building community with artists, teachers, and community organizations. Active class work will explore ideas for projects that will support lesson planning and the growth of curriculum concepts. In addition, students will hold yearlong placements at schools, community centers, area colleges, museums, LGBTQIA youth centers, and the long-running SLC Saturday Lunchbox Theatre Program that combines the SLC and Yonkers communities. As a result of this course, students will have a portfolio of designed lesson plans and educational ideas that will serve as a creative template for current and future projects. We will explore the work of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, bell hooks, and others. Placements may offer an hourly stipend.

This course includes a weekly group conference and individual rehearsal meetings for students who will be directing readings, workshops, and productions in the theatre program and in independent companies during the fall semester. Students will meet once a week as a full group and in individual, one-on-one conferences with the teacher that will be scheduled around their own individual rehearsals. Students will read and discuss the texts of all selected plays in the full-class meeting in a shared, hands-on approach to production. Students will analyze form and style and context and discuss all aspects of their upcoming productions. The teacher will observe rehearsals for individual director’s projects as the basis of the one-on-one meetings. This class will meet twice a week for the group and individual conferences. Students with an interest in directing but are not directing in the fall term are welcome to join Director's Conference.

In this directing course, we will focus on directing modern and contemporary plays. Through hands-on exercises and in-class and out-of-class work, students will explore directorial strategies and will develop their ability to take a play from page to stage. Students will learn strategies around script selection and then how to break down their chosen performance text. Students will learn how to analyze a text, how to prepare for the rehearsal process, and how to craft a directorial concept and work with designers. Directors will learn casting strategies and consent-based practices for designing audition and callback processes. Moving into the rehearsal stage, directors will learn rehearsal planning strategies, rehearsal techniques, and the mechanics of directing actors. Directors will also learn consent-based and trauma-informed directing practices, as well as basic intimacy choreography, to create ethical rehearsal spaces. In the first semester, the class will work together on breaking down and analyzing one play, with students choosing one scene from the play to direct. In the second semester, directors will choose a 10- to 20-minute play to direct, which will culminate in a showing at the end of the semester.

This course includes a weekly group conference and individual rehearsal meetings for students who will be directing readings, workshops, and productions in the theatre program and in independent companies in the fall semester. Students will meet once a week as a full group and in individual one-on-one conferences with the teacher, scheduled around their own individual rehearsals. Students will read and discuss the texts of all selected plays in the full-class meeting in a shared, hands-on approach to production. Students will analyze form and style and context and discuss all aspects of their upcoming productions. The teacher will observe rehearsals for individual director’s projects as the basis of their one-on-one meetings. Students with an interest in directing but are not directing in the fall term are welcome to join Directing Conference.

This course will explore methods of creating original theatre through a choreographic lens as a way of assembling the various building blocks from which theatre is made (sound, image, movement, language, design, etc.), as well as through the influence and manipulation of time. The semester will begin with structured prompts and assignments largely completed in class, eventually moving into self-generated collaborative projects with some work to be completed outside of class. One of the main focuses of this course is the attempt to articulate, through open discussions, one’s creative process and choices therein. Through analysis of said exercises, students will come to more clearly know one another’s work and methods. Students will be asked to create movement sequences, collaborative projects, and other studies as a way of encountering the use of assembly, juxtaposition, unison, framing, interruption, deconstruction, and other time-based art practices. Readings will include manifestos and selections from an array of artists, essays and excerpts of various theatre practices from around the world, as well as watching examples on video. As students will be working within various levels of physicality, wearing loose, comfortable clothing is encouraged. No dance or movement experience is necessary; one only needs curiosity and a willingness to jump in to find value in this course.

Students learn the basics of armed and unarmed stage fighting, with an emphasis on safety. Actors are taught to create effective stage violence, from hair pulling and choking to sword fighting, with a minimum of risk. Basic techniques are incorporated into short scenes to give students experience performing fights in both classic and modern contexts. Each semester culminates in a skills proficiency test aimed at certification in one of eight weapon forms.

Students learn the basics of armed and unarmed stage fighting, with an emphasis on safety. Actors are taught to create effective stage violence, from hair pulling and choking to sword fighting, with a minimum of risk. Basic techniques are incorporated into short scenes to give students experience performing fights in classic and modern contexts. Each semester culminates in a skills proficiency test aimed at certification in one of eight weapon forms.

As a continuation of Stage Combat, this course deals with more complex weapon styles. The “double-fence” or two-handed forms (rapier and dagger, sword and shield) are taught. Students are asked to go more deeply into choreography and aspects of the industry. Critical thinking is encouraged, and students will be asked to create their own short video showing an understanding of basic principles (use of distance, point of view, storytelling). The function of the stunt coordinator, essential in a growing film industry, will also be explored.

We will explore the actor’s performance with songs in various styles of popular music, music for theatre, cabaret, and original work, emphasizing communication with the audience and material selection. Dynamics of vocal interpretation and style will also be examined. Students perform new or returning material each week in class and have outside class time scheduled with the musical director to arrange and rehearse their material. Students enrolled in the course also have priority placement for voice lessons with faculty in the music program and enrollment in Alexander Technique classes or other movement courses of their choosing.

Who are you as a writer? What do you write about, and why? Are you writing the play that you want to write or that you need to write? Where is the nexus between the amorphous, subconscious wellspring of the material and the rigorous demands of a form that will play in real time before a live audience? This course is designed for playwriting students who have a solid knowledge of dramatic structure and an understanding of their own creative process—and who are ready to create a complete dramatic work of any length. (As Edward Albee observed, “All plays are full-length plays.”) Students will be free to work on themes, subjects, and styles of their choice. Work will be read aloud and discussed in class each week. The course requires that students enter, at minimum, with an idea of the play on which they plan to work; ideally, they will bring in a partial draft or even a completed draft that they wish to revise. We will read some existent texts, time allowing. Finally, your interest in the workshop indicates a high level of seriousness about playwriting; and all serious playwrights should take History and Histrionics. We read great plays and analyze them dramaturgically. It’s indispensable for the playwright.

You will investigate the mystery of how to release your creative process while also discovering the fundamentals of dramatic structure that will help you tell the story of your play. In the first term, you will write a short scene every week taken from The Playwright’s Guidebook, which we will use as a basic text. At the end of the first term, you will write a short but complete play based on one of these short assignments. In the second term, you’ll go on to adapt a short story of your choice and then write a play based on a historical character, event, or period. The focus in all instances is on the writer’s deepest connection to the material—where the drama lies. Work will be read aloud and discussed in class each week. Students will also read and discuss plays that mirror the challenges presented by their own assignments.

If you’re a playwright searching for a safe place to create and/or engage trans and non-binary work, perhaps inventing your own along the way, then this is a class for you. We’ll look to myriad texts—from Alok’s Instagram posts, to C. Julian Jimenez’s plays, to She-Ra, to Joseph Campbell (critically), to K. Woodzick’s Non-Binary Monologues Project, to Disclosure, to Vivek Shraya, to much, much more—in order to synthesize what already informs some trans and non-binary work with our own creative desires. As long as you feel invested in trans and non-binary work and a classroom of respect, you’re welcome here. Before I came out as non-binary, survey classes about trans and non-binary work showed me the breadth of the umbrella. I hope to do the same here.

If you’re new to playwrighting and looking for a safe, warm classroom to experiment with your burgeoning love of the craft, this is the place for you. We’ll make our own plays—but we’ll do it informed by the diversity that is on our stages right here, right now. Playwrights like David Henry Hwang, Sarah Ruhl, Dominique Morisseau, Nilaja Sun, C. Julian Jimenez, and many others will be the voices that we elevate as we find our own. A combination of analysis and (primarily) creative workshop, Act One, Scene One is a great place to start your first (or second, or third, or fourth) play.

Students will learn how to look at the world with fresh eyes and how to use imagination to create a theatrical world on stage. The class covers the fundamental ideas of scenic design and basic design technique, such as research, drawing, and scale-model making. We will start from small exercise projects and complete a final design project at the end. This class designs the program semester projects. Students will present most of the projects to the class, followed by questions and comments from fellow students. Presentation and critique skills are important in this course. Students with no experience but interested in other aspects of theatre making, as well as in visual arts or architecture, will be able to learn from the basics.

Lighting Lab will introduce students to the basic elements of stage lighting, including tools and equipment, color theory, reading scripts for design elements, operation of lighting consoles and construction of lighting cues, and basic elements of lighting drawings and schedules. Students will be offered hands-on experience in hanging and focusing lighting instruments and will be invited to attend technical rehearsals. They will have opportunities to design productions and to assist other designers as a way of developing a greater understanding of the design process. The class designs the program semester projects.

This course is designed for students who have completed Costume Design l and Costume Design ll and would like to further explore any aspect of designing costumes by researching and realizing a special costume design project of their own choosing.

This course is an introduction to the basics of designing costumes and will cover various concepts and ideas, such as: the language of clothes, script analysis, the elements of design, color theory, fashion history, and figure drawing. We will work on various theoretical design projects while exploring how to develop a design concept. This course also covers various design-room sewing techniques, as well as the basics of wardrobe technician duties; and students become familiar with all the various tools and equipment in the costume shop and wardrobe areas. Students will also have the opportunity to assist a Costume Design ll student on a departmental production to further their understanding of the design process when creating costumes. No previous experience is necessary. Actors, directors, choreographers, dancers, and theatre makers of all kinds are welcome.

This course expands upon the ideas and concepts set forth in Costume Design l in order to hone and advance the student's existing skill sets. Students will further develop their design and construction abilities, as they research and realize design concepts for a variety of theoretical design projects and develop their communication skills through class discussions and presentations. Students will also have the likely opportunity to design costumes for a departmental production, assisted by a Costume Design l student. This design opportunity allows for a unique learning experience, as the student collaborates with a director and creative team to produce a fully realized theatrical production.

This course, which serves as an introduction to theatrical video design, explores the use of moving images in live performance, basic design principles, editing and playback software, content creation, and basic system design. The course examines the function and execution of video and integrated media in theatre, dance, and interdisciplinary environments. Exercises in videography, nonlinear editing, and designing sequences in performance software will provide students with the basic tools needed to execute projection and video design in a live-performance setting.

This course serves as an introduction to theatrical sound design. Students will learn about basic design principles, editing and playback software, content creation, basic system design, and sound theory. The course examines the function and execution of sound in theatre, dance, and interdisciplinary environments. Exercises in recording, editing, and designing sequences in performance software will provide students with the basic tools needed to execute sound designs in performance.

This course is an introduction to the basics of designing costumes and will cover various concepts and ideas, such as: the language of clothes, script analysis, the elements of design, color theory, fashion history, and figure drawing. We will work on various theoretical design projects while exploring how to develop a design concept. This course also covers various design-room sewing techniques, as well as the basics of wardrobe technician duties; and students become familiar with all the various tools and equipment in the costume shop and wardrobe areas. Students will also have the opportunity to assist a Costume Design ll student on a departmental production to further their understanding of the design process when creating costumes. No previous experience is necessary. Actors, directors, choreographers, dancers, and theatre makers of all kinds are welcome.

Theatrical producers are responsible for understanding both the creative and the administrative aspects of theatre. A good producer is tasked with upholding the artistic goals of the creative team, as well as the logistic and budgetary needs of a project, and balancing all of these to create and maintain a successful and financially viable production. With an emphasis on practicum work, students will study tiers of producing—including nonprofit and commercial models—and will work to develop and implement projects integrating the rich and diverse production groups both on campus and in the wider campus community. Using the foundation of existing models and programming, students will develop partnerships between the SLC theatre program, DownStage, independent student groups, other academic programs on campus, as well as campus civic-engagement and advocacy groups. Students will work as liaisons between these entities, curating programming that amplifies and connects the groups and creating distinct, cohesive production experiences for the theatre program and campus community. The course will include a trip to New York City to a general management/production firm, as well as a possible trip to see a production in New York City outside of course hours.

DownStage is an intensive, hands-on conference in theatrical production. DownStage student producers administrate and run their own theatre company. They are responsible for all aspects of production, including determining the budget and marketing an entire season of events and productions. Student producers are expected to fill a variety of positions, both technical and artistic, and to sit as members of the board of directors of a functioning theatre organization. In addition to their obligations to class and designated productions, DownStage producers are expected to hold regular office hours. Prior producing experience is not required.

Production managers bridge the gap between artistic and logistic elements of production. They must be problem solvers, big-picture thinkers, and well-versed in all aspects of theatre—blending technical, artistic, and managerial skills. This course is a study of theatre management with an emphasis on real-world applications to production-management concepts. Students will develop an understanding of the relationships among the creative, administrative, and production departments of a theatre company and how these funtion collectively to achieve common organizational and artistic goals. Through project-based activities, production-management students will develop a working knowledge of the artistic and managerial elements of a theatre company and how these function together to deliver a cohesive season. They will dialogue with innovators in the field and analyze real-world applications of production-management concepts. A theatre management practicum is embedded in the course curriculum; all students will be assigned as a student production manager for an SLC theatre production.

Stage management is a practice grounded in supporting communication across all departments. A stage manager acts as a liaison between all members of the company—the cast, director, designers, producers, and technical crew. Stage managers also support the director and company by helping to set the tone of the room. They establish clear and specific expectations, develop and implement systems to help move the process forward, and manage all technical elements throughout the process. Good stage managers are flexible and exhibit transparency and empathy, as they hold space for everyone and curate a culture of trust and professionalism through their work. This course will explore the basic techniques and skills of stage management via the five stages of production: preproduction, rehearsals, tech, performance, and close/strike. Students will practice script analysis and develop systems for rehearsal/performance organization and the maintenance and running of a production. A theatre-management practicum is embedded in the course curriculum; all students will be assigned as a stage manager or assistant stage manager for an SLC theatre production.

This is a stagehand course that focuses on the nuts and bolts of light and soundboard operation and projection technology, as well as the use of basic stage carpentry. This is not a design class but, rather, a class about reading, drafting, light plots, assembly and troubleshooting, and basic electrical repair. Students who take this course will be eligible for additional paid work as technical assistants in the theatre department.

DownStage is an intensive, hands-on conference in theatrical production. DownStage student producers administrate and run their own theatre company. They are responsible for all aspects of production, including determining the budget and marketing an entire season of events and productions. Student producers are expected to fill a variety of positions, both technical and artistic, and to sit as members of the board of directors of a functioning theatre organization. In addition to their obligations to class and designated productions, DownStage producers are expected to hold regular office hours. Prior producing experience is not required.

Production managers bridge the gap between artistic and logistic elements of production. They must be problem solvers, big-picture thinkers, and well-versed in all aspects of theatre—blending technical, artistic, and managerial skills. This course is a study of theatre management with an emphasis on real-world applications to production-management concepts. Students will develop an understanding of the relationships among the creative, administrative, and production departments of a theatre company and how these funtion collectively to achieve common organizational and artistic goals. Through project-based activities, production-management students will develop a working knowledge of the artistic and managerial elements of a theatre company and how these function together to deliver a cohesive season. They will dialogue with innovators in the field and analyze real-world applications of production-management concepts. A theatre management practicum is embedded in the course curriculum; all students will be assigned as a student production manager for an SLC theatre production.

Stage management is a practice grounded in supporting communication across all departments. A stage manager acts as a liaison between all members of the company—the cast, director, designers, producers, and technical crew. Stage managers also support the director and company by helping to set the tone of the room. They establish clear and specific expectations, develop and implement systems to help move the process forward, and manage all technical elements throughout the process. Good stage managers are flexible and exhibit transparency and empathy, as they hold space for everyone and curate a culture of trust and professionalism through their work. This course will explore the basic techniques and skills of stage management via the five stages of production: preproduction, rehearsals, tech, performance, and close/strike. Students will practice script analysis and develop systems for rehearsal/performance organization and the maintenance and running of a production. A theatre-management practicum is embedded in the course curriculum; all students will be assigned as a stage manager or assistant stage manager for an SLC theatre production.

This is a stagehand course that focuses on the nuts and bolts of light and soundboard operation and projection technology, as well as the use of basic stage carpentry. This is not a design class but, rather, a class about reading, drafting, light plots, assembly and troubleshooting, and basic electrical repair. Students who take this course will be eligible for additional paid work as technical assistants in the theatre department.

This graduate level component is an intensive in artistic planning and production. From conceiving a project, planning, budgeting, and fundraising for its creation, promoting the premiere, taking a work on the road, and archiving it for the long term, this class will prepare students with a basic knowledge of what it takes to put your work into the world. In addition the class will look at the national and international contemporary performance field with a ground level introduction to working artists, residencies, presenting organizations,festivals, museums, and more. This class meets on zoom. Open to graduate students and undergraduate seniors.

This class will serve as an introduction to grants and fundraising for independent artists. We will explore managing a grants and individual giving calendar, local, state, and federal funding sources, and delve deep info project based grants for independent artists including The MAP Fund, Creative Capital, New England Foundation for the Ats National Dance & Theater Projects, National Performance Network's Creation and Development fund and more. In addition we will explore crowdfunding methods and individual solicitation. Classes will be a mix of lectures via case studies of successful grants, guest appearances from foundation program officers, and workshop sessions through which students share progress and challenges in completing mock grant applications throughout the semester. Grad Component open to undergrad Juniors and Senior.

How do we as artists engage with an accelerating, fractured, technology-infused world? How do we as creators produce our work under current economic pressures? Contemporary Practice is a year-long course that focuses on artists and thinkers dealing with these questions and looks at how we situate our practice in the field. Students will investigate current and emerging practices in Performing Care, Contemporary Choreography, Speculative Theater, Immersive Theatre, Co-Presence, Performance Cabaret, Post-Digital Strategies, Socially Engaged Art, and Mixed Reality Performance. Classes will be structured around weekly readings/discussions. Through field research, embodied laboratories, and creative/professional development we will build a skill set, network, and knowledge base for articulating and supporting our work and engaging with collaborators, organizations, and audiences. This class meets once a week. Open to Graduates, Seniors or by permission of the professor.

Curriculum Lab is a required weekly course for students who are sharing their theatre and creative skills in the Saturday Lunchbox Theatre Program. The Curriculum Lab will explore the creation and development of an interdisciplinary teaching curriculum for children ages 6–18. Through this weekly lab, directly connected to Lunchbox Theatre, students will gain insight into child-development principles, lesson-planning skills, and classroom-management strategies. Through inquiry and reflection, students will expand their critical thinking processes while utilizing practical teaching methods and techniques suitable for multiple learning types and levels.

This course is for undergraduate theatre artists interested in learning and sharing theatre skills in the community. Using the vocabulary of theatre, we will investigate methods and techniques, styles, and forms to create and develop theatre projects designed for specific community work. The course develops individual collaboration, experimentation, and understanding of specific community needs. Students will explore the essentials of constructing a creative practice for community engagement. In addition, students will learn to extend their personal theatre skills by developing detailed interdisciplinary lesson plans for specific workshops. Each community project is unique. Lesson plans may include a combination of theatre games, acting, music, story making, movement, and drawing. Participants are encouraged to teach what they already know, step outside their comfort zone, and learn more as they become aware of their placement’s educational and psychological needs. The course focuses on teaching methods, making mistakes, and becoming aware of individual and personal processes. This ideal combination explores education and community problems for those considering a career in early-childhood, middle-school, and high-school education and beyond. Course topics will explore community self-care, lesson planning, curriculum development, and approaches to learning. In this course, students will experience crucial connections between theory and practice through a weekly community placement. Students will learn by doing, gaining hands-on experience by collaborating as a team member at an area school, senior home, museum, or the long-running Saturday SLC Lunchbox Theatre Program, which is open to the Sarah Lawrence and Yonkers communities. In addition, students will gain valuable experience as prospective teachers and teaching artists by taking this course and developing lesson plans that will be useful and valuable beyond the Sarah Lawrence College experience. Students will better understand how civic-engagement practices encourage essential dialogues that deepen community connections and may lead to change. Many former students of this course are teaching and running educational programs at schools, theatres, and museums across the globe. Course readings will include the work of Paolo Freire, Augusto Boal, Viola Spolin, MC Richards, Vivian Gussin Paley, Pablo Helguera, and others. Budget-depending placements may offer an hourly stipend.

Students in this course will develop valuable creative resources while investigating the intersection of theatre and community. The course is open to graduate and upper-level undergraduate students interested in sharing theatre skills in the community. We will explore interdisciplinary creative processes, social-justice issues, and curriculum development focusing on the individual. We will analyze the crossovers between various teaching theories, pedagogies, and philosophies. In addition, students will explore creating theatre in the community that investigates the connection of art practices in education while respecting the emotional aspects of learning. Students will analyze, explore, and investigate social-justice pedagogies and philosophies and explore various practices and creative techniques to deepen awareness and critical thinking. We will look at strategies for classroom management and teaching methods suitable for different ways of learning. Students will actively create, develop, and share collaborative theatre lessons while building community with artists, teachers, and community organizations. Active class work will explore ideas for projects that will support lesson planning and the growth of curriculum concepts. In addition, students will hold yearlong placements at schools, community centers, area colleges, museums, LGBTQIA youth centers, and the long-running SLC Saturday Lunchbox Theatre Program that combines the SLC and Yonkers communities. As a result of this course, students will have a portfolio of designed lesson plans and educational ideas that will serve as a creative template for current and future projects. We will explore the work of Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Mendieta, bell hooks, and others. Placements may offer an hourly stipend.

Theatre is a tool for social change. This one-semester course looks at a dynamic collection of contemporary plays written as a means of protest and activism. The course will culminate in an open-class performance project that students will devise and create over the course of the semester. The class includes a range of vital plays and films, from HAIR, written in response to the Vietnam War, to compelling new works by Antoinette Nwandu and Dominique Morisseau that resonate in the Black Lives Matter Movement, to plays that address concerns of the LGBTQ+ communities, among others. Protest Plays is open to actors, directors, playwrights, and those with a particular interest in theatre as a means of activism and change.

Weekly class meetings in which productions are analyzed and discussed will be supplemented by regular visits to many of the theatrical productions of the current season. The class will travel within the tristate area, attending theatre in as many diverse venues, forms, and styles as possible. Published plays will be studied in advance of attending performances; new or unscripted works will be preceded by examinations of previous work by the author or the company. Students will be given access to all available group and student discounts in purchasing tickets.

In this lecture, we will focus on theatre and performance in the African diasporas. This class will discuss some of the different experiences of what it means to be of an African diaspora and to create for performance. How do you express yourself when, structurally, your environment is inhospitable to such a self? We understand that the most commonly expressed histories tend to favor Western perspectives. How then, do we understand and trust what we learn of the history of Black performance? How do we understand and trust what we hear/read about contemporary Black theatre and performance? What IS theatre, and how does that word relate to non-Western traditions of performance? This class is interested in the connection between ritual and performance, mythology and truth, house and home. It holds space for oral traditions and modes of performance not necessarily called theatre while also maintaining a weekly practice of reading and discussing published plays, theory, and criticism.

Once upon a time, a playwright said in a rehearsal, “I just think that this is the most Cubist moment of this play.” Everyone in the room fell silent and grew uncomfortable—because, what in the heck did she mean by that? And aren’t we already supposed to know? This interactive lecture course surveys the aesthetic movements throughout history and teaches you to track their impact on your work. Ideas behind each movement are examined in relation to the historical moment of their occurrence and in their formal manifestations across visual art, musical, architectural, and performance disciplines. Each student then places his/her own work within a wider context of formal aesthetic discourse—locating hidden influence and making conscious and purposeful the political resonance that is subsequently uncovered. Students are encouraged to find ways of acknowledging the responsibility that one carries for one’s work’s impact on the world and to start using terms like “Post-Modernism” and “Futurist” with confidence.

Students on the London Theatre Tour will attend a wide range and array of plays, and meet daily in seminar with Theatre Program faculty as part of a 12-day immersive theatre/classroom experience. The London Theatre Tour offers a unique opportunity and course of study. Students will experience first-hand and up close the distinct history and current expression of what makes London a world theatre center. Students will attend up to 10 plays, take tours of theatre and arts districts, and meet with theatre professionals, in a dynamic, comprehensive program. The London Theatre Tour offers ample free time, between seminars, plays and tours, for students to explore London on their own or in small groups. Students will attend daily classes and make presentations on chosen topics as part of a distinct curriculum built upon the plays, playwrights, styles and forms, history and expression of British Theatre, as seen through a collection of contemporary plays, adaptations, and interactive works of theatre. The London Theatre Tour runs within the first two weeks of January, 2025. Preliminary information about the program can be discussed in registration interviews. Specific information on application deadlines, logistics and cost of the program, including academic credits, show tickets and housing in London, will be discussed in an in-person introductory meeting early in the fall semester.

Embodied Thesis provides a critical and supportive forum for developing new works of original theatre and performance, focusing on researching in multiple formats, including historical and artistic research, showings, improvisations, experiments, and conversation. Each of you had the opportunity to create a solo, duo, or group project. We share our research, respond to developmental prompts, keep a practice journal, loosely develop a structure/content for the projects, refine our performances through showings, and support and gave feedback to the cohort.

Embodied Thesis cultivates technical skills and nurtures a deep understanding of the integral relationship between research and embodiment in performance practice. By delving into an intentional and elongated creation process, students embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery. They leave the course equipped with an original work that authentically reflects their artistic voice and demonstrates their growth as innovative practitioners.

Taught by a rotating series of Sarah Lawrence faculty and guest artists, this course focuses on developing the skills needed for a wide variety of techniques for the creation and development of new work in theatre. Ensemble acting, movement, design and fabrication, playwriting, devised work, and music performance are all explored. The class is a forum for workshops, master classes, and open rehearsals, with a focus on the development of critical skills. In addition, students in Grad Lab are expected to generate a new piece of theatre to be performed each month for the Sarah Lawrence community. These performances may include graduate and undergraduate students alike. Required for all Theatre graduate students. This class meets twice a week.

This class meets once a week and is required for all second-year Theatre graduate students.

Graduate Practicum is designed for hands on graduate work.

Graduate Practicum is designed for hands on graduate work.

This graduate level course will focus on pedagogy and the theory of teaching theatre in higher education. Students will prepare to work as a theatre artist and educator in universities and colleges. Students will learn the practical skills of developing materials necessary to secure a position teaching theatre such as a teaching CV, pedagogical statement, artist statement, and diversity statement. Students will also learn the practical skills they will need once they’ve landed a teaching position such as developing a syllabus and other documents to track student progress.

We will discuss different perspectives on arts pedagogy and learn what is new and on the cutting edge of developing culturally competent, anti-racist, trauma informed, consent based, and inclusive teaching practices. Students will learn that Inclusive Teaching is a foundational framework for teaching in an increasingly diverse and globally connected society–one that recognizes and affirms the myriad backgrounds, perspectives, and identities individuals bring to learning environments. We will grapple with this in each class as students are encouraged to design their teaching materials to be welcoming, accessible, inclusive and explicitly centralizing of a broad range of students.

Students will learn how to identify their teaching goals for a course and then how to develop curriculums that will work towards those goals with each lesson. They will learn how to design exercises with multiple entrance points and they will learn how to design both summative and formative assessments. In addition to this in class work together, students will gain hands-on experience executing lessons and exercises by assisting a professor in the the SLC theatre program.

In this course we will discuss the ideas of thinkers including bell hooks, James P. Comer, Bettina Love, Kim Solga, Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, Gada Mahrouse, Chanelle Wilson, Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, and Heidi Safia Mirza, among others. Open to graduate students.