Courses
Core Courses
Semester course; three lecture hours. Three credits. Explores theories of texts and textuality as they relate to the study of media, the arts and discourse of any kind.
Fall 2023: Joshua Eckhardt
Fall 2022: Oliver Speck
Fall 2021: Les Harrison
Fall 2020: Jennifer Rhee
Fall 2019: David Golumbia
Semester course; three lecture hours. Three credits. Examines the history of communication technologies in their social and cultural contexts, with an emphasis on the development of contemporary digital technology and new media. Students will explore how the interactions between communication practices and technologies are related to institutions, identity formation, cultural values, social practices and economic conditions.
Spring 2024:
Fall 2022: Joshua Eckhardt
Fall 2021: Joshua Eckhardt
Fall 2020: David Golumbia
Fall 2019: Richard Fine
Semester course; three lecture hours. Three credits. Explores the history of disciplines and media and studies the implications for scholarly and creative practice of crossing boundaries between disciplines and media.
Spring 2023: Mariam Alkazemi
Spring 2022: Nicole O'Donnell
Spring 2021: Nicole O'Donnell
Spring 2020: Mariam Alkazemi
Spring 2019: Mariam Alkazemi
Spring 2018: Hong Chen
Spring 2017: Hong Chen
Semester course; three lecture hours. Three credits. Provides the opportunity to develop and expand knowledge of specific production technologies needed for e-portfolio website and to study and practice professional and/or creative skills that students are contemplating using in their doctoral work.
Spring 2023: Oliver Speck
Spring 2022: Oliver Speck
Spring 2021: Eric Garberson
Spring 2020: David Golumbia
Spring 2019: Michael Hall
Spring 2018: Michael Hall
Spring 2017: Eric Garberson
Seminars
MATX 690 Seminar in Media, Art and Text
Semester course; three lecture hours. Three credits. Graduate-level research and reading centered on interdisciplinary study.
Fall 2022
Cultural Discourses/Seminar in Media, Art and Text: Black (In/Ex)clusion: Race and Recreation in the US (and Beyond)
Michael Hall
Department of English
Recreation is a significant aspect of popular culture in the US; however, black Americans have a fraught historical relationship with leisure pursuits in this country, the vestiges of which resonate in the present. For instance, statistics collected from the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service show that although people of color make up nearly 40 percent of the total U.S. population, close to 70 percent of people who visit national forests, national wildlife refuges, and national parks are white, while Black people remain the most dramatically underrepresented group in these spaces. Also, as Emma Gosalvez notes in a December 2020 news article, “Research shows that people of color are far less likely to engage in nature-based outdoor recreation activities, with historic discrimination being a large underlying factor.” This course introduces students to the complicated history of race and recreation in the US through a critical study of leisure that addresses myriad contexts and issues. Specific subtopics of inquiry will be chosen from the following overarching units: 1) Race, Space, and Nature; 2) Conservation, Environment, and Race; 3) Contested Space of Leisure; 4) Disaster Tourism and Toxic Tours; 5) Diversity, Inclusion, and Sport; 6) Parks and Recreation; and 7) Safe Spaces: A Home Away from Home. In addition to robust class participation, students will be responsible for in-class presentation of readings, a midterm research proposal, and a final researched paper. Class will meet in-person (i.e. face-to-face) and temporarily move online only in the event of a public health emergency.
Spring 2022
Culture, Institutions & Ethics
Dominic Willsdon
ICA, School of the Arts
Over the past decade and more, debates around cultural institutions have centered increasingly on questions of institutional and professional ethics. Those questions concern, for example, labor relations, artists’ pay and rights, racial and gender equity, conditions for community partnership, and institutional practices in curating, communications, and education. The debates have been further energized by the crises of 2020-21: the racial reckoning, and the social and economic impact of the pandemic.
This seminar studies how these issues can be understood and addressed across the cultural sector. It centers on institutions of contemporary art, but also looks at other areas of contemporary culture such as film/TV and publishing. It asks: What principles ought to govern how institutions of contemporary culture work? How should cultural institutions be shaped by contemporary ethical and political demands? How should they change? What ethics-based knowledge and skills are needed to work in cultural institutions today?
Fall 2021
Art for Art’s Sake: Fin-de-siècle Literature and Art
Nicholas Frankel
Department of English
The fin-de-siècle (Fr. meaning ‘end-of-the-century’) was more than a distinct historical period, roughly corresponding to the 1890s. It was also an important cultural movement or sensibility, characterized by decadence, excess, and the cultivation of style, beauty, and art for their own sakes, as well as by a new liberalism – even anarchism -- in matters of gender and sexuality. In this class we will examine the fin-de-siècle sensibility as expressed in British literature and visual art of the period, as well as in the close interplay between them. We’ll pay particular attention to the writings of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Violet Paget, and Bram Stoker, as well as “New Woman” writers such as “George Egerton” [Mary Chavelita Dunne] and Mona Caird and the poets of the Rhymers Club. We’ll also explore the visual art (and writings about art) of James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts among others, paying attention to the artist’s celebrity, the rise of “reproducible” or graphic art, illustration, and the challenge to visual representation as such.
Select Past Seminars
Mary Caton Lingold
Department of English
This seminar offers a broad graduate-level survey of the field of sound studies. We will take a historical approach as we examine the way sound has been theorized and experienced across listening cultures and time. We will pay particular attention to audio technologies — their creation and adaptation within specific cultural contexts. While a historical arc will shape the course, thematic clusters will emphasize sound in relationship to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other categories key to critical methods in the humanities. Assignments will be hands-on and will include audio production from field-recording to podcasting and experimental genres. Beginners and experienced sound producers and tinkerers are all welcome. Short form academic writing will also be emphasized.
Oliver Speck
Film Studies, School of World Studies
This course surveys representations of slavery in American cinema. Well into the 1940s, Hollywood Cinema notoriously depicted slavery in a positive light: Birth of a Nation (1915) – still considered a major breakthrough in terms of storytelling – and Gone with the Wind (1939) – one of the most financially successful films ever – paved the way for renewed policies of segregation and painted a nostalgic image of the antebellum South, respectively. For years after that, Hollywood avoided the potentially painful subject altogether, and chose to concentrate on the inspiring fight for freedom by white slaves, such as the historical dramas The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Spartacus (1960), or the role of the white savior, such as the 1984 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A major turning point came in 1977 with the acclaimed television miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel. After the success of this series, films turned more and more to a realistic depiction of the brutal reality of slavery. Here, the 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad is considered a milestone insofar as it fairly realistically depicts the atrocity of the so-called Middle Passage, the shipping of enslaved Africans to the New World. Still, given that white directors focusing mostly on white characters directed these films, critics have accused these films of smoothing over difficult issues of representation and serving as vehicles for redemption. More recent films (e.g. Lincoln, 2012; Django Unchained, 2012; and 12 Years a Slave, 2013) reflect on their own status as representations of a historical fact – human bondage –that in philosophical and aesthetic terms remains truly unrepresentable.
Karen Rader
Department of History; Science, Technology and Society program
This discussion-intensive graduate seminar investigates the complex representations and experiences of what STS scholars have called ‘technoculture’ and how these mediate – and in turn, are mediated by –embodiments of gender and race. We will investigate the intersection of gender and race in the history of modern Western science and technology (1850 onward), and how these intersections have shaped the development and use of particular technologies (from the household to the workplace) as well as visions of alternate framings for technoscientific presents and futures. Readings will be draw from extensive STS scholarship (history, sociology, theory) in this area, as well as historical primary sources in the development of science and technology, including the history of industrial standardization, medical texts and practices, and computing and the internet.
Oliver Speck
Film Studies, School of World Studies
Many news outlets have remarked on a recent macabre phenomenon: terrorists now record their attacks with lightweight cameras that were initially designed and marketed for extreme sports. The affinity of extreme sports and terrorist attacks hardly needs to be pointed out: a fast-paced, dangerous, potentially deadly activity in a hostile terrain is recorded from the point of view of the participant bearing witness to the authenticity of an exhilarating experience. The exact way in which this device is deployed deserves careful analysis, as the graphic footage then finds its way into recruitment videos mostly aimed at disaffected young men and women in Europe, the United States and other developed and developing regions. This seminar will elucidate this particular challenge to our democracy by looking at the complex ideological underpinning of this narrative device, relating point-of-view-shots in video games, extreme sports and combat to a solid base of political philosophy.
Oliver Speck
Film Studies, School of World Studies
This course will explore films that treat virtual reality as an alternative consciousness (e.g. “Total Recall,” “The Matrix,” “eXistenZ”), comparing them to films that introduce a notion of the virtual as developed by Gilles Deleuze in his two cinema books and in the two books he co‐authored with Felix Guattari (“Groundhog Day,” “Run Lola Run,” “The Third Generation”). Since the virtual holds potential for political change, but should not be confused with the possible, films can help to think a “community to come,” as Giorgio Agamben conceptualizes it (“Hero,” “Miracle in Milan” and “Our Daily Bread”).
Eric Garberson
Department of Art History
This Media Art and Text topic seminar examines representations of the visual artist from the 18th century to the present. The principal question to be investigated is how the cultural constructs of creativity and artistic identity are produced and reproduced, visually and textually, across different social and institutional contexts. The course will begin with a variation on Foucault’s question, asking “what is an artist?” and reading key historical and theoretical texts on the figure of the artist. This will provide the foundation for a selective, thematic survey of representations in scholarly and literary texts (artist monographs and catalogues raisonnés, novels and short stories), fine art (painting and graphics) and popular media (advertising and film). Class format will be primarily a discussion of assigned readings, which will include secondary scholarly literature and primary sources, both textual and visual. Each student will select a topic relevant to his or her own interests for a major research project culminating in a presentation and a 20‐page paper.
Other Courses
Independent study may be supervised by graduate faculty in one of the participating units. It may not duplicate courses regularly offered. No more than twelve credits of independent study may be counted toward the degree. Additional credits may be authorized for purposes of continuous enrollment. Upon approval by the supervising faculty member, the student should submit a description of the course of study, a bibliography and the anticipated final product (a long paper, annotated bibliography, creative project, etc.) to the MATX director and the graduate programs adviser. An electronic override is issued for registration upon approval.
For the independent study application form, please contact the graduate programs adviser.
Internship opportunities are available in the Richmond area at a range of institutions including museums, libraries and galleries. Students seek out their own internships and submit to the MATX director a description of the planned internship with the approval of the external supervisor. The final grade will be assigned by the supervisor in consultation with the MATX director. A student may take one or three credits of internship in a given semester. No more than six credits of internship may be counted toward the degree.