Principles of Dramaturgy: This graduate theater seminar focused on the specialized world of the dramaturg, a staff position at many regional theater companies. Dramaturgs read and edit plays, prepare background material and historical context for directors and actors and often assist artistic directors in planning theater seasons. From Lessing to Tynan, I got a good grounding in dramturgical history, along with reading so many translations and adaptations of Sophocles' "Philoctetes" that I could probably perform the work as a solo show.
History and Theory of Cinema: I took this overview course with first-year graduate film students in the School of the Arts. D.W. Griffiths, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard were among the great filmmakers we studied each week in a marathon four-hour lecture.
Screenplay Analysis: A thorough grounding in how scripts come together, from classic three-act structure to non-linear narrative. Among the films we carefully dissected: Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," Hitchcock's "Frenzy" and Alexander Payne's "Election."
American Art History: This fascinating Barnard College lecture course covered the colonial period through World War I and included paintings, decorative arts, sculpture and architecture. The best part was that I could pop down to the Metropolitan Museum and see many of the works we talked about in class.
Aesthetics and Politics: From Kant and Marx to digital culture, this interdisciplinary graduate seminar brought together different students from the School of the Arts. Themes addressed included: the notion of a ‘pure’ aesthetic and its critique; ‘tendency’ art and its critique; classic debates about modernism and realism in art practice; feminist critiques of aesthetic theory and art practice; representation and abstraction in engaged art practice; postmodernism and the ‘anti-aesthetic’; and the return to ‘beauty’ in the late 20th century. Heady stuff, and well worthwhile.
Cultural criticism: A chance to take a class taught by senior fellows Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall. For this intensive writing course I focused on dance, though I also wrote book reviews and several personal essays. My final project was on legendary choreographer Paul Taylor's spring season at City Center.
History of American Drama: I read at least two plays a week -- from O'Neill and Williams to the avant-garde Wooster Group -- in this graduate level course that I took with students in the dramaturgy, directing, playwriting and theater management concentrations. My projects for the class included a group presentation on the history of regional theaters in the United States and a final paper on playwright Tina Howe.
20th Century Art: This lecture class covered the big names from Manet to Warhol, giving me a foundation in the sometimes crazy world of modern art. (For the first time in my life, I think I actually began to understand Picasso.)
Origins of Modern Visual Culture: Another art-history lecture course, this one with a major emphasis on important developments in the making of a new visual culture in the 19th century, including photography, printing, panoramas, worlds fairs and early cinema. Most interestingly the class got into theories of perception, from Turner's use of color to Wagner's concept of opera as total entertainment.
