From Shakespeare's fools to Key and Peele, from Mark Twain to Mindy Kaling: humor is inextricably connected to culture. When we miss a joke, surely it's not because we lack a sense of humor, but because we lack the cultural assumptions that enable us to understand the punch line. In this course, we will analyze arguments in a variety of comedic texts, critical essays, and scholarly journal articles, examining both how they are made, what they teach us about comedy, and the ways in which comedy engages critically with social, cultural and political issues. Additionally, we will explore comedy's ability to reveal the pettiness and pathos at the heart of the human condition, and how comedians use race, class, gender, language, sexuality, and identity to challenge our assumptions about ourselves and the society in which we live. In Funny Business, you will choose a comedic text (visual, video, or written) and will create an extended academic argument about it with the support of theoretical concepts that we will work with in class and other texts from your own research.

What is a nation? Does it come from a map, a language, a race or a religion? The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been periods of intense change, as Middle Eastern nations have emerged and states have been broken down by internal and external forces. In this writing and research seminar, we will explore the racial, religious, and political beliefs that bring people together and break them apart both in the Middle East as well as worldwide. Reading historical nationalist works alongside critical theory will allow us to reconsider ideas of communal identity from the nineteenth century through the present day. From these topics, students will develop a research topic and write their own primary source research paper.

SPACE: the final frontier? . . . not quite. The idea of space has been widely contested over the centuries, particularly with regard to the built environment and cultural production. This course explores some of the key thinkers and cultural producers implicated in the discourses about public space during the latter half of the 20th century. This topic spans the fields of urban studies, geography, art history, architecture and cultural theory, and the course will engage texts by figures as diverse as urban theorist Mike Davis, Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre and artists Robert Smithson and Suzanne Lacy, among others. We will consider: How do notions of public vs. private mediate our experiences of art and architecture? How do different geographies of the mid- to late 20th century--the modern city, the desert and the ‘burbs--influence our conception of space? What are the political systems that define and control space? And how have artists, architects, urban theorists, and other cultural producers expanded our understanding of space and its tenuous political history?

What makes someone or something monstrous? Can you tell just by looking at them? Not all monsters have fangs, and they are not always fictional. We will look at vampires, werewolves, and ogres, but also think about how we as a culture apply their characteristics to certain communities. How do figures from myths and fairy tales inform our understandings of people different than us? What makes certain monsters more sympathetic than others? Why do types of monsters, zombies for example, become popular at certain moments in history? Why do news outlets and political figures consistently use language that implies monstrous behavior to describe both individuals and groups, labeling them as deviant? We will read scholarship from different perspectives analyzing the way society marks certain bodies as monstrous, and how those markings delineate social power dynamics. Drawing support from course readings as well as individual research, students will apply their knowledge to a primary text and construct an academic argument that engages the tension between monstrous facts and monstrous fictions.

We live a stone’s throw away from the most frequently crossed international border in the world.  How does this border—and the countless reasons why it is crossed every day—contribute to our idea of home?  In this course we will examine theories about displacement, migration and diaspora, and how these theories challenge or support cultural constructions of home.  In addition we will explore the ways in which home becomes mythologized for refugees, those in exile and economic migrants and consider how personal, social, national, ethnic or feminist identity is formed during journeys that take us far away from home or return us there.

Upwards of 43 million Americans are currently experiencing some kind of physical, cognitive, or sensory impairment, and that number is on the rise. And yet despite the pervasiveness of these kinds of disabilities among the U.S. population, and despite the fact that disabled people comprise one of the largest U.S. minority groups, disabled figures are often stereotyped in movies, comic books, commercials, novels, and on television shows, as being deserving of the viewer’s pity, or as being excessively courageous because of their ability to overcome what is often portrayed as a troubled or difficult existence. These stereotypes mark disabled people as ‘other’, thus marginalizing an already marginalized population. In this course, we will examine popular representations of disability to uncover assumptions about the normal or ideal body. We will read scholarship from a variety of perspectives that consider impairments in relation to history, nationality, race, gender, and sexuality. In the process, students will apply this scholarship—and their own independent research—to a popular cultural form with the objective of making and defending an argument about disability in a research paper.

In the past three decades in particular, there has been incredible growth and change in art’s response to the political tensions and growing border security infrastructure on the Tijuana-San Diego border. This local art history has many interesting potential connections yet to be analyzed and understood, especially by residents north of the border. In this MCWP 50 course, we will develop research projects investigating the many different contexts, practices, and artworks by transborder artists in the region, considering in particular the representations of the struggle for social justice for people whom the border marginalizes, or denies entry.

Everyday we are inundated and interact with visual images and media from sharing Grumpy Cat memes to viewing time-lapse videos of Earth from NASA to swiping Tinder profile pictures. We also freely distort, reflect, and refract visual sources depending on our own needs and interests. Yet, how do our interactions with seemingly innocuous products such as videos, television shows, photographs, and paintings, among many other visual mediums, shape deeply ingrained individual, regional, and even national identities? This class looks at global processes of identity construction through the lens of visual culture. Readings will serve as a primer to understand the transmission and communication of visual culture across borders and oceans as well as how its interpretation varies according to the historical context in which it is articulated. The significance attached to such interpretations not only depends on the producer’s intentions, but also by how people consume and manipulate visual sources to make sense of the world around them or facilitate social change. The course will culminate in a final research project in which students will research a specific visual source or trend, providing subsequent analysis from what we have learned in the readings throughout the quarter.

What makes Scandal so scandalous? Is Modern Family really modern? These are the types of questions scholars ask when studying the relationship between entertainment television and changing social mores, and how we understand the world around us through media. In this class, we will read television as a text to not only analyze the content itself but also examine the historical contexts in which a program’s politics are (explicitly or implicitly) situated. We will explore the ways in which sitcoms and dramas offer a useful point of convergence for discussions of race, class, gender, and sexuality during the historical moment that such programs aired. Through reading critical essays, scholarly journal articles, and watching TV shows you are expected to contribute to the academic discussions on television’s powerful reach. Students will apply this scholarship—in addition to selected readings from the course reader—to their own research on a television text with the objective of writing a research paper based on their own argument about representations of social change in prime-time TV.