Film & Media Studies

Our contemporary world is deeply permeated with media and new technologies that inherently influence the way we communicate, transfer knowledge, exchange information, offer representations, and experience reality and its possible imaginaries. This course traces the development of such media technologies (print media, telephony, radio, television, film, internet, mobiles, games) and accounts for their historical transformations while focusing on their intermedial character and their relation to other arts (literature, photography, performing arts, painting, architecture, music). The course takes into account archeological and philosophical notions of media and how new forms of communication exert social, cultural, and political influences in a global context. In particular, the course addresses fandom and popular culture, gender and race in networked spaces, convergence culture, intellectual property, the role and function of social networks in the redefinition of the public sphere, notions of citizenship and democracy, and the future of digital humanities.

This course covers leading theoretical approaches to Japanese animation as viewed from abroad. Is anime a genre? A culture? An industry? How do we actually define anime? And what reasons exist for studying anime in the first place? To answer these questions, the course explores the history of Japanese animation and its global reach by means of arguments put forth by leading scholars in the English language, including notably Rayna Denison, Susan Napier, Thomas Lamarre, and Jonathan Clements. This course looks at the themes they identify in and around anime, such as the shojo, the otaku, the techno-orientalism, as well as investigating to what extent characteristic production methods such as hand-drawn animation define a supposedly unique nature of anime. In the process the course also attempts to identify the transnational aspects that have long formed a part of "Japanese" animation, by asking the question: How Japanese is anime?

In this course, students further their application of industry-standard digital tools and techniques for the development of interactive projects across different platforms. Students gain extended creative and technical knowledge and understanding of development processes and programming, and develop their knowledge and application of aesthetics and form.

This course investigates the way in which literary texts and cultural theories have responded to the emergence of multiple new media formats through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By situating literary and theoretical texts in a broader network of visual, aural and interactive media the course invites students to consider: the social, political and cultural effects of technology; the specificity of written texts as distinct from other forms of technical media; relationships between text, image, and sound; the historical implications of mechanical reproduction; the emergence of networked communication; the cultural and political impact of the computer.