Get an interdisciplinary look at culture in multiple contexts

“Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.”Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

The Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) major at Franklin focuses on cultural phenomena and processes as they unfold under the pressure of historical, social and economic forces. Inherent in our approach is an understanding of culture as an ever-evolving entity that demands continuous acts of interpretation, negotiation and creativity.

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Our teaching is both theoretical and topic-based: for instance, we explore how collective memory is shaped in the wake of slavery or apartheid; we seek to understand the conse-quences of forced or voluntary mobility; we examine the cultural significance of cuisine; we investigate the multiple ways in which law shapes cultural processes; we explore the nexus of culture and nature; and we study forms of popular music as an expression of culture.

The comparative work we do explores each topic from a number of disciplinary angles and situates it in its historical context. In this context we ask how the topic is reflected in, and influenced by, literary texts, film and visual culture; we investigate how new media contribute to our understanding of cultural processes and trace how broader systems of knowledge and power, such as law or policy, come to bear on them.  In comparing these various modes of knowledge production, we use theory to help us appreciate cultural nuances and to understand the multiple challenges that confront us in today’s globalized world.

Our program is both rigorous and flexible. We support our students in designing their own educational path, which culminates in a year-long senior thesis or an internship. In both cases, this final focus on an original piece of research, or on a specific professional arena, prepares our graduates for success on the job market. So, what can you do with a CLCS degree? A lot, in fact: the range of careers open to our graduates includes any sector that values keen analytical abilities, synthetic thinking, and effective oral and written expression. Our alums over the past decade have built careers at NGOs, with governmental agencies, in development aid and human rights;  in academia, law, business, psychology, marketing and journalism; as editors, politicians, interpreters, teachers and foreign aid workers. Many have also gone on to graduate school to seek advanced degrees in fields as diverse as psychology, history, development aid, literature, art history, law, cultural studies and environmental studies.

 

Majors

All of the courses required in the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS)  major are topic-based and explore literature and culture from multiple perspectives.  Four major elective courses are selected in consultation with the student’s major advisor (see description below). Students planning a major in CLCS should enroll in LC 100 or LC 110 prior to taking upper-division classes in the major.

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Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies

"Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world."
Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil

The Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) major at FUS invites students to think about the nature, function and impact of storytelling in a globalized world. The topic-based courses in CLCS take the insights of how narrative works in different literary genres and linguistic traditions and applies them to other fields, such as law, environmental studies, history, film and visual culture, and politics. In other words, we not only deploy literature as a window on the world, but ask how the world is molded by the stories we tell about it. To do this, students explore the categories of race, class, gender, sexuality and age to guide their critical thinking and understanding of culture as an ever-evolving entity that demands continuous acts of interpretation, negotiation, and creativity.

By offering theoretical approaches to literature, film and culture across four languages, and by supporting work in the creative fields, we train our students to become nuanced critics of the narrative forms and structures that provide the framework for cultural phenomena. By comparing a wide range of cultural narratives, CLCS majors gain a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on contemporary challenges such as migration, food sustainability, and identity politics as they learn to navigate multiple discourses and to propose creative, ethical responses.

This approach is not only theoretical and creative, but also experiential and hands-on, with onsite travel courses and professional pathways playing a key role in student learning. On Academic Travel, for instance, CLCS majors study how collective memory in the wake of the Holocaust is shaped in Poland, Germany and France; they consider how capital cities like Paris and Berlin become protagonists of our lives and narratives; and they study how landscapes influence notions of belonging and self in Morocco and Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Another way that students transform the knowledge that they gain in the classroom is through pathways. Students either design their own pathway in consultation with their CLCS advisor, or they choose from one of three pathways that give them the opportunity to investigate human rights and policy; ethics, food and sustainability; or storytelling and performance across media. In each pathway, a key CLCS course leads into a number of courses in related disciplines so as to afford interdisciplinary, creative or professional perspectives. Those who wish to gain hands-on experience in the field are encouraged to complete an internship option.

Our graduates have analytical, expressive and problem-solving skills; they are creative and understand how to navigate across disciplines and cultures. These are skills that do not become obsolete and are valuable in today's job markets. Their year-long capstone experience writing a substantive thesis or embarking on an extensive internship set them up for the most rigorous academic and professional contexts. The professions embarked on by CLCS students have included careers in education, publishing, creative fields, law, cultural consultancy and diplomacy, media production, political advocacy and government, and business. CLCS graduates have been successfully admitted to advanced degree programs, in various academic areas, at excellent universities around the world including most recently Emerson College, The University of British Columbia, Cambridge, and Columbia University.

Major Requirements (42 Credits)

The Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) major curriculum is interdisciplinary and topic-based, providing in-depth exploration of specific cultural phenomena. Interdisciplinary streams designed to link to specific professional pathways further distinguish the CLCS major in its flexibility and responsiveness to student initiatives. Students participate in the design of the professional pathways by choosing three additional courses in consultation with CLCS faculty and their major advisor (see description below).

Foundation Courses (6 Credits)

Two of the following:

CLCS 100 The Stories We Live By

Stories are everywhere. We use them, consciously or unconsciously, to make sense of identities, experiences, and desires. And, at the same time, we are shaped by the stories that we absorb and interpret. This course explores how storytelling both reflects and shapes our lives. It introduces students to keywords and terms for reading and reflecting upon stories, both in the pages of books and in everyday life. The course considers a variety of narrative forms, including short stories, novels, fairy tales, self-help manuals, comics, films, podcasts, and political discourse. The course introduces students to fundamental questions about the nature of storytelling, while developing the vocabulary and critical skills for analysing and discussing stories. This is a writing intensive course in which students read as they learn to write. Students practice applying a critical vocabulary to textual forms as well as becoming familiar with the skills of drafting and editing. The course also introduces students to some of the professional pathways open to writers and storytellers.(This writing-intensive course counts towards the Academic Writing requirements).

CLCS 110 Reading Cultures: Approaches to Cultural Studies

This course has two primary goals: to introduce students to the history and theoretical writings of various strands of cultural studies, and to acquaint them with some of the intersecting axes - race, class and gender - that energize the field. Close attention will be paid to issues such as the shaping of identity, forms of representation, the production, consumption and distribution of cultural goods, and the construction of knowledge and power in a host of cultural practices and cultural institutions.

CLCS 120 Introduction to Creative Writing

This course presents an introduction to creative writing through a variety of genres, including poetry, prose, fiction and non-fiction. By paying close attention both to literary models and original student writing, this class asks that participants reflect on the relationship between reading and writing, and voice and context. Students will compose short pieces in a variety of genres and present them for critique in weekly workshops.  A final portfolio of all work during the semester will act as a springboard for more advanced courses in creative writing.

CLCS 150 Reading Film

This course introduces students to the language of cinema through close studies of and foundational readings on film theory, narrative/documentary structure, camera technique, lighting, sound, casting, and location. Students will be expected to demonstrate their understanding of film language through scholarly analysis of both canonical and contemporary cinema texts and two practical applications of film. Students will move beyond the passive reception of an image-based world by working towards increased intellectual adaptablity in terms of engaged film reading skills that will call into question philosophical and culture-specific notions and norms. The learning outcomes will be developed through a number of concentrated modules lasting approximately three weeks each, including analysis, contemporary criticism, audience reception, and practical applications.

Major Courses (6 courses; 18 Credits)
200-level courses

Three of the following:

CLCS 105T Paris Protagonist: Lost in Translation

This Academic Travel and creative writing course creates the occasion for an intensive hybrid scholarly/creative encounter with a mythical urban landscape which figuratively lives and breathes, as a protagonist, through French literature and film. The travel component that underscores this course will also mark the culmination of this Parisian encounter, ushering students from the realm of theory to practice with daily (on-location/site-driven) writing prompts and workshop-style events designed to address the following key questions: What forms does this protagonist assume as s/he endures through time? What voices emerge from the space of her debris? What gets lost in translation and how can the dialogue between art and cultural theory aide us in finding our way through this impasse of loss? How can the deepening of a student’s cultural awareness help the City of Light avoid being subsumed by her own, distinctive, and almost irresistible, charme fatal?
Three thematic modules will frame this exploration and create a groundwork on which to base the student’s intellectual discovery and experimentation as writers/travelers: the poetry of Charles Baudelaire highlights the unique experience of Parisian space; the contribution of Surrealism which both defines and defies the peculiarities of Parisian time; the French New Wave (contrasted to foreign cinematic renderings of Paris), with a focus on the twin concepts of translation-transfiguration, allegories of Light and “Othering.”
 
Students enrolling in this course may expect dual-language editions of French literary sources and French films with English subtitles (when possible).


CLCS 200 Gender and Sexuality in a Global Context

This course presents an interdisciplinary introduction to key concepts in gender studies. Focusing on the way in which gender operates in different cultural domains, this class investigates the manner in which race, culture, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender. (This writing-intensive course counts towards the Academic Writing requirements).

CLCS 210 Deception

Deception, in all its forms, including eavesdropping, adultery, cheating, and trickery, functions as a narrative motor in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and film. This class examines this notion of deception in literary and visual cultures. In particular, this class will focus on the strategies of narrative structures in the European novel and film from 1840s through the late twentieth century. We will consider eavesdropping, lying, adultery, cheating, gender switching, and their narrative consequences relating to gender and class through the course of the semester. European Realism, with its focus on the every-day and the darker side, signals a shift away from the Romantic and will introduce our study of deception in a cross-cultural context.

CLCS 216 Opera: When Music Meets Literature

The unique alchemy of word and sound, of music, literature and theater led to the creation of a complex art form - Opera. The objective of this course is to familiarize students with all the elements that contributed to its popularity throughout the centuries. It is meant to enlarge the cultural horizon through a historic prospective from its origins to present day, overcoming the largely diffused pre-concept that opera is only for connoisseurs. Based on extensive listenings, readings and discussions, the course emphasizes the musical and literary aspects of opera history, as well as its theatrical, architectural and political context. It presents students with the essential elements needed to attend a performance, the variety of singing voices and the complexity of preparation and staging of an opera. It encourages students to comparative listening of different versions and reading of the original literary sources.

CLCS 220T Inventing the Past: The Uses of Memory in a Changing World

The construction of memory is one of the fundamental processes by which the workings of culture can be studied. Every country, every culture and every community has a specific memory culture that finds expression in a congruence of texts: of literature and film, of law and politics, of memorial rituals, and historiography. The aim of this course is to enable students to recognize different forms of the construction, representation and archiving of memory; to analyze processes of individual and collective identity formation through memory; and to understand the power differentials operant in the negotiations and performance of a national memory. The travel component of this course will focus in particular on Berlin and representations of the Holocaust.

CLCS 225 Music and Popular Culture from the 1950s to the 1990s

This course covers popular music genres, generally defined as music produced for commercial purposes and transmitted through mass media to a wide audience, and their relationship with popular culture. Drawing on sociology, media studies and cultural studies, it will examine the cultural significance of popular music genres such as rock’n’roll, punk, heavy metal, hip hop, rap, techno, industrial etc., with reference to issues such as space, ethnicity, class and gender. It will further explore how and to what end the creation, circulation and consumption of popular music tend to be shaped by record companies and corporate business styles. Finally, reflecting upon how popular music is, in many ways, a direct reflection of its times, it will show how it is mediated by historical, geographical, political, economical and technological factors.

CLCS 230 Science / Fiction: Envisioning the Possible

Science fiction narratives may be defined as speculative fictions, ideal allegorical vehicles eliciting theoretical reflection on the state of contemporary culture and society and motivating social reform. As such, the main objective of this course is to consider several major contemporary socio-cultural issues through the unique lens provided by writers and filmmakers of the science-fiction tradition. The issues, allowing for variances from year to year, will include questions regarding gender and Otherness, the hypothesized deterioration of a human-world bond, modern apocalyptic anxieties, genetic engineering, intersections of ideology and communication technologies. Authors and filmmakers may include: Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guinn, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, William Gibson; Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Andrew Niccol, Jean-Luc Godard, Lana and Andy Wachowski

CLCS 235T Greek Civilizations and Their Discontents

This travel course will focus on the co-existence and forced movement of populations between present-day Turkey and Greece while grappling with notions of human rights as inscribed in the ancient ideas of citizenship and polis. The travel will trace a parallel trajectory in the ancient and modern worlds: moving from Athens to Thessaloniki, students will study the histories of cultural co-existence and the moments of violent dissolution in the modern world; the class will also visit ancient sites such as Corinth and Mycenae on the Peloponnese; Delphi; the ancient city of Vergina, whose modern instantiation became the home of Greeks who were expelled from Turkey during the population exchange in 1922; and Philippi, abandoned to the Ottoman empire in the 14th century. Throughout this course, students will study notions of human rights, forced migration, and the tensions inherent in encounters between East and West. Students will read a broad array of texts, ranging from historical accounts to human rights treatises and philosophical texts, novels and plays.

CLCS 236T Prague on the Page

The literature of Prague lies in the city's complex web of identities, a web created by social upheaval through the ages. Beginning with sixteenth-century tales of the Golem, the clay figure animated by Rabbi Loew to protect the city's Jewish community, students will investigate how Prague's writers have responded to the politics of their times by embracing the surreal and the ambiguous. In particular, this class will look at how these authors have found inspiration in the city itself. Reading includes Franz Kafka's evocation of the early twentieth-century city and a selection of works by more recent writers such as Weil, Kundera, and Hakl. Studying the way these writers repeatedly draw on each other through the idea of the city as a text, students will visit their haunts in Prague and its surroundings, and map their works onto the city's landscape and onto its history, with the surreal Kafka museum as a starting point.

CLCS 238T Reading the Postcolonial City: Berlin and Hamburg

Colonialism has left its traces not only very obviously on the former colonies themselves but also on the face of the cities of the colonisers. Host of the ''Congo Conference'' that carved up the continent in 1885, Germany was late into the ''scramble for Africa.'' However, it has long been implicated in colonialism through trade, scientific exploration, and Hamburg’s position as a ''hinterland'' of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Seeking to explore colonial echoes in less obvious places, namely in contemporary Berlin and Hamburg, the course asks how we can remember colonialism in the modern world, become conscious of its traces, and encourage critical thinking about the connections between colonialism, migration and globalization. As an Academic Travel, this course will include an on-site component where the class will team up with postcolonial focus groups in Berlin and Hamburg, going onto the street and into the museum to retrace the cities’ colonial connections, and to experience and engage with the colonial past through performance-based activities.

CLCS 241 Forbidden Acts: Queer Studies and Performance

In this course, queer solo performance and theater are playfully considered ''forbidden acts'' because they commonly enact a special kind of transgression. These acts give voice to and, at once, subvert a wide range of political identities conventionally defined by race, ethnicity, HIV status, class, gender, and sexual practice. Often autobiographical at their point of departure, queer performance and theater seem intent on troubling the comfort of community even as they invest in it. This rich, albeit problematic, ambivalence stems from the fact that the term queer, itself, connotes primarily a locus of refusal, an unbinding and destabilizing term of defiance, of provocation via polysemy. As such, queer performance and theater seek to open up new vistas of multiple, shifting, polymorphous identities. What political implications might these queer texts dramatize? What may be the ramifications of instilling the notion of personal identity with collective utopian aspirations? How would the students enrolled in this class spin the term queer to encompass their own sense of individual difference and empower their own vision of creative defiance? In attempting to respond to these questions, students taking this course will be invited to share their own forbidden acts: to approach theoretical refection through performative exercises, to merge the analytical realm with the autobiographical monologue, to test the limits (if there are any) between theatrical play and ideological engagement.

CLCS 242 Representations of Poverty in Literature

This course looks at poverty as it is portrayed in contemporary literature, film, television, painting, music and street magazines. Students will explore how these representations compare to economic and social indices such as income, Living Standards Measurement surveys, welfare statistics, poverty indexes and poverty determinants. For these latter determinants the class will take Switzerland, a country in which the extremes of poverty and riches are quite subtle, as our case study. The overall goals of this course are 1) to compare different forms of representation and to recognize and be able to distinguish among the many faces and facets of poverty in a wealthy nation and 2) to critically explore the ideologies underlying mainstream representations of ''the poor'' or ''the marginalized'' and to ask how effective such representations are in triggering social change.

CLCS 243 The Cultural Politics of Sports

This course looks at sports as a cultural, social and political phenomenon and explores some of the major concepts pertinent to the cultural studies discipline through the lens of sports such as nationalism, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, celebrity culture and its fans, ethics, and concepts of power. Students will also consider the very ideas of 'sportsmanship,' 'playing the game' and the global 'mega-events' that many professional sports competitions have become. This course will involve reading theoretical essays related to sports, class discussion of the readings, regular reading responses, and presentations. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own research interests based on a particular sport, major sports event (Olympics, European Soccer Championship, World Series) or sports infrastructure (Little-League, college sports, sports clubs) and to reflect culturally on an activity that cuts across many disciplines (e.g. business, communications, ethics, health) as well as one that they themselves may be passionately involved in, either as actors and/or as spectators.

CLCS 247T French Cultural Institutions: Power and Representation

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French authors and artists were instrumental in shaping the imaginary of the ''Orient'', with a myriad of paintings and texts housed for public consumption in national cultural institutions. Students will use the French case to explore the politics of representation: the creation and objectification of an Oriental ''Other''. On-the-ground field study in museums, archives and galleries of Paris (the former colonial capital) and Marseille (the ''Gateway to North Africa'') will help students to investigate the ties that bind the visual arts and literature with the exercising of knowledge and power, and to read literary and artistic works as shaped by their cultural and historical circumstances. The strong Arab and Berber presence in both cities today, in particular from France's former colonies in North Africa, will provide the impetus to question how contemporary writers and artists explicitly and implicitly engage with and renegotiate these ''cultural artifacts'', and what broader significance this might have for questions of representation and identity, Self and Other, in the (not only French) present. Students will read contemporary texts by authors such as Leïla Sebbar and Assia Djébar and explore work by visual artists including Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, using their, and our own, ''encounters'' in the Louvre, the Pompidou Center, the Arab World Institute, MuCEM and smaller galleries to consider the significance of reappropriating the gaze and of the relationship between visual pleasure and politics, while questioning who art is ''for'' and where the ''representation business'' takes us. (The course may count toward the French Studies major in consultation with the coordinator of the French Studies program.)

CLCS 248T European Food Systems: You Are Where You Eat

In this course, students will explore the cultures that produce and are reproduced by our current food systems in Europe, touching upon the local, national and global dimensions. This course will examine the cultural, ecological, political, and geographic forces at work influencing the chain of production from farm to table. In particular, students will consider the contemporary food systems in Italy and Switzerland as well as their cultural and historical roots. Students will learn more about what it takes to become an active food citizen as the class considers where food comes from here in Europe and how the food we eat shapes who we are, both literally and figuratively. This course includes a travel component to Italy and Switzerland where students will study first hand some of the concepts discussed, including terroir, slow food, and local farm to table movements.

CLCS 250 Ecocritical Approaches to Film

This course approaches film from an ecocritical perspective to explore how the medium of film articulates relations between the environment and human rights. In recent decades, scholars have increasingly examined how film represents ecological issues and humans' involvement with those issues, particularly with regards to environmental disaster and climate change. The course aims to make students familiar with those debates by examining a variety of film genres -- blockbuster, documentary, animation, among others -- to offer a survey in reading film ecocritically, from a human rights’ perspective. Students will gain experience in analyzing films as texts and in applying ecocritical theory to those films and the ethical issues surrounding them, from production to narrative, and distribution to reception. Screenings, theoretical readings, class discussion, video-making and writing assignments will help students develop a critical awareness of how film tells the story of our complex relation with the environment against the backdrop of contemporary human rights regimes.

CLCS 251T Reading Moroccan Culture

This course examines gender, ethnic, class, family, age, religious relationships within contemporary Morocco. It first provides students with a historical overview of Morocco since its independence in 1956, focusing on the monarchies of Hassan II and Mohammed VI the current king. It explores the power dynamics that exist in a society that is predominantly patrilinear and where gender roles are mostly divided along a binary system; it studies the place of the individual in a society where the collective ego prevails; it considers the place of Berber identity within Moroccan society and finally it explores Sufism as a counter-power to any form of Islamic rigorism. All the themes studied are substantiated with presentations by Moroccan scholars working in the fields of sociology, gender, ethnic, religious, and music studies. (Knowledge of French recommended.)

CLCS 253T On Refugees: Representations, Politics and Realities of Forced Migration: Greece

This travel course will focus on forced migration and refugees, with a travel component that takes the class to Greece, one of the major European nodes of the current refugees crisis. The course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the political, social and cultural contexts of forced migration and is coupled with the study of a number of imaginative responses that help to shape attitudes and positions towards refugees. Throughout this course, students will study ideas of human rights as they relate to refugees, political and theoretical concepts that help to think through notions of belonging, sovereignty, welcome, and a range of cultural narratives, including films, public art, theater and literature, that bring their own critical interventions to bear on the emergent discourses surrounding refugees.

CLCS 254 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures and Theories

This course is designed as an introduction to the field of postcolonial studies. Readings will familiarise students with a diversity of ''world literature'' and grant an understanding of key debates in postcolonial studies. As postcolonialism is not a unified field of study, the course engages with different theoretical understandings of the term and queries what it even means to be ''postcolonial.'' When exactly does the postcolonial begin? What are the implications of using such a broad umbrella term to designate writings from around the world? Students will explore depictions of the colonial encounter and decolonisation, question the links between colonialism and globalisation, and examine constructions of East and West, Global North and Global South. Central to the course will be the themes of: power and violence; economics and class; land and nation; authenticity and development; gender and sexuality; history and memory; the politics of literature; and the politics of print culture. Students will read a diverse and broad historical selection of texts from a variety of geographical locations including, India, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica. Literary texts will be paired with theoretical readings from such critics as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ann McLintock, Benita Parry, Franz Fanon, and Edward Said. Although the main focus of study is literature, the course will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, understanding literary works as products of cultural, historical, social, and political circumstances. Throughout the course, students will explore how colonial power has shaped—and continues to shape—the world in which we live.

IS 274 Italian and Italian-American Cinema

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the major accomplishments of Italian cinema from ''neorealism'' through the ''commedia all'italiana'' to the present. Emphasis is placed on film as a narrative, visual, and theoretical medium for scholarly exploration of current societal issues in contemporary life. Some of Italy's major film directors will be considered, such as Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, the Taviani brothers, Scola. Particular attention is dedicated to the films of Fellini. A module dedicated to Italian-American cinema (Capra, Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino) offers a means for comparative study of two related but contrasting traditions in filmmaking. EMPHASIS IS PLACED ON FILM AS A NARRATIVE, VISUAL, AND THEORETICAL MEDIUM FOR SCHOLARLY EXPLORATION OF CURRENT SOCIIETAL ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE

IS 278 Italian Genre Crossings, Transmedia, and Hybridity

This course offers an innovative look at Italian filmmakers, novelists, journalists, television actors, philosophers, photographers, translators, singers, contemporary internet personalities, who refuse to be defined by one category of artistry and, instead, view work across genres and media as an important means to amplifying the scope and range of their unique message, while commonly embracing the value of cross-fertilization and hybridity. Franca Rame and Dario Fo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Dacia Maraini, Umberto Eco, Amelia Rosselli: these are just a few of the Italian cultural icons of hybridity to whom students will be introduced. There is a significant project production component to this class which asks students to venture into multimedia assignments (merging digital photography with fiction writing, for example; or exploring the concept of liminality in both music and the prose poem).

IS 280T Italian Cinema on Location: Projections of the Eternal City in Italian Film and Cultural Studies

This course provides an introduction to classic cinematic portrayals of the city of Rome and its inhabitants, with an emphasis on 20th-century authors and filmmakers. Landmark films, such as Roberto Rossellini's ''Open City'' and Federico Fellini's ''La Dolce Vita'' will be contextualized both historically and thematically. Subsequently, students will begin crafting their own short film design; to be pitched in the form of a multi-media presentation prior to travel. Filming and production will follow in Rome, under the guidance and supervision of the professor. During the final weeks of the semester, class time will be devoted to close the discussion of contemporary readings from Italian Cultural Studies and, parallel to this, editing and completion of the student's semester-long short film project. Students enrolling in this course should have basic knowledge of how to create and edit short films using their own digital video devices. Students should be familiar with the program Final Cut (or similar editing program).

300-level courses

Three of the following:

CLCS 300 Masculinities in Literature and Film

This course offers an overview of different masculinities as they have been represented in literature and film for the past couple decades. Students will first explore the recent developments in masculinity studies, particularly focusing on masculinity along intersectional lines. They will reflect upon the intricate ways of defining, theorizing and conceptualizing masculinity in an age that Zygmunt Bauman has defined as liquid. They will read novels such as Tomboy by French writer Nina Bouraoui, Salvation Army by Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa and watch films such as Death Proof by American film director Quentin Tarentino, Facing Mirrors by Iranian film director Negar Azarbayjani, Boys Don't Cry by American film director Kimberly Peirce.

CLCS 310T The Culture of Cities: From Roman Garrisons to Industrial Chic

Ever since its formation in the nineteenth century the metropolis has functioned as a multivalent metaphor for the experiences of ''modern'' life. Portrayed at once as a space of disruption and of stability, of danger and of creativity, the city has as found a place in the modernist and postmodernist imagination that reflects how a people's surroundings influence thought pattern and social practices. At the same time of course the needs of ever-evolving groups of inhabitants form the shape cities take. Taking Zurich as the case study, students will ask how overlapping and interacting slices of urban culture, ranging from the material (buildings, squares, streets and bridges), to the symbolic (narratives, myths and legends), and the performative (music, theater and film) shape our urban experience.

CLCS 315 Slavery and Its Cultural Legacies

In 1619 the first slaves reached the new colonies in what is now the United States of America, founding a history of pervasive, discriminatory, racialist ideology that reaches all the way into our present. In a first part, this course will trace the history and culture of slavery from the slave trade to the civil war and emancipation and into the era of Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and beyond. Students will read a range of historical texts, policies and legal text that shaped slavery as well as responses to slavery in the form of slave narratives. In a second part, the course investigates through films and documentaries, music, memorials, literature and economic texts how the legacy of slavery continues to shape the culture of the United States in all areas of cultural and political life. In this part, students will grapple with questions of memory and memorializations, cultural appropriations, systemic economic inequalities, cross-cultural conceptions of enslavement and the question of reparations.

CLCS 320 Culture, Class, Cuisine: Questions of Taste

Food carries social, symbolic, and political-economic meaning that differs across cultures, and hence cuisine represents a focal point for studying divergent cultural practices. In that sense, this class examines the sociological, anthropological, literary, and cultural dimensions of food. The class will explore people's relationship to food with regard to the environment, gender roles, and social hierarchy, from French haute cuisine to the fast food phenomenon.

CLCS 325 Advanced Creative Writing Workshop

A writing workshop that allows students to explore different forms of prose writing including the traditional novel, the epistolary novel, and the graphic novel. This course will emphasize central techniques such as character, setting, beginnings and endings. Each week students will present sketches for critique in the writing workshop, and will compose a short piece of fiction for publication in the final class journal.

CLCS 330 The Politics of Mobility: Exile and Immigration

Beginning with the post-colonial theory of Edward Said, this class will examine the ideas of exile and immigration in a colonial and post-colonial context. This course will explore exile vs. expatriatism, language and power, movement across cultures, narrative agency and authority, and voices in the new immigrant narrative. By approaching the topic from a comparative perspective, students will be exposed to a polyphony of voices and the variety of experiences associated with exile and the construction of identity. Students will examine, in particular, contemporary fiction as a window to the context of this experience.

CLCS 335 Hauntings

This creative writing/cultural theory course focuses on the concept of haunting and related phenomena such as possession or exorcism. The course draws from recent scholarly work in hauntology, a term coined by Jacques Derrida in his SpectresdeMarx (1993). What emerges from this area of research is an unusual theoretical space in which to consider literature and culture, both philosophically (as critical thinkers) and creatively (as authors and performance artists). The class explores and creatively experiments with texts that function primarily as a medium for giving voice to those realms of human experience that are generally considered unreasonable and extrasensory; otherworldly perceptions of parallel dimensions that transcend the laws and rational orderings of the knowable physical world. Students will reflect on ghostly metaphors and manifestations as they are summoned, in various forms and to different ends, by fiction writers, performers, and filmmakers who tend to link stories of haunting to social-psychic-emotional disturbances: expressions of diasporic sensibilities and hyphenated ethnicities, stigmas of invisibility related to shadows of class and gender, spectral polyvalence and the paranormal activity emerging from recent theoretical discourse around taboo conceptual couplings such as the queer child and/or the ''unruly/child''.

CLCS 340 Fashion and Visual Culture

The focus of postmodernity on surface phenomena and diversity, its concern with the personal, the subjective and with identity have worked to make fashion a field of studies that has gained importance in the last 15 years. Aiming at getting past the age-old belief in the essential frivolity of fashion, this course examines how fashion draws upon recurrent instabilities of men and women (masculinity vs femininity, youth vs elderliness, domesticity vs worldliness, inclusion vs exclusion etc...) to thrive and express its creativity, how its ever constant shifting nature results in the notions of gender, ethnicity and class status to be ever more fluid, how it has been redefining the body and its image, in particular with the advent of the supermodel in the eighties, and last but not least, how it relates to and signifies within so many aspects of our daily life and environment, whether it be space (work vs domesticity, urban vs non-urban), photography (static vs dynamic), music (alternative vs pop) and sexuality.

CLCS 350 Culture and Human Rights

''Human Rights'' has become a key selling point for organizations, political parties and social movements. And yet what is actually meant by the term often remains vague, and it is difficult to take the critical stance necessary to judge its significance. In this class we interrogate the term with a series of questions: what counts as ''human'' in the discourses surrounding Human Rights? What sorts of rights do individuals in fact have simply by virtue of being human? Do all humans have the same rights? Who gets to decide this? How has the definition changed over the last 200 years? To what extent is the term gendered, determined by class and racialized? And finally: how do different national settings change how we think about and act on ideas of Human Rights? This course will examine these questions by tracing ideas surrounding Human Rights in treatises, literary texts, films, debates and case studies from the Enlightenment to the present. Against the backdrop of foundational texts such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, declarations by the European Court of Human Rights, the African Court on Human and People's Rights, the Geneva convention and the United Nations Human Rights Commission students will consider literary and filmic works that grapple critically with the terms they lay out. Students will also consider how NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch translate the political rhetoric to apply their own interpretations of Human Rights to their field work.

CLCS 360 Critical Race Studies in a Global Context

In this course, the class will work to create a more critical understanding of what race is, what race does, and how contemporary racial meanings are constructed and disseminated. In order to do so, students will explore Critical Race Theory (CRT) and critical theories of race in several contexts. CRT refers to a theory that emerged among legal educators in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. In the last twenty years, a growing number of scholars in fields such as cultural studies, gender studies, history, media studies, politics, postcolonial studies and sociology have integrated and developed the work done by critical race theorists. This course will focus in particular on this interdisciplinary approach to critical race studies. The practice of race will be examined as well as the policies and institutions that shape race in a global context in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Finally, students will consider the intersection of race and other social hierarchies, including gender, sexuality and social class.

CLCS 370 Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies
CLCS 371 Law and Culture

This course aims to investigate law's place in culture and culture's place in law. This focus proceeds from the realization that law does not function in a vacuum but exerts a powerful influence on all manner of cultural practice and production, even as its own operation is influenced in turn by various forms of culture. Given this increasing porosity and interpermeability of Law and different forms of culture, the focus of this course is on the mutual influence between law and other discursive practices, such as literature, TV sit-coms and film. In studying a number of prominent legal cases such as Brown v the Board of Education, we will explore the following questions: What are the mechanisms by which popular representations and cultural practices find their way into legal processes and decisions? How does law in turn bleed into and influence cultural processes? Does law act as a buffer against societal assumptions about, and constructions of, gender, age, ability, sexuality and ethnicity, or does it re-enforce and re-inscribe existing social norms?

CLCS 372 Tales of Catastrophe

The cultural debris that results from political and natural catastrophes is made up of narratives that contain both implosion and creation, wreckage and renewal. In that sense disasters mark pivotal turning points in the way we conceptualize and understand human phenomena and cultural processes in a number of disciplinary perspectives from psychoanalysis to literature, from environmental science to religion and from ethics to aesthetics. Students will read the narrative fallout in fiction, science, and film that emanate from distinct disaster zones ranging from the petrified texture of Pompeii to the generative force field of ground zero.

FRE 324 From Beur to Post-Beur Literature: Exile, Margins, and Re-Territorialization

This course focuses on fictional works written by authors whose identities straddle the Mediterranean. Whether they immigrated from Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco to France or were born in France to immigrant parents, these writers have found an outlet for the expression of their personal experience in writing. These fictions gives rise to a number of issues such as the important role French people of Maghreb origins have played in the cultural shaping of France since the independence of the countries mentioned above, the subsequent interior colonialism they were and are still subject to, the topographical and social divides that separate the different ethnic strata of French society, the gender issues that have developed since the ''regroupement familial'' in 1974. As a complement to the readings, students will see different documentaries and / or films that will sociologically, historically and culturally frame these issues.

FRE 353 Representations of Immigration in Francophone Literature and Film

This course examines literary and cinematic representations of migrants and migration from former French colonies to countries that border the Mediterranean in the 21st century. It focuses on the realities and cultural representations of both emigration and immigration from historical, political, economic, and sociocultural perspectives. Novels, films and documentaries will allow students to understand and conceptualize different views on migrations, whether it be Francophilic, ex-centric, clandestine migrations, or its remedy, disimmigration.

FRE 374 Introduction to French Cinema

The course examines French films from Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite (1933) to Robert Bresson's Un condamne a mort s'est echappe (1956). It explores the art of cinematography while considering the aesthetics, historical, political, sociological, and psychoanalytical frames within which each movie was realized. It furthermore provides students with analytical tools to enable them to develop their own personal approach when viewing, discussing, and writing about a film.

FRE 376 French Cinema: The New Wave

The French New Wave was a major turning-point in the history of French Cinema. It gave birth to a new way of approaching cinematography as a whole. This course centers on New Wave film directors Chabrol, Truffaut, Resnais, Godard and Varda, and examine closely their cinematographic creed, theoretical preoccupations, similarities and differences. Movies will be partially watched outside of class.

GER 370 Topics in German Literature and Culture
GER 374 Strangers in Paradise?: Historical and Cultural Texts on Immigration into Switzerland

This course will trace the different waves of immigration into Switzerland through the lens of cultural and political texts produced in German (or translated into German) over the last thirty years, both by those who have immigrated to Switzerland and by Swiss natives in reaction to the immigrants' presence. We will begin our examination of the various tensions immigration has engendered with Rolf Lyssy's film Die Schweizermacher, a comedy about the hurdles facing would-be naturalized citizens in the mid-seventies. Next, in a variety of literary, filmic and legal texts, we will look at the situation of Italians, Spaniards,Tamils, Turks, immigrants from Balkan countries, and, most recently, from Iraq. Finally, we will study the contemporary campaigns of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), and the heated debates fueled by their right-wing provocations about who does and does not belong in this ''paradise'' known as Switzerland. This course is taught in German.

GER 376 Screening Swissness: An Introduction to Swiss-German Film

This course will trace the development of Swiss-German film over the last several decades paying close attention to motives such as gender, the tension between city/countryside, ideas of Swiss identity, depictions of foreigners, and Swissness. Swiss-German film made its entry on the international stage in the thirties, with films that reacted to the threat of war and critically reflected on the notion of the Geistige Landesverteidigung, or the spiritual resistance, a concept, which should become a rallying call during World War Two. The fifties and sixties with the so-called Gotthelf Filme, in which Jeremias Gotthelf's novels and stories were brought to the big screen in beautiful black and white renditions that fuelled the national imaginary with more soothing notions of what it meant to be Swiss followed the earlier critical stances. A host of related Heimatfilme-films in which the nineteenth century Heile Welt depictions of Gotthelf were transposed into the 20th century with little regard for changing political landscape. The seventies and eighties then saw rather more reflected takes on what it meant to be Swiss: films, like for instance Rolf Lyssy's Die Schweizermacher, that explored the arduous process of procuring a Swiss passport, and is thought of today as a break-through in Swiss film history. Today, we look back on three decades of Swiss film since Die Schweizermacher as a site avid and often provocative cultural criticism that has turned the idea of Swissness upside down even as its relentless search for a Swiss identity speaks the language of enduring Heimweh. This class is a split-level class, and will be taught in German with some attention to the peculiarities of Swiss dialects. Film screenings will take place regularly on a weekday evening and must be attended in addition to the regular classes.

ITA 350 Topics in Italian Cultural Studies

The land and the people of Italy and the Italian-speaking world: historical, social and cultural evolution; major developments in the arts (literature, music, opera, figurative arts, theater, cinema,; television, digital cultures, and new technologies) as these relate to enduring questions related to linguistic and political unity, immigration and emigration, race, class, gender and sexuality. Aspects of contemporary Italy are also covered

ITA 370 Readings in Italian Literature

Special topics course in Italian Literature; topics vary by semester.

ITA 373 Italian Film and Society

Aspects of political, social and cultural history of twentieth century Italy are studied through documentaries and some of the major accomplishments of Italian cinema. Some novels adapted into film are also examined. Most of the films are in Italian (some with English subtitles).

ITA 374 Italian Cinema

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the major accomplishments of Italian cinema from ''neorealism'' through the ''commedia all'italiana'' to the present. Emphasis is placed on film as an artistic, aesthetic and theoretical medium for an exploration and interpretation of issues related to contemporary life. Some of Italy's major film directors will be considered, such as Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, the Taviani brothers, Scola. Particular attention is dedicated to the films of Fellini.

Experiential Pathways and Interdisciplinary Approaches (3 courses in addition to the CLCS foundation course: 12 credits)

Four courses (12 credits) either self-designed in close consultation with their advisor or within one of four pathways as designated below to complement one topic-based CLCS course already completed in the major courses. One of these professional pathway courses may take the form of an internship (CLCS 498). Individually designed professional pathways must be approved by the advisor. Please note that upper-division courses may have pre-requisites.

Food and Sustainability
One of the following:
CLCS 248T European Food Systems: You Are Where You Eat

In this course, students will explore the cultures that produce and are reproduced by our current food systems in Europe, touching upon the local, national and global dimensions. This course will examine the cultural, ecological, political, and geographic forces at work influencing the chain of production from farm to table. In particular, students will consider the contemporary food systems in Italy and Switzerland as well as their cultural and historical roots. Students will learn more about what it takes to become an active food citizen as the class considers where food comes from here in Europe and how the food we eat shapes who we are, both literally and figuratively. This course includes a travel component to Italy and Switzerland where students will study first hand some of the concepts discussed, including terroir, slow food, and local farm to table movements.

CLCS 320 Culture, Class, Cuisine: Questions of Taste

Food carries social, symbolic, and political-economic meaning that differs across cultures, and hence cuisine represents a focal point for studying divergent cultural practices. In that sense, this class examines the sociological, anthropological, literary, and cultural dimensions of food. The class will explore people's relationship to food with regard to the environment, gender roles, and social hierarchy, from French haute cuisine to the fast food phenomenon.

Three of the following:
COM 230T Communication, Fashion, and the Formation of Taste (Italy)

The sense of taste, whether it refers to the metaphorical sense of taste (aesthetic discrimination) or the literal sense of taste (gustatory taste), is a fundamental part of human experiences. This Academic Travel course examines various ways that communication processes shape our sense of taste in the contemporary society. It will explore topics such as the taste for food, clothing and accessories, music, and other cultural activities applying key theories and concepts of communication, fashion, and taste. Ultimately, the course seeks to develop an understanding of how interpersonal, intercultural, and mediated communication in our everyday life plays a critical role in the formation of individual taste as well as collective taste. In order to achieve this objective, field observations and site visits will be planned during the Academic Travel period.

CLCS 498 Capstone: Internship in CLCS

CLCS 498 is one of two available alternatives (the other being a thesis) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 498 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete an internship that represents the capstone to their major experience. An internship is recommended for students entering a professional field.

ENV 200 Understanding Environmental Issues

This case study based course serves as the bridge experience for students completing their introductory course requirements for the ESS major or the ENV minor and who are now moving into the upper-level courses (However it is open to all interested students meeting the prerequisite). Through detailed examination of several case studies at the local, regional, and global levels, students synthesize material from introductory level courses to explore the interdisciplinary nature of today’s environmental issues. They examine what different disciplines offer to our understanding of and attempt to solve these issues.

ENV 220 Ecocritical Approaches to Literature

This interdisciplinary, writing-intensive course will introduce students to environmental literary criticism, more commonly known since the 1990s as ''ecocriticism.'' As a theoretical approach to literature, eco-criticism provides a secondary lens through which to analyze primary sources; an eco-critical approach focuses on how these primary sources have ''constructed'' our relationship to the natural world through writing and narrative. In applying eco-critical theory to a selection of primary fiction, students will examine some of the major environmental themes found in literature, among others: land use, speciesism, climate change, environmental apocalypse, and the post-human. Students will explore these themes using some of the basic critical tools and methodologies of ecocriticism, not only to explore how authors write about the environment, but also to examine how the environment itself is constructed through aesthetic discourse. Students should leave the course with improved critical environmental literacy skills that will enable interdisciplinary reflection about our interactions with the natural environment.

SJS 100 Sustainability and Social Justice: Ethics, Equality, and Environments

One of the fundamental questions we all face today is how to counter the urgent challenges posed by global climate change and unequal economic development. Questions coalescing around notions of ethics, justice, equality, and human rights intersect with questions of how to shape a culturally and environmentally sustainable world. Exploring a wide range of theoretical and practical perspectives on Sustainability, Social Justice and Ethics, this cross-disciplinary, introductory course will give students multiple disciplinary frameworks to think critically and productively about the intersections between the social and the natural worlds. The course provides the gateway to the program in Social Justice and Sustainability (SJS).

Human Rights, Law, and the Non-Profit Sector
One of the following:
CLCS 350 Culture and Human Rights

''Human Rights'' has become a key selling point for organizations, political parties and social movements. And yet what is actually meant by the term often remains vague, and it is difficult to take the critical stance necessary to judge its significance. In this class we interrogate the term with a series of questions: what counts as ''human'' in the discourses surrounding Human Rights? What sorts of rights do individuals in fact have simply by virtue of being human? Do all humans have the same rights? Who gets to decide this? How has the definition changed over the last 200 years? To what extent is the term gendered, determined by class and racialized? And finally: how do different national settings change how we think about and act on ideas of Human Rights? This course will examine these questions by tracing ideas surrounding Human Rights in treatises, literary texts, films, debates and case studies from the Enlightenment to the present. Against the backdrop of foundational texts such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, declarations by the European Court of Human Rights, the African Court on Human and People's Rights, the Geneva convention and the United Nations Human Rights Commission students will consider literary and filmic works that grapple critically with the terms they lay out. Students will also consider how NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch translate the political rhetoric to apply their own interpretations of Human Rights to their field work.

CLCS 371 Law and Culture

This course aims to investigate law's place in culture and culture's place in law. This focus proceeds from the realization that law does not function in a vacuum but exerts a powerful influence on all manner of cultural practice and production, even as its own operation is influenced in turn by various forms of culture. Given this increasing porosity and interpermeability of Law and different forms of culture, the focus of this course is on the mutual influence between law and other discursive practices, such as literature, TV sit-coms and film. In studying a number of prominent legal cases such as Brown v the Board of Education, we will explore the following questions: What are the mechanisms by which popular representations and cultural practices find their way into legal processes and decisions? How does law in turn bleed into and influence cultural processes? Does law act as a buffer against societal assumptions about, and constructions of, gender, age, ability, sexuality and ethnicity, or does it re-enforce and re-inscribe existing social norms?

Three of the following:
BUS 135 Introduction to Business Systems

The course introduces the global business system in the context of the economic, political, social and technological environments, relating business to society as a whole. Topics covered include the international scope, function, and organization of firms, and other fundamental concepts of multinational business. The course also addresses functional areas such as the value chain, production, marketing, human resources, and accounting.

CLCS 254 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures and Theories

This course is designed as an introduction to the field of postcolonial studies. Readings will familiarise students with a diversity of ''world literature'' and grant an understanding of key debates in postcolonial studies. As postcolonialism is not a unified field of study, the course engages with different theoretical understandings of the term and queries what it even means to be ''postcolonial.'' When exactly does the postcolonial begin? What are the implications of using such a broad umbrella term to designate writings from around the world? Students will explore depictions of the colonial encounter and decolonisation, question the links between colonialism and globalisation, and examine constructions of East and West, Global North and Global South. Central to the course will be the themes of: power and violence; economics and class; land and nation; authenticity and development; gender and sexuality; history and memory; the politics of literature; and the politics of print culture. Students will read a diverse and broad historical selection of texts from a variety of geographical locations including, India, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Jamaica. Literary texts will be paired with theoretical readings from such critics as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ann McLintock, Benita Parry, Franz Fanon, and Edward Said. Although the main focus of study is literature, the course will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, understanding literary works as products of cultural, historical, social, and political circumstances. Throughout the course, students will explore how colonial power has shaped—and continues to shape—the world in which we live.

CLCS 498 Capstone: Internship in CLCS

CLCS 498 is one of two available alternatives (the other being a thesis) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 498 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete an internship that represents the capstone to their major experience. An internship is recommended for students entering a professional field.

HIS 325 Human Rights in History

The idea of universal, inalienable rights has become one of the most influential concepts in modern history. Human Rights have become an inspiration to oppressed groups and individuals around the globe, a rallying cry for a global civil society, and also a controversial source of legitimation for political and military interventions. The course asks about the reasons for the stellar rise of the concept of Human Rights from ''nonsense on stilts'' (Jeremy Bentham) to such a powerful driving force in contemporary politics. Also, it asks whether Human Rights are the result of a specifically European or Western or Christian legacy. Students in this course will discuss some key thinkers from the Enlightenment to the present within their historical contexts, and analyze not only the philosophical and theoretical framework for Human Rights as a factor in history, but also have a closer look into the consequences of Human Rights influenced politics in general.

POL 321 International Organization

The focus of this course is the development of supra-national and international agencies and entities. The United Nations, the European Union, the IMF, the World Bank, trading blocs, and other specialized agencies are studied as examples-in light of increasing economic interdependence in the international system.

POL 398 Human Rights in International Law and Politics

Since the end of the Second World War human rights have played a growing role in international law and in international politics. The heinous atrocities committed during the war, unparalleled in history in scope and horror, aroused worldwide indignation and gave rise to the desire to establish new rules and reinforce existing norms that could guarantee respect for fundamental human rights internationally. Conventional international law was developed through a series of multilateral treaties sponsored by the United Nations and institutions to guarantee respect for these norms were established. In spite of the broad consensus on the need for these norms and the institutions, the expansion of human rights has been accompanied by controversy in both legal application and political interpretation and usage. This course will examine the historical development and philosophical bases of human rights from the ancient world to the present before looking at the role of human rights in international law as it has developed since the Second World War. The course will look at how the introduction of human rights into the area of international law has affected fundamental precepts of the international law system itself and some of the problems this has created. Treaty law, customary law and growing jurisprudence will be considered. The course will also review to the problems of enforcement and application of human rights law both on a national and international level and the functioning of the various institutions (tribunals, IGO’s and NGO’s) that have been established with this purpose in mind. Finally students will examine the political role of human rights in the foreign policies of states and other organizations (such as the European Union) and the major issues confronting human rights today (terrorism, civil wars, new areas of expansion of human rights, such as international environmental law or the distribution of energy resources or water and the question of humanitarian intervention).

PSY 220 Multicultural Psychology

This course is intended to introduce and familiarize students with the concept of multicultural psychology. The entire field of psychology from a perspective that is mindful of the diversity in today’s society will be considered. Students will explore the ways in which psychology is socially constructed and will pay particular attention to the following factors as they influence human development: oppression, language, acculturation, economic concerns, racism and prejudice, socio-political factors, child-rearing practices, religious practices, family structure and dynamics, and cultural values and attitudes.

Storytelling and Performance
One of the following:
CLCS 230 Science / Fiction: Envisioning the Possible

Science fiction narratives may be defined as speculative fictions, ideal allegorical vehicles eliciting theoretical reflection on the state of contemporary culture and society and motivating social reform. As such, the main objective of this course is to consider several major contemporary socio-cultural issues through the unique lens provided by writers and filmmakers of the science-fiction tradition. The issues, allowing for variances from year to year, will include questions regarding gender and Otherness, the hypothesized deterioration of a human-world bond, modern apocalyptic anxieties, genetic engineering, intersections of ideology and communication technologies. Authors and filmmakers may include: Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guinn, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, William Gibson; Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, Andrew Niccol, Jean-Luc Godard, Lana and Andy Wachowski

CLCS 241 Forbidden Acts: Queer Studies and Performance

In this course, queer solo performance and theater are playfully considered ''forbidden acts'' because they commonly enact a special kind of transgression. These acts give voice to and, at once, subvert a wide range of political identities conventionally defined by race, ethnicity, HIV status, class, gender, and sexual practice. Often autobiographical at their point of departure, queer performance and theater seem intent on troubling the comfort of community even as they invest in it. This rich, albeit problematic, ambivalence stems from the fact that the term queer, itself, connotes primarily a locus of refusal, an unbinding and destabilizing term of defiance, of provocation via polysemy. As such, queer performance and theater seek to open up new vistas of multiple, shifting, polymorphous identities. What political implications might these queer texts dramatize? What may be the ramifications of instilling the notion of personal identity with collective utopian aspirations? How would the students enrolled in this class spin the term queer to encompass their own sense of individual difference and empower their own vision of creative defiance? In attempting to respond to these questions, students taking this course will be invited to share their own forbidden acts: to approach theoretical refection through performative exercises, to merge the analytical realm with the autobiographical monologue, to test the limits (if there are any) between theatrical play and ideological engagement.

CLCS 325 Advanced Creative Writing Workshop

A writing workshop that allows students to explore different forms of prose writing including the traditional novel, the epistolary novel, and the graphic novel. This course will emphasize central techniques such as character, setting, beginnings and endings. Each week students will present sketches for critique in the writing workshop, and will compose a short piece of fiction for publication in the final class journal.

Three of the following:
AHT 334 Artists' Biopics

This course looks at the representation of artists’ lives and artistic practices in film. Biopics explore a character’s personal journey, depicting a biographical tableau of a lifetime’s tribulation and achievements. The figure of the artist has long held a fascination for society. Misunderstood, decadent, melancholic, single-minded against the odds, and above all prophetic and visionary, the romantic potential of artists offered dramatic material to film directors and the film industries alike. At the same time, the cinematic medium provides a remarkable platform from which to enter the artist’ personal studio, and to gain an insight into the complex mechanisms of artistic creation. This course will explore both facets of artists’ biopics, engaging with the representation in film of the lives of artists such as Caravaggio, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the works of directors such as Maurice Pialat, Dereck Jarman and Peter Greenaway.

CLCS 370 Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies
CLCS 498 Capstone: Internship in CLCS

CLCS 498 is one of two available alternatives (the other being a thesis) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 498 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete an internship that represents the capstone to their major experience. An internship is recommended for students entering a professional field.

IS 278 Italian Genre Crossings, Transmedia, and Hybridity

This course offers an innovative look at Italian filmmakers, novelists, journalists, television actors, philosophers, photographers, translators, singers, contemporary internet personalities, who refuse to be defined by one category of artistry and, instead, view work across genres and media as an important means to amplifying the scope and range of their unique message, while commonly embracing the value of cross-fertilization and hybridity. Franca Rame and Dario Fo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Dacia Maraini, Umberto Eco, Amelia Rosselli: these are just a few of the Italian cultural icons of hybridity to whom students will be introduced. There is a significant project production component to this class which asks students to venture into multimedia assignments (merging digital photography with fiction writing, for example; or exploring the concept of liminality in both music and the prose poem).

IS 280T Italian Cinema on Location: Projections of the Eternal City in Italian Film and Cultural Studies

This course provides an introduction to classic cinematic portrayals of the city of Rome and its inhabitants, with an emphasis on 20th-century authors and filmmakers. Landmark films, such as Roberto Rossellini's ''Open City'' and Federico Fellini's ''La Dolce Vita'' will be contextualized both historically and thematically. Subsequently, students will begin crafting their own short film design; to be pitched in the form of a multi-media presentation prior to travel. Filming and production will follow in Rome, under the guidance and supervision of the professor. During the final weeks of the semester, class time will be devoted to close the discussion of contemporary readings from Italian Cultural Studies and, parallel to this, editing and completion of the student's semester-long short film project. Students enrolling in this course should have basic knowledge of how to create and edit short films using their own digital video devices. Students should be familiar with the program Final Cut (or similar editing program).

Capstone Requirement (6 Credits)

The CLCS capstone includes a first semester of research in preparation for the second semester of thesis or internship work.

CLCS 497 Capstone: Comprehensive Readings in CLCS

CLCS 497 is the first of two capstone courses for majors in CLCS, and will follow the trajectory of a traditional reading course. Students and the professor will choose an extensive reading list that includes fundamental, primary and theoretical texts in literature and CLCS taken largely from the courses taught in the disciplines. Students will then choose their own texts to add to the core list that represent the individual student's particular area of interest. Class sessions will be devoted to the development of the list and subsequent discussion of the chosen works. Evaluation pieces include a comprehensive exam and a proposal for the subsequent thesis (CLCS 499) or internship project (CLCS 498).

One of the following:
CLCS 498 Capstone: Internship in CLCS

CLCS 498 is one of two available alternatives (the other being a thesis) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 498 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete an internship that represents the capstone to their major experience. An internship is recommended for students entering a professional field.

CLCS 499 Capstone: Thesis in CLCS

CLCS 499 is one of two available alternatives (the other being an internship) for the second of two capstone courses for CLCS majors. CLCS 499 represents the culmination of the interdisciplinary, intercultural experience at Franklin. Students will complete a thesis that represents the capstone to their major experience. A thesis is recommended in particular for students interested in pursuing graduate studies.

3-YEARS BACHELOR OPTION

This major is also offered as a 3-year accelerated bachelor’s degree, designed for students with specific high school academic credentials who are admitted to Franklin with advanced standing credit, equivalent to 30 US credits. This option grants students a jump start on their introductory level University courses. Learn more about the 3-year bachelor’s degree at Franklin or contact the Office of Admission.

YEAR ONE - SAMPLE CURRICULUM

Fall Semester Spring Semester
FYS/CLCS 200
(First Year Seminar/Choose a CLCS class at 200 level)
SCI/Math 
CLCS 100
(Choose a CLCS class at 100 level)
CLCS 100
(Choose a CLCS class at 100 level)
WTG 130/150/200* Modern Language
TVL
(Choose an academic travel class)
TVL
(Choose an academic travel class)
Global Responsibility CORE Global Responsibility CORE

YEAR TWO - SAMPLE CURRICULUM

Fall Semester Spring Semester
Modern Language CLCS 200
(Choose a CLCS class at 200 level)
*CLCS 200
(Choose a CLCS class at 200 level)
CLCS 200
(Choose a CLCS class at 200 level)
SCI/Math CLCS 300
(Choose a CLCS class at 300 level)

TVL
(Choose an academic travel class)

Pathway/Elective
Global Responsibility CORE Global Responsibility CORE

YEAR THREE - SAMPLE CURRICULUM

Fall Semester Spring Semester
CLCS 497
Capstone: Comprehensive Readings in CLCS
CLCS 498 Capstone: Internship in CLCS or
CLCS 499 
Capstone: Thesis in CLCS
CLCS 300
(Choose a CLCS class at 300 level)
CLCS 300
(Choose a CLCS class at 300 level)
Pathway/Elective Pathway/Elective
Pathway/Elective Elective 
Elective Elective 

LEARN MORE

Faculty

Chair of the Academic Division of Arts and Cultures
Associate Professor, Italian and Comparative Literary & Cultural studies

Ph.D. The University of Chicago
M.A. The University of Chicago
B.A. Connecticut College

Office: Kaletsch Campus, Office 6
Phone: +41 91 986 53 17
Email: fferrari@fus.edu

Fabio Ferrari

Coordinator of Digital Pedagogy Initiatives and the WLC
Adjunct Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Ph.D., University of Manchester, UK
M.A., University of Otago/Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou, Aotearoa-New Zealand
B.A. (Double Hons), University of Otago/Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou, Aotearoa-New Zealand

Office: Lowerre Academic Center, Office 1
Phone: +41 91 986 36 31
Email: kroy@fus.edu

Kate Roy

Adjunct Professor, Music History

Ph.D. University of Vienna, Austria
M.A. National Music Academy Bucharest, Romania
B.A. National Music Academy Bucharest, Romania

Office: Kaletsch Campus, Faculty Office 2
Phone: +41 91 986 53 23
Email: htrebicimarin@fus.edu

Hrisanta Trebici Marin

Professor, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

Ph.D. Princeton University
M.A. Princeton University
B.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Office: Lowerre Academic Center, Office 6
Phone: +41 91 986 36 53
Email: cwiedmer@fus.edu

Caroline Wiedmer

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