43 courses with the subject VIST H, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
VIST H105INTRODUCTION TO PERFORMANCE STUDIES1.0
This course introduces students to foundational concepts and embodied practices relevant to the study of theater and performance. We will focus on the intersection between dramatic texts and performance and approach textual analysis and performance through parallel methodologies: as scholars, we will read, reflect on, and write critically about texts and performances; as performers, we will explore a variety of techniques to create “applied interpretations,” interpretations that take form in performance. Lottery Preference: First Year Students and VIST Minors
The fundamentals of digital film production. Students will learn the grammar of key film genres and basic filmmaking craft, including cameras, lighting, sound techniques, and nonlinear editing, creating four short films in the genres of animation, experimental, documentary, and fiction.
VIST H113BLACK VISUAL CULTURE: AN INADEQUATE SURVEY OF THE LATE 19TH TO 20TH CENTURIES1.0
This course seeks to ask the question: How do we see blackness? How have we learned to see the thing we’re always surrounded by and have so many questions of? How do we know blackness through the visual and/as the racial? What if blackness uses the racial-visual to be known but refuses to be seen and represented so easily? What do we do then? Lottery Preference: 5 slots for first year students; preferences for VIST Minors
VIST H117DESIGN AND DIGITAL FABRICATION: SYSTEMS, TOOLS, AND MATERIAL FORM1.0
This course investigates the relationship between computational design and material fabrication through hands-on making. Students will develop foundational design principles and fabrication literacy, learning not only how to operate tools but how digital systems structure aesthetic and material possibilities. Using 3D modeling, 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC machining, they will translate digital models into physical form through iterative prototyping, foregrounding material constraint, precision, and design intention. Lottery Preference: VIST minors
This course provides students with the tools needed to understand, analyze, and build games as designed experiences. During the semester, we will take a close look at games and how design choices shape meaning, interaction, and player experience. We will examine games as systems of communication, exploring how visual, spatial, and procedural elements work together to create meaningful play. Lottery Preference: 1st Year Students and VIST minors
VIST H131THE LURE OF IMAGES: RELIGION AND VISUAL MEDIA1.0
This course examines representations from figural forms to abstractions, found objects and beautiful writing to understand the power of sacred imagery. We will examine formats from medieval manuscripts and painted walls to films, panoramas and comic books to observe the dynamics that emerge among viewers and images in spatial contexts ranging from altar pieces, sculpture, stained glass and painting in neo-Gothic churches, calligraphy in mosque and shrine interiors, deity icons in Hindu temples and potent fabrics in Buddhist monastic complexes. Crosslisted: VIST.
An introduction to the trans-disciplinary field of Visual Studies, its methods of analysis and topical concerns. Traditional media and artifacts of art history and film theory, and also an examination of the ubiquity of images of all kinds, their systems of transmission, their points of consumption, and the very limits of visuality itself. Crosslisted: Visual Studies, Fine Arts, Comparative Literature
VIST H145SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED: DESIGNING OBJECTS OF PLAY0.5
Emphasizing digital design and remote digital fabrication, this course invites students to think critically about objects of play. What materials are used in toy design? What are the environmental implications of mass production? How can thinking about communities of play help us imagine solutions to problems of isolation? Crosslisted: Independent College Programs, Visual Studies
VIST H160VISUAL STORYTELLING: AN ACTING AND FILMMAKING WORKSHOP1.0
This course offers a unique collaborative approach to visual storytelling in narrative and fiction film, combining the technical and creative aspects of both acting and filmmaking. Co-taught by a filmmaker and an actor-director, students will gain foundational skills in acting and film production, focusing on the specific demands of narrative storytelling. Through hands-on projects, students will work on both sides of the camera, learning to act, direct, and contribute to the technical production process. Crosslisted: VIST, ARTT. Lottery Preference: VIST and ARTT students (when offered in Fall, 4 spaces reserved for first years)
This course explores the evolution of Japanese woodblock prints, artists, collectors, and exhibition practices from the 17th century through the present day. Crosslisted: East Asian Languages & Cultures, Visual Studies
This course explores how contemporary writers and artists can help us re-learn the way we understand the ancient world. Each week students will examine a contemporary creative practice (e.g. creative writing, installation and multi-media art, music, photography, and performance) alongside a selection from ancient Greek literature or art. We will focus on both the works themselves and the practices of writers and artists—we’ll talk about how one gives us a way into the other. We will pay particular attention to how research, archives, and “interdisciplinarity” are an inherent part of the creative process. Our goal is twofold: to explore 21st century responses to the ancient world, and to examine how 21st century practices challenge and question notions of the “classics” and how we study them. Crosslisted: Classical Studies, Comparative Literature
VIST H218REALTIME INTERFACES FOR CREATIVE EXPRESSION1.0
Realtime Interfaces for Creative Expression is a 200-level course for artists, performers, and computer science students with an interest in developing novel interactive software applications for the creation of digital art, responsive environments, and new media performance. Students will use the graphical programming environment Max to dynamically control, process, and generate digital audio and video content. Assignments will touch upon a number of related disciplines including interactive computer music, algorithmic and generative art, and video synthesis. Prior experience with coding and/or digital art-making is recommended. Pre-requisite(s): None Lottery Preference: VIST Minors
VIST H226IMAGING PUBLIC SEX UTOPIAS: A PRODUCTION WORKSHOP1.0
This praxis course examines the tension between art and that which is considered obscene: queer porn, public shamelessness, and deviant sexualities such as kink and sex work. We will develop projects that explore the powerful potential of the utopian imagination using techniques of GIF animation, self portraiture, and video. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies Minors
VIST H228EXPERIMENTS WITH 60S PERFORMANCE: A FLUXUS ARTS WORKSHOP1.0
In this workshop course, we will reenact event scores from performance artists of the 1960s, including primary sources from Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Alison Knowles, and George Brecht. Akin to a theatrical script or a musical score, an event score, a poetic script for performance, questions whether the performance is its documentation, the textual-visual component, or its restaging and activation with the body. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies minors
This course provides an introduction to Japanese cinema from the immediate Postwar period of 1945 to the present day. Focusing on films by influential directors including Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, and Mizoguchi Kenji among others we will consider how Japanese filmmakers use cinema to investigate issues of truth, beauty, identity, and nationhood in an attempt to answer fundamental questions regarding life and death in Japan’s Postwar period. Crosslisted: East Asian Languages & Cultures, Visual Studies, Environmental Studies
VIST H232BLAQUEER EYE: THE LOOK AND FEEL OF REAL1.0
Beginning with behind-the-scenes documentary of a female illusionist pageant The Queen (1968) and ending with the cancellation of HBO’s ballroom reality television competition show Legendary (2021), this course finds interest in the textured lives of gender and sexually creative African descendants in the U.S. and how their lives have been translated into the terms black, queer, and trans in public imagination. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies minors, then Film Studies minors
VIST H233DECOLONIZING VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY: FILMMAKING WORKSHOP1.0
This is a hybrid video production and theory course which grapples with the entanglements between ethnographic film/documentary and colonial structures of power. We will bring a decolonizing lens to explore—through texts, screenings, and making films—major modalities in the field including sensory ethnography, indigenous media, and feminist experimental film. Crosslisted: Visual Studies, Anthropology Prerequisite(s): at least one course in Anthropology or Visual Studies
VIST H235NARRATIVE DIGITAL PRODUCTION - FROM SCREENPLAY TO FINISHED VIDEO1.0
In this course will learn the technical fundamentals of planning and creating narrative videos, from concept to finished product. We will focus on creating screenplays and storyboards; planning around bringing the pre-production materials to life, and editing footage into a finished video to share. We will be utilizing screenplay applications and editing software found in VCAM while discussing how to streamline video production logistics surrounding fictional or narrative work. Lottery Preference: VIST minors first, second year students second.
VIST H236PRISON MEMORY AND CARCERAL IDENTITY: A FILM PRODUCTION WORKSHOP1.0
This oral history, interviewing, and filmmaking course focuses on carceral narratives and prison memory, particularly those of the Graterford Diaspora. The course will develop students' film production literacy when engaging carceral narratives and prison memory on film. Additionally, students will learn how to collect oral history interviews from members of the Graterford Diaspora, preserving and amplifying their stories while fostering collaborative, constructive feedback. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies minors
VIST H237VIRTUAL THEATERS: FROM CLOSET DRAMA TO PANDEMIC THEATER1.0
This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts from various centuries whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual, including philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, radio drama, novel chapters in dramatic form, artists’ books that mix page and stage, drama about internet and social media, and remote online theater on platforms like Zoom. Lottery Preference: VIST Minors
VIST H238PAPER & PIXELS: AN INTRODUCTION TO PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL ANIMATION1.0
Animation is not the mere act of creating an illusion; the word “animation” comes from the Latin word “anima,” meaning “soul,” “spirit,” or “life.” Animators breathe life into the inanimate and invisible worlds of images, objects, thoughts and feelings. In this hands-on course, you will bring these worlds to life through the means of analog and digital animation. You will learn fundamental techniques of pixilation, direct animation, rotoscoping, sound design, stop animation, basic character creation and rigging. You will also learn the history of these styles, how they have evolved over the years and their impact on art and culture. By the end of the semester, you will use the technical and conceptual tools you’ve learned to create both an individual and collaborative animation. Lottery Preference: VIST minors
VIST H239VISIONS OF JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONALITY AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN ASIAN CINEMA1.0
This course aims to deepen understandings of Asian struggles for justice and representation through independent films by Asian (including diaspora) directors. We will analyze films that offer a window into legal and social movement struggles for gender justice, self-determination, and environmental justice. Crosslisted: Visual Studies; Anthropology; East Asian Languages & Cultures; Peace, Justice and Human Rights
What can textiles tell us beyond what we see? In this course, we explore textiles through touch, sound, and memory. Throughout the semester, you will analyze art, experiment with making, engage in discussions, and create your own projects using textiles, sound, or mixed media. Together, we will discover how textiles connect people, cultures, and stories in meaningful ways. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies minors
VIST H250THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EXHIBITION: OBJECTS, IMAGES, TEXTS, EVENTS1.0
An introduction to the theory and practice of exhibition and display. This course will supply students with the analytic tools necessary to understand how exhibitions work and give them practical experience making arguments with objects, images, texts, and events.
VIST H251STRANGE MUSIC: MONSTERS, GHOSTS, AND ALIENS ON STAGE AND SCREEN1.0
Scholars of film often speak of the camera as an “all-seeing eye.” But what role does the ear play in cinematic experience? This course will explore the history, character, and function of music (and sound) in the first half of the twentieth century (and beyond): how they worked with (and against) the camera’s gaze to complicate narratives, to articulate time, and more generally to represent feeling and identity. This term will put special focus on the non-human: monsters, ghosts, aliens, and more generally the idea of the magical or supernatural. What does such radical Otherness sound like? How has it been represented musically? And how have composers and sound designers put such conventions to work in films of the last 100 years, from Metropolis and Nosferatu to Dune and Arrival? To answer these questions we’ll explore the silents, the early sound film and (especially) the long arc of composers (from Eric Korngold to Bernard Herrmann and from John Williams to Hans Zimmer. We’ll consider the legacy of Romanticism, the possibilities of Modernism, and even the Avant Garde, and learn about orchestration, harmony and thematic process as they contribute to cinematic narrative. We will also consider various theories of sound, music, and film staked out by film and operatic composers themselves, as well as critical and scholarly essays by leading writers on the monstrous, the alien, and the supernatural. Crosslisted: VIST Prerequisite(s): No formal prerequisite, but some previous study of either music or visual media would be helpful
VIST H255IN THE WRITERS’ ROOM: SCREENWRITING FOR TELEVISION1.0
In the TV world, stories are built in the “writers’ room,” where writers come together to create a successful show. In this course students will study the craft of episodic screenwriting by simulating the collaborative spirit of the writers’ room. As they learn screenplay structure and form, visual storytelling techniques, dialogue, character development, and story arc, students will produce one episode for a class anthology project and participate in a final community table read event. Crosslisted: ENGL. Lottery Preference: VIST minors, Creative Writing Concentrators, ENGL majors
VIST H259LIFE IS (A) SHORT: FICTION FILMMAKING WORKSHOP1.0
Life is (a) Short: Fiction Filmmaking Workshop (level 200) In this intermediate production course, students will usher a short film from pre-production to final exhibition. Production elements (cinematography, locations, casting) and post-production concerns (editing, color, and sound) will inform how we (re)envision our stories. This will culminate in a short fiction film to be screened for the community. All students are required to bring a brief script or treatment to the first week of class. Prerequisite(s): VIST 110: Foundations in Film Production, H233: Decolonizing Visual Anthropology OR up to the instructor's discretion
VIST H264THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: ART TRAVERSING THE BINARY1.0
Through a survey of visual, literary, and performance arts primarily by Black and Latina women (e.g., Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Christina Sharpe, Ana Victoria Jiménez) this course seeks to theorize the many dimensions of the oppositional gaze, with a focus on the ways these thinker-artists challenge, critique and disrupt various binaries that they identify with the history of western philosophy. Crosslisted: AFST,VIST.
Through this course, students will develop ethnographic research and writing skills using sensory detail (taste, touch, sight, sound, smell and feeling) to evoke people, places, and things. Assignments are primarily writing-intensive with additional fieldwork and multimodal (e.g. photography, film) exercises. Crosslisted: Anthropology, Visual Studies Prerequisite(s): Any Anthropology course
VIST H267BEAUTY PROBLEMS: RHETORIC, AESTHETICS, PHILOSOPHY1.0
This course will examine a series of problems that beauty and other sensuous pleasures make for philosophy, film, and contemporary art. Works will include those of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Isaac Julien, Elaine Scarry, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Fred Moten and others.
This course explores the visual and poetic life of sports, ancient and modern. It brings together cultural criticism, visual analysis, and historical study to theorize the beauty of athletics. Concepts of the body, gender, race and performance, and tropes such as "for the love of the game," "feel for the game" and "poetry in motion" will organize our work on the sensory and aesthetic dimensions of sports. No prior expertise in classics, art or sports necessary. Crosslisted: COML,VIST.
VIST H275RACE AND REPRESENTATION IN DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING1.0
This is an introductory cross-listed (Visual Studies/Anthropology) production course on the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking through an exploration of race onscreen. The objective of the course is to enable students to build a critical awareness of the ways in which film and media in general perpetuate racist discourses and representations and explore how students can challenge such representations through their own filmmaking practices. As inspiration, we will watch and study a wide variety of innovative documentary films that bring alternative voices and histories to screen and read/watch filmmaker interviews. Classes will combine elements of a studio (sharing and critiquing filmmaking work in progress) and seminar (discussing weekly themes). Crosslisted: VIST. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies minors, then Anthropology majors/minors, then Film Studies minors
What can we learn about the Middle East by examining media? What can we about media by studying institutions of production and practices of consumption in the Middle East region? In this course, we will read ethnographies of media from the Middle East and look at and listen to media. We will explore cases from different countries, from Egypt to Syria, Turkey to Afghanistan, from Lebanon to Palestine/Israel. Crosslisted: VIST. Pre-requisite(s): 100-level course in social sciences, or humanities. Lottery Preference: Senior anthropology students have a priority to take the class.
This course examines the relationship between environment and the arts in China and Japan. In particular, how artists engage with and respond to nature through varied modes of artistic production and exhibition. Crosslisted: East Asian Languages & Cultures, Environmental Studies, Visual Studies
This course is an in-depth and engaged study of Uri McMillian’s book Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015). In it, McMillian presents a history of visual and performance artists like Ellen Craft, Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Nicki Minaj, whose oeuvres can be understood through the lens of black feminist study and theory. Lottery Preference: Visual Studies minors
Through close looking, performance experiments, and scholarship on reality television in general and the Housewives franchise in particular, this course will investigate the way that the production of reality in these shows—the very visual quality of film, filter, and light dependent on revenue dictated by viewership—changes along lines of identity causing us to wonder if the Housewives not only change our culture, but also our (view of our) lives. We will tinker around with performance and production work inside and outside the classroom to question the fabric of our own realities and how we can share in its weaving. Lottery Preference: VIST minors, GSST concentrators, AFST concentrators
VIST H310ILLNESS AND DISABILITY IN ART AND PERFORMANCE1.0
This course introduces students to important concepts and practices relevant to the study of illness and disability in art and performance. We will approach illness and disability through parallel methodologies: as scholars, we will read, reflect on, and write critically about how art and performance help us understand illness and disability as embodied experiences, and as makers, we will try a variety of hands-on activities to explore illness/disability as forms of resourcefulness and experimental thinking. Lottery Preference: VIST minors
In this course students will watch short films that center queer identity and experience and put them in conversation with theory (Jack Halberstam, Jose Esteban Munoz, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, et. al) We will ask: what constitutes the canon? What are queer affects? What does the short form offer visual storytellers? Conversely, how might queerness reimagine the short form? All students will write two short papers and produce a final essay video project. Crosslisted: VIST,COML,GSST Pre-requisite(s): VIST 142 - Intro to Visual Studies
VIST H317ECOLOGIES OF COOPERATION: PARTICIPATION AND PRAXIS IN PHILLY ARTS, CULTURE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL ORGS1.0
Ecologies of Cooperation is an interdisciplinary TriCo Philly course that explores how visual arts, the humanities, and cooperative organizing shape contemporary ecological thought and practice in an urban context. Students will engage directly with Philadelphia’s networks of artist-run organizations, cooperative businesses, community gardens, and mutual aid formations to investigate how environmental awareness, care, and stewardship is not only represented, but actively reproduced through participatory and collective practices. Philadelphia is a rich terrain for studying and practicing the social production of ecological thought and action. Through readings, expert guest and site visits, cooperative engagements, and arts-based research, students will immerse themselves in the living networks of people, places, and practices shaping the city’s environmental future(s). Combining seminar discussion with field-based research in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program, students will draw on environmental humanities, political ecology, social practice art, and urban studies to analyze how collective structures emerge, endure, and transform. The city will serve as our primary text, offering grounded examples of how shared ownership, collective decision-making, and cultural production can help imagine more just and resilient ways of living together in a time of environmental precarity. This course will be taught in Philadelphia. Crosslisted: VIST. Pre-requisite(s): ENVS 101 or equivalent (or instructor permission) and at least one 200 or 300 level social science or laboratory science course, or equivalent. Priority in registration will be given to students participating in the Tri-Co Philly Program (https://www.haverford.edu/philly-program). Remaining seats are available to other Tri-Co students, by lottery, if demand exceeds remaining spaces in the course. If you are interested in the program, you must fill out the application, which is due on Sunday, April 5, by noon. This program includes registering for two of three of the program’s courses, which include this course or MATH B195 Biostatistics: Data, Health and Ethics in Philadelphia or ARTH061/ENVS056 Art and Culture of Indigenous Philadelphia: From Shackamaxon to the Present. Those not participating in the Philly program do not need to complete the application and can simply pre-register for the class. Lottery Preference: Tri-Co Philly Program students, Majors, Minors >> Seniors, Juniors, in ENVS or VIST
It’s no secret that media shape the world around us. Cell phones use GPS to help us navigate through traffic and platforms like Instagram connect us to millions of people. Have things always been this way? How did people react to new technologies like film or television in the past? How do modern media impact us now? For German credit there will be an extra 60-minute session in German. Crosslisted: GERM,COML,VIST.
VIST H332INTO THE THREAD: GENDER AND TEXTILE ARTWORK IN LATIN AMERICA1.0
Long dismissed as “women’s work,” fiber art carries quiet insurgency in its threads. Emerging from Indigenous, Black, and mestizo communities, its textures expose how race, labor, and intimacy intertwine. From domestic spaces to museum walls, Latin American feminist and queer artists have used fiberwork to unravel colonial legacies and re-stitch desire, memory, and resistance. Taught in Spanish, this course traces how touch, texture, and craft become acts of embodied, anti-colonial transformation. Crosslisted: SPAN,GSST,VIST
VIST H338CREATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISMS: FIELD EXPERIMENTS FOR PERFORMING NATURE1.0
This course explores creative process within the context of environmental interventions. It offers multi-disciplinary creative exercises to help students become the innovative and creative environmental professionals.The course unfolds as hands-on workshop through a series of micro-experiences, helping students evolve into fully-conscious, creative environmental professionals who approach communities empathically and connect to Nature profoundly, ethically facilitating the voices of humans and non-humans, as part of researching, assisting, protecting, and promoting fragile places under threat. Crosslisted: ENVS,PEAC,VIST. Lottery Preference: ENVS majors
Examines art, writing and exhibition practices centering in particular cultural contexts. Explores artists and curators who link art, identity, and politics, and the environment in their practice. Focuses on developing practical skills related to archival research, analysis of visual material and critical making. To be taken in fall semester of senior year. Prerequisite(s): Visual Studies minor
