Note: This list of Recommended Courses offered at UC Berkeley is based upon available information and is not intended to be comprehensive. To suggest changes or additions, please contact:
BCNM Associate Director
Aaron Fai
afai@berkeley.edu
Graduate Courses
NWMEDIA 200 001, 3 units
Questioning New Media
Asma Kazmi
Held in conjunction with the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium which brings internationally-known speakers to campus to present their work on advanced topics in new media: http://atc.berkeley.edu. Students will enhance skills in questioning new media: how to think critically about new media, how to use new media resources to research pioneering work in new media, how to form incisive questions about new media, and how to evaluate and create effective presentations on topics in new media.
NWMEDIA C262, 4 units
Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces
Kimiko Ryokai
This course explores the theory and practice of Tangible User Interfaces, a new approach to Human Computer Interaction that focuses on the physical interaction with computational media. The topics covered in the course include theoretical framework, design examples, enabling technologies, and evaluation of Tangible User Interfaces. Students will design and develop experimental Tangible User Interfaces using physical computing prototyping tools and write a final project report.
ANTHRO 229A, 4 units
Archaeological Research Strategies: History of Theory in Anthropological Archaeology
Charlotte Williams
Required for all first and second year graduate students in archaeology. Three hours of seminar discussion of major issues in the history and theory of archaeological research and practice (229A), and of the research strategies and design for various kinds of archaeological problems (229B). To be offered alternate semesters.
ARCH 229, 1-4 units
Special Topics in Digital Design Theories and Methods: Architectural Story Telling in the Age of AI
Ronald Rael
This course explores the use of AI image and video making for the use of improving architectural communication and representation. Students will learn techniques to improve visualization and narration in the telling of architectural stories. The final outcome of the semester will be the making of a short film based on the development of designs from past or current studio projects.
ARCH 245, 3 units
Daylighting in Architecture
Luisa Caldas
Daylighting is a cornerstone of architecture design, a fundamental aspect of space making. The course focuses on design approaches to natural light, resorting to the study of precedents in modern and contemporary architecture, daylighting vocabularies and grammars, rules of thumb, field measurements, quantitative studies and computer simulations. Other topics include health and comfort, energy conservation, metrics and standards. Weekly sessions comprise both lectures and labs. Final projects are developed in groups and use both qualitative and quantitative methods to assess design solutions.This course is designed for graduate students interested in the practice of coding and digital representation as well as theoretical critique. Alongside discussion of theoretical texts in the field, students will co-learn 3D javascript and web development. There is no technical pre-requisite for the course - all are welcome.
ART 375, 1 unit
The Teaching of Art: Practice
Asma Kazmi
MFA course utilizing aspects of pedagogical and andragogical teaching, the interactive lecture, collaborative learning, simulations, and brainstorming-freewriting, this semester-long seminar will focus on these various intergrative teaching approaches, to facilitate communication in the diverse and wide-ranging arena which is fine arts today. Discussion of course aims, instructional methods, grading standards, and special problems in the teaching of art practice.
DESINV 200, 3 units
Design Frameworks: History & Methods
Hugh Dubberly, Ling-xiu Zhang
This course exposes students to the mindset, skillset and toolset associated with design, and interweaves practical design methods with readings and lectures on the history of design and technology.
DESINV 202, 4 units
Technology Design Foundations
Sudhu Tewari
This course introduces foundational design and technology frameworks and builds skill sets essential to the design of products, services, and experiences enabled by emerging technologies. It follows a human-centered design process that includes research, concept generation, and prototyping, with an emphasis on iteration and refinement. It also develops fluency across a range of core technologies, from fabrication to micro-controllers, and how to operationalize them within a design context. These activities are supported by regular practice of design critique. Students engage with a highly technical semester-long project to create a product-service system leveraging both hardware and digital technologies that addresses a well-defined need.
EGYPT 203, 4 units
Late Egyptian
Rita Lucerelli
This course is designed to introduce students to the study of Late Egyptian, a later stage of the ancient Egyptian language used in the New Kingdom from ca 1500 to 1000 BCE. This course will cover Late Egyptian grammar through reading and translating literary texts written in both hieroglyphic and Hieratic scripts, in particular, the main literary tales of the “Two Brothers” and “Wenamun” will be examined.
ETHSTD 250 003, 4 units
Research Seminar: Critical Ethnic Studies without Guarantees: Thinking with Stuart Hall
Keith Feldman
This course takes up the work of Stuart Hall, among the most influential scholars in the fields of cultural studies and ethnic studies. Preferring contingency and complexity over the limited guarantees of analytical reductionism, Hall’s extensive engagement with culture, politics, and theory has informed contemporary debates about: identity and difference; race and capitalism; Marxism and deconstruction; nationalism, migration, and diaspora; popular culture and cinema; authoritarianism, post-colonialism, and neoliberalism. Students are invited to think through the detour of Hall’s theorizing as a way to animate, reconsider, and refresh their own intellectual projects.
INDENG 215, 3 units
Analysis and Design of Databases
Ken Goldberg
Advanced topics in information management, focusing on design of relational databases, querying, and normalization. New issues raised by the World Wide Web. Research projects on current topics in information technology.
JOURN 215, 3 units
Multimedia Skills
Jeremy Sanchez Rue
This class teaches the fundamentals of using digital video, audio, and photo equipment, as well as editing digital files. The class is designed to expose students to what it is like to report in a multimedia environment. While primarily for students taking new media publishing courses, the class will be valuable to any student who wants to better prepare for the emerging convergence of broadcast, print, and web media.
JOURN 216, 3 units
Multimedia Reporting
Jeremy Sanchez Rue
For journalists, the World Wide Web opens a powerful way to tell stories by combining text, video, audio, still photos, graphics, and interactivity. Students learn multimedia-reporting basics, how the web is changing journalism, and its relationship to democracy and community. Students use storyboarding techniques to construct nonlinear stories; they research, report, edit, and assemble two story projects.
PORTUG 275, 4 units
Critical and Stylistic Studies of a Single Author or Period: Senses of the Avant-Garde
Nathaniel Wolfson
The seminar approaches the avant-garde not only as literary and artistic history but as a reorganization of perception. We consider how literature and visual art recalibrate modes of seeing, hearing, touching, and inhabiting space. From this perspective, the avant-garde becomes an inquiry into how art transforms not only representation but the felt experience of the social and political. Centered on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazil, this seminar explores how the historical avant-gardes transformed cultural fields, leaving lasting marks and establishing practices that continue to shape production today. We'll move across a wide theoretical spectrum: from canonical theories of the avant-garde to phenomenological approaches to aesthetic experience, and from structuralist poetics to intermedia semiotics. The avant-garde is far from an exclusively Western aesthetic tradition or the sole product of exchanges with Europe. We examine the impact of African diasporic and Indigenous cultures on Brazil’s modernist and avant-garde traditions, while also situating Brazilian experimentation within transnational circuits of exchange.
THEATER 266 002, 4 units
Theater Arts: Ecology, the Arts, and Authoritarianism
Shannon Jackson
Scientists, politicians, policy-makers, and activists struggle to sensitize global citizens to the threat of climate change. That effort is particularly challenging when climate denial is part of an authoritarian playbook in our contemporary moment. In this nexus, artists and writers work to articulate and propel climate advocacy and global coalition through creative practices that re-imagine the systems of the world. What is the varied role of the arts as an ecological practice? What is the varied role of the cultural sector in times of authoritarianism, both as a resistant force and as a complicit force? How do different artistic mediums—literature, visual art, live performance, film and video, site-specific art, and cross-media practices—similarly and differently engage with issues of ecology, autocracy, and their intersection? In addition to critical reading, students will examine the practices of a range of artists as well as programs at BAMPFA, Doe Library, Art Practice, and at Bay Area arts organizations, responding as cultural critics, emerging curators, and creative-makers as well. Students will develop their own scholarly essays and cultural practices; they will also have the chance to contribute to programming and writing for upcoming events, exhibitions, and screenings.
Undergraduate Courses
AMERSTD 110 003, 4 units
Nuclear Berkeley
Dmitri Brown, Mark Brilliant
In his book Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963, the eminent historian of California, Kevin Starr, described the rise of the University of California to world prominence as a research institution as inextricably bound to the “arts and sciences of nuclear warfare.” This course will trace the history and historical validity of that claim, examining the myriad ways in which UC Berkeley (and the broader Berkeley and Bay Area) was involved in nuclear developments including weapons design and testing, strategy and policy, and innovations in science, engineering, medicine, and energy. We will approach these topics through a variety of perspectives and frameworks. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and independent work, students will ultimately be expected to produce a major piece of research on a slice of the history of Nuclear Berkeley that can take the form of a substantial final paper, podcast, website, QR-driven walking-tour, archival report, or other creative project. For students working on World War II-related Nuclear Berkeley projects, a goal will be to get those projects linked to the website for the National Park Service’s Manhattan Project National Historic Park. Curiously, the three physical sites of that historic park - Los Alamos, NM, Hanford, WA, and Oak Ridge, TN were all made possible by UC Berkeley scientists - Robert Oppenheimer, Glenn Seaborg, and Ernest Lawrence, the latter two of whom won Nobel Prizes - and yet somehow UC Berkeley is not even listed among the Manhattan Project’s “other places” mentioned in the website. We hope that some students in this class can help begin to correct that egregious omission in the historical record.
ART 30, 3 units
Art, Water, and California
Greg Niemeyer
Water is one of the most precarious resources in California, yet many people believe the water supply to be unlimited. The arts and visual cultures contribute to such popular misconceptions of natural resources, but media art can also help people develop more accurate and relevant conceptions of natural resources. The course introduces students to interdisciplinary creative research and media art production with the end goal of advancing popular conceptions about water. Students study water cultures in California from the 1750's onwards and experience a wide range of watercourses and waterworks to inspire new art. Art projects include data visualization, short fiction, billboard designs, and interactive gallery displays.
ART 160 002, 4 units
Artificial Art
Jill Miller
Artificial intelligence is often framed as a frictionless technology of the future, but its systems are built on vast material infrastructures. This studio course takes a critical look at AI through artistic practice. Students will experiment with generative tools while exploring how artists are engaging machine learning and other algorithmic systems in their work.Through hands-on projects and discussion, the class considers questions of authorship and what it means to make art with — and about — computational systems. At the same time, the course investigates the ecological and material realities behind AI. We will look at the energy demands of data centers, the extraction of minerals used in computing hardware, the environmental costs of large-scale computation, and the global labor networks that sustain AI technologies. Students will develop projects that engage these hidden infrastructures, using artistic practice to question how technological “progress” shapes the environment and our collective future.
DESINV 15, 3 units
Design Methodology
Emily Au
This introductory course aims to expose you to the mindset, skillset and toolset associated with design. It does so through guided applications to framing and solving problems in design, business and engineering. Specifically, you will learn approaches to noticing and observing, framing and reframing, imagining and designing, and experimenting and testing as well as for critique and reflection. You will also have a chance to apply those approaches in various sectors. This course may be used to fulfill undergraduate technical elective requirements for some College of Engineering majors; students should refer to their Engineering Student Services advisors for more details.
ENGLISH 176, 4 units
Literature and Popular Culture: Stories and Games
Grace Lavery
Course description coming soon.
ETHSTD 11AC, 4 units
Introduction to Ethnic Studies
Keith Feldman
This explores the work of key theorists of race, ethnicity, and de-colonization whose work and ideas have formed the basis of scholarly work in the broad, interdisciplinary field of comparative ethnic studies. It is intended both to offer beginning students a ground in the ideas and methods they will encounter throughout their major, and to introduce names, texts, and concepts with which all majors should be familiar. This course satisfies the American cultures requirement.
FILM 13, 4 units
Experimental, Alternative, and Radical Indigenous Media and Art
Instructor TBA
This course will explore both the limits and capaciousness of the terms “experimental” and “media” from a critical Indigenous media theory perspective. This will include interventions made by Indigenous media practitioners/theorists which often blur the boundaries between experimental, alternative, and radical media production. Attending closely to the sense of the collective and the communal in their works, what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call an “ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction,” we will put these in relation to a conception of the minor. This class will investigate how Indigenous media operates as a site of social and political experimentation against colonial, imperial, and other dominating and reductive forces. We will experience work by Indigenous media creators who push the boundaries of form, materiality, expression, technology, sociality, visuality, legibility, identity, and politics. A significant emphasis will be placed on collective and community-based work as well as radical and revolutionary media and media that contends with forces of destruction. We will also read and discuss theories of mediation and the sensorium. Media will be understood capaciously, with little distinction between “old” and “new” media, though we will discuss these discursive formations outside of developmental historicism and in relation to their social uses. This will range across archival documents, AI and martial technology, filmic and digital images, sound experimentation, etc.
FILM 20, 4 units
Film and Media Theory
Weihong Bao
This course is intended to introduce undergraduates to the study of a range of media, including photography, film, television, video, and print and digital media. The course will focus on questions of medium "specificity" or the key technological/material, formal and aesthetic features of different media and modes of address and representation that define them. Also considered is the relationship of individual media to time and space, how individual media construct their audiences or spectators, and the kinds of looking or viewing they enable or encourage. The course will discuss the ideological effects of various media, particularly around questions of racial and sexual difference, national identity, capitalism, and power.
FILM 35, 4 units
Digital Media Studies
Jacob Gaboury
This course is about digital media: how it came to be, where it is going, and how we can engage with it critically and creatively. Over the course of five units we will trace both the history and theory of contemporary digital media technologies, examining how digital media have come to shape our engagement with contemporary culture with a particular focus on aesthetics, form, and politics.
FILM 145 001 & 002, 4 units
Global Media
Iggy Cortez, Joseph Coppola
This course will focus on topics in national, transnational, and global cinema, television, photography, and/or new media.
FILM 155, 4 units
Media Technologies: Cinema After Digitization
Jacob Gaboury
This course examines the influence of digital technology on contemporary film and visual culture. Beginning in the year 2000 we look at how computational media have transformed the way we make, view, and understand filmmaking as a creative and cultural practice in the 21st century. From computer graphics to TikTok and artificial intelligence, we will explore new tools and develop new skills to help us understand and analyze digital cinema today.
HISTORY 131B, 4 units
Social History of the United States: Creating Modern American Society: From the End of the Civil War
Dmitri Brown
This course examines the transformation of American society since the Civil War. The lectures and readings give special attention to the emergence of city culture and its possibilities for a pluralistic society; the experience and effect of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the revolution in communications and industry; changes in family dynamics, the emergence of modern childhood, schooling, and youth culture; changes in gender relations and sexuality; the problematics of race and the changing nature of class relationships in a consumer society; the triumph of psychological and therapeutic concepts of the self.
INDENG 115, 3 units
Industrial and Commercial Data Systems
Ken Goldberg
Design and implementation of databases, with an emphasis on industrial and commercial applications. Relational algebra, SQL, normalization. Students work in teams with local companies on a database design project. WWW design and queries.
MEDIAST 10, 4 units
Introduction to Media Studies
Josh Jackson
The objective of this class is to enhance students' knowledge of media's industrial and cultural functions by introducing them to key perspectives and methods of study that stress a) how media systems have and continue to develop in the United States and across the globe as well as b) how we use and make meaning with media as part of our everyday lived experiences. To consider media's social, economic, political, and cultural impact, the course will investigate a number of ways of understanding its production, form, reception, and influence, being careful to recognize how these approaches relate to each other and to a wide array of diverse case studies in television, film, recorded music, print, video games, and online.
MEDIAST 104E, 4 units
History and Development of Online News
Rich Jaroslovsky
This course will examine the history of online news beginning with the earliest experiments with news delivered via dedicated terminals. From there, we’ll look at the impact of the personal computer’s growth and the rise of proprietary dial-up online services. The open, Wild West nature of the early Web brought new possibilities but also the beginning of debates about credibility, free vs. paid content and competitive challenges that continue to this day. We’ll focus on key figures in technology and journalism who shaped the new medium, and trace how its growth undermined traditional economic models even as it enabled the rise of new ones, continuing through today’s world of mobile apps, aggregators and social media.
MEDIAST 111B, 4 units
Text and Data Media History
Matthew Berry
This course covers the modern global history of textual and digital media forms, with a focus on interactions between emerging media technologies and emerging modern power structures. We will examine how and why historical agents responded to, made use of, and tried to regulate new information technologies such as the printing press, documents and forms, newspapers, the postal service, the telegraph and teletype, filing and punch-card systems, electro-mechanical and electronic computers, networked databases, and the internet. Lectures will consider the impact of specific media technologies on the historical development of state administrations, colonial empires, ideological movements, and modern global business.
MEDIAST 112, 4 units
Media Theories and Processes
Ian Kivelin Davis
This course will familiarize you with the often-contentious history of media theory. At issue among scholars working within different theoretical and research traditions are core disagreements about what should be studied (institutions, texts, audiences, and/or technologies) and how media should be studied (for applied, “practical” purposes or with an eye that is critical of power and institutional structures). Course readings and lectures stress an understanding of these various research traditions by focusing on the cultural, historical, political, and social contexts surrounding them, the research models and methods used, and the findings and conclusions reached.
MEDIAST 113, 4 units
Media and Democracy
Meeta Rani Rani Jha
An interdisciplinary examination of the role and power of media for civic engagement and state-public interactions.
MEDIAST 114, 4 units
Media and Globalization
Ian Kivelin Davis
This course offers an introduction to media and globalization. We will examine global media industries (film, television, music, news, advertising, diplomacy, new media, etc.), and explore content produced within these industries through specific case studies. Topics include Bollywood, Hallyu, television format sales, nonwestern news, media imperialism, the globalization of popular cultures, diasporic communities, and global representation. The class reviews theories and histories of media globalization before turning to case studies to learn about the political and cultural roles of media in globalization processes.
MEDIAST 130, 4 units
Research Methods in Media Studies
Meeta Rani Rani Jha
This course is intended to familiarize students with some of the primary research methods used to study mass media texts and audiences (and the relationship between the two). Because the field of media studies has historical roots in both the social sciences and humanities, the course will cover both quantitative and qualitative approaches to communications research. Course readings will describe research methods, offer examples of research projects and findings, and present critiques of research studies and methods. Course assignments will involve designing and conducting a series of sample projects on a single topic of the student's choosing in order to gain a fuller understanding of various research methods and their limitations and strengths. There are five separate research projects on the syllabus; students must complete the first project and may conduct any three of the remaining four projects. Students must present and discuss their research findings for one project to the class.
MEDIAST 180, 4 units
Television Studies
Josh Jackson
This course examinines contemporary approaches to the study of television, investigating televison's social, political, commercial, and cultural dimensions. Readings and assignments require students to apply critical perspectives to television programming and to the analysis of individual television texts.
MEDIAST 190, 4 units
A Guide to Your Self: Media, Personality, and Identity as History and Theory
Matthew Berry
How and why do we use media technologies to understand and express our "selves"? Are the representations of individuals in media more (or less) accurate reflections of person's identity or do they actually constitute who that person is? How do media representations of gender, race, and class affect the production of self? This course will embark on an adventure through history and theory, exploring how identities and personalities are produced, represented, consumed, and critiqued through such diverse media technologies as the printed autobiographies, photographs, audio and video tape, social and streaming digital media, copying, cloning, and brain emulation. Special attention will be paid to literature on psychoanalysis, dramaturgy, celebrity, digital selves, and gendered visuality.
MELC 103, 3 units
Religion of Ancient Egypt
Rita Lucerelli
A survey of the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, based primarily upon the written sources.
MUSIC 158A, 4 units
Sound and Music Computing with CNMAT Technologies
Edmund Campion
Explores the intersection of music and computers using a combination of scientific, technological, and artistic methodologies. Musical concerns within a computational frame are addressed through the acquisition of basic programming skills for the creation and control of digital sound. Will learn core concepts and techniques of computerbased music composition using the Cycling74/MaxMSP programming environment in combination with associated software tools and programming approaches created by the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Included will be exposure to the essentials of digital audio signal processing, musical acoustics and psychoacoustics, sound analysis and synthesis. The course is hands-on and taught from the computer lab.
POLSCI 106A, 4 units
American Politics: Campaign Strategy - Media
Daniel Schnur
An inside look at how political campaigns operate from the viewpoint of the media, taught by the people who run them. Class material will be directed towards students who are interested in direct involvement in campaign politics or who are looking for a greater understanding of the political process. Students will be required to develop a complete written campaign strategy document in order to fulfill class requirements. Students will be expected to follow political and campaign news via the media and be prepared to discuss those developments in class.
PORTUG 27, 3 units
Introduction to Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese-Speaking Cultures (in English)
Nathaniel Wolfson
This course offers an overview of contemporary Portuguese-Speaking Cultures and Literatures. The time frame covered is from the sixties--years of rupture and experimentalism in artistic and cultural production—to the present. Students will study the concrete poetry of the Portuguese author Ana Hatherly, the visual (“Concrete”) poems of the Brazilian author Haroldo de Campos, and the drawings of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Maria Schendel. The course content will include the multi-layered music of the Angolan duet Ouro Negro and the political essays of Cape Verdean academic Amílcar Cabral. Themes such as colonization, decolonization, freedom, will be among the larger, decidedly compelling group of subjects on which the course will touch.
PORTUG 135, 4 units
Studies in Luso-Brazilian Literature: The Brazilian Short Story
Nathaniel Wolfson
Conducted in Portuguese. Discover the rich tradition of the Brazilian short story, one of the most inventive forms in modern literature. We will read, analyze, and discuss writers from different moments and literary traditions, among them Machado de Assis, João do Rio, Lima Barreto, João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Conceição Evaristo, and Cidinha da Silva. Along the way, we will also explore the Brazilian tradition of the crônica, a hybrid form that moves between literature, journalism, and everyday observation. Throughout the semester, we will place short fiction in dialogue with other genres and media—including music and visual art—that have helped shape Brazil’s cultural imagination. Our goal is to investigate how short stories create entire worlds within the compressed architecture of the form. Students will also experiment with the genre themselves, producing their own works of short fiction over the course of the semester.
PSYCH 147, 3 units
Methods in Cognitive Development
Celeste Kidd
The goal of this course is to introduce you to the excitement of studying development, primarily in humans. The course covers different methodologies for studying development, and how to interpret the resulting data. Students will become more wise consumers of empirical data on development, whether those data appear in scholarly or popular media. This course provides students with the analytical tools and productive skepticism required to objectively evaluate findings in developmental science.
RHETOR 145, 4 units
Science, Narrative, and Image: Ecology Across the Arts
Shannon Jackson
What is the role of narrative in science and conversely? How do images supplement or displace these narratives? How have scientific conceptions impacted narrative forms and theories of narrative? How important are images to the rhetoric of scientific persuasion? Finally, how can science itself be narrated or visually represented? This course will examine critical discussions of these questions.
THEATER 146A, 3 units
Choreography: Solo/Duet Showcase
Lisa Wymore
Analysis of choreographic theories of form and structure and their practical application within solo and duet compositions.
For more information or to suggest changes or additions, please contact
BCNM Associate Director
Aaron Fai:
afai@berkeley.edu