Screen Studies and Criticism

A graduate seminar that treats film not as entertainment to decode but as a medium for thinking philosophically about emotion — how regret, anger, jealousy, shame, fear, and love take shape on screen, and what that reveals about perception and ethical life. You'll read across philosophy and film theory (Pippin, Williams, Sartre, Sissa, Price, Nussbaum) alongside close work on directors like Hitchcock, Pasolini, von Trier, Bergman, Martel, and Fassbinder, with weekly reflections, a presentation, a midterm, and a research paper anchoring the work. It sits in the COMD graduate track as the place where screen analysis stops being formalist and starts asking what films make us feel and know.