Seminar description
This first-year foundation course is a survey of sound film (with a brief selection of silent shorts) on the topic of how popular cinemas have represented going to school. Looking at one film and one scholarly text a week, the course will offer an introduction to the close reading of film texts, reading and writing film criticism, and the fundamentals of film history. By engaging with only one film/reading per week, the course emphasizes depth over breadth. Texts for the course may include excerpts from Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing About Film, Sturken and Cartwright’s Practices of Looking, Staiger’s Interpreting Films, and Prince’s Movies and Meaning, along with selected criticism on the movies screened. Those films may include Zero for Conduct, Aparajito, Tom Brown’s School Days, Tea and Sympathy, If, Rock and Roll High School, Mean Girls, School Daze, Blackboard Jungle, or Lady Bird. Restricted to first-year students.
Get to know your professor
Nic Sammond
You can call me…
Prof Sammond
I just can't live without…
A free Palestine
I just can't live without…
A free Palestine
My hometown is…
Milwaukee, WI
For my undergraduate degree…
Theatre, Wesleyan University
I am surprisingly good at…
Rewriting song lyrics on the fly.
Fun fact:
In the 1980s, I was a bike messenger in New York City.
If I wasn't teaching, I would be a…
A forest ranger
What I'm working on now is…
A history of underground comix and abjection.
Lately, something that has been exciting me about my research/scholarship is…
Interviewing old hippes about their experiences in the 1960s and 1970s.
A fun fact about my field of study is…
For some reason, people don’t respect it.
I was inspired to get into this field because…
It is where people have envisioned social change as comics. It’s an archive of hopes and dreams, one of the most fun I know.
My first-year seminar in five words:
See what generations have done with the sentiment, “School sucks… but I rock!”
In a sentence, what you’ll learn in my course:
How to cut through the… nonsense…and express what you want your university experience to be, or who you want to be because of/in spite of it.
One of my favourite things about teaching first-year students is…
So many cornball answers come to mind. You guys see the world so differently than I do, and I love hearing about that and about how what I know sounds to you.
My best advice for those starting their first year…
Also corny: Keep your mind and your heart open. As much as it pains you, try to engage with someone whose world view makes little to no sense to you.
NAME: Chelsea Rochman.