Featured Courses
Current
Color Outside the Lines
University of Notre Dame Fall 2026
This course is an introduction to slow thinking* in the humanities with a focus on the rich, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming topic of color. We’ll pay special attention to the way philosophers, scientists, artists, and filmmakers have grappled with color’s slipperiness, as well as the way color intersects with questions of gender, race, class, and ability. Is color an objective or subjective phenomenon? What can we gain from moving beyond symbolic interpretations of color? How does the way we think about color look different in different historical moments, and how does it change alongside the emergence of new technologies and media forms? Is it possible to talk about color in a U.S. context without also talking about race?
These are thorny and complex questions. When addressing them, the goal isn’t to whip up a quick answer. Critical thinking requires patience, intellectual humility, and time—three things modern academic life, and modernity in general, often discourages. We live in a culture that values speed, output, and efficiency over depth, reflection, and community, in an era where new technologies like generative AI can generate instant answers. By asking you to slow down and work through big ideas without the aid of digital tools, this class directly challenges automated forms of text generation that take away our capacity to fully experience the challenges and rewards of a liberal arts education.
*This approach is indebted to Lily Abadal, Drafted: Scaffolded Writing for Slow Thinking in the Age of AI (2025).
Critical Approaches to Television
University of Notre Dame Fall 2026
Television, as an experience, a spectatorial mode, and a medium, entered our lives in the 1950s and has since shared a complex and evolving relationship with art, culture, and the public sphere. But in 2026, what counts as “television,” anyway? Is it public broadcasting, cable, or streaming platforms and social media— or all of the above? How do we begin to isolate and understand something as shapeshifting and ubiquitous as TV?
This class is designed to help you confront the many structures and meanings of television, both as an industrial formation and as a distinct medium with its own politics of identity. It provides the foundation for other TV-specific courses within the FTT Television Studies concentration. Taking a long historical view of television—from black-and-white to color, analog to digital—we’ll explore how TV has been analyzed as a communication medium, a creative art, a technological apparatus, a commercial industry, and a cultural forum, as well as a form of recreation, education, social bonding, and political engagement. Above all, this course will give you crucial context for contemporary debates in an age where streaming platforms and algorithmic profiling—and not the networks—dominate TV’s future.
Past
From Prisms to Pantone: Color, Race, & Technology
University of Michigan Fall 2023
In this class, we will take a deep dive into the rich, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming topic of color as it is mediated by technology, culture, and politics. By doing so, we’ll open up a larger conversation about how technology shapes our perception of the world and ourselves. A major conceptual thread running throughout the course will be around the complex relationship between so-called "abstract" color in the arts and sciences and color as a tool of racial classification and oppression. Throughout the semester, we’ll look critically at the ways in which color technologies from photography to biometrics have historically been calibrated in a way that perpetuates racial bias. Students will have many different modes of engaging with the course material and are encouraged to propose a creative or hybrid theory/ practice final project in lieu of a traditional written paper.