Spring 2015

Global Media

Director: Patricia O’Neill, Professor of English
315-859-4218
Email: poneill@hamilton.edu

The focus this semester will be on how global culture is produced and represented in literature, art, and digital media. Field trips, courses and independent study will establish the historical and present day contexts in which New York City symbolizes and participates in the globalization of technology and culturally complex identities.

Seminar on Globalization

Critical examination of economic, political, and cultural theories that have defined what we mean by globalization. We will discuss issues such as the politics of transnational film and literature, the role of museums and community-based organizations, the problems of international capital and immigrant labor in a global city.

Special Topics Course — Representing New York City Post-WWI and Post 9/11

Beginning with E.B. White’s famous essays on New York City in the late 40s and 50s, we will consider how authors and filmmakers have generated images of NYC as both exciting and dangerous, a crossroads and meeting point for people from all over the world.  The second half of the semester we will focus on literary and filmic responses to the attacks on New York City in September 2001 and exam changes in the city’s culture and identity for long time residents and contemporary immigrants and visitors.

Internship

Students will receive credit for working 4 days a week in a cultural or media-oriented organization and post weekly synopses of their experiences on Blackboard.

Independent Study

Working from abstracts and short bibliographies developed in consultation with the director and the student’s concentration advisor in the Fall semester, students will analyze the effects of globalization on one form of culture or media in a substantial paper (20-30 pages). All students will receive college credit for this work.  Students may also seek concentration credit.

Spring 2015 Participants