Spring 2026 Course Search

This discussion-animated, readings-based seminar provides art historical, cultural, and critical contexts for the Visual Arts Lecture Series (VALS). In addition to our ongoing interrogation of the public lecture as such, students present their own work (in any field) and analyze the technical and stylistic aspects of structuring an effective and engaging ‘talk.’ The course provides unique opportunities for interaction with visiting artists, curators, critics, and historians.

Each term, Bennington Visual Arts offers a program of 4-5 lectures by visiting arts professionals: artists, curators, historians and critics, selected to showcase the diversity of contemporary art practices. Designed to enhance a broader and deeper knowledge of various disciplines and issues in the Visual Arts and to stimulate campus dialogue around topical issues in contemporary art and culture, these thematically curated presentations offer students the opportunity to engage with art by emerging and internationally-known artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

This course examines the complex relationship between language, culture, and society through an interdisciplinary lens, incorporating perspectives from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. Students will explore how linguistic practices both reflect and shape identities, power dynamics, cultural norms, and worldviews as we cover topics such as linguistic relativity, regional variation, racialization, politeness, and markers of gender and class.

How can anthropology help us understand political dynamics around the world? This course will introduce students to a range of approaches anthropologists have developed in the study of politics and the political. The course will consider anthropological methods for studying the powerful, the state and institutions, and political movements.

What does intimacy reveal about our social worlds? This seminar explores a range of recent methods in the study of intimacy, as well as what it means to make intimate knowledge claims. Through neighboring concepts in Anthropology, such as kinship, friendship and relatedness, as well as through intimacy’s imbrication with economy, sexuality, violence, and more-than-human worlds, this course considers the varied shapes that intimacy takes across distinct social worlds.

Conducted through research focusing on the development of Japanese subcultures in the Post World War II period, this course poses various critical inquiries about the effects of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on contemporary global consumer society, visual culture and the production of art.

This class will investigate various pedagogical approaches to food studies by examining curriculums, topics and discourses being taught at some academic institutions. More importantly, we will put focus on researching art collectives, contemporary civic engagement practices, and other non-institutional models developed by creative practitioners and activists, which engage with food as a conduit to undertake social, political and cultural identity issues and to enhance their community cohesion.

What forces and individuals contribute to shaping an artist’s legacy? What happens to all of the objects, materials, and correspondence that artists create during their lifetime? What is a catalogue raisonné? This one-credit remote module will introduce students to legacy work and to the nascent field of artist-endowed foundations, inviting the consideration of philosophical and creative questions, while simultaneously offering practical knowledge applicable to future professional opportunities.

Graduate Teaching Fellows in Dance are integrated into the dance program as teaching assistants. In consultation with their academic advisors and the dance faculty, MFA candidates develop an assistantship schedule of approximately ten hours weekly; the courses they develop and teach are listed in the curriculum. All Teaching Fellows bring their own professional histories and contribute their own manners of teaching.

This course is designed to assist graduate students with the research and development of their new work. The weekly format is determined with the students. In class, they show works-in-progress, try out ideas with their colleagues, and discuss issues involved in their creative processes. Though the class meets only once a week, students are expected to spend considerable time each week in active, ongoing creative research; their independent projects will be presented to the public, either formally or informally, by the end of the term.