Spring 2026 Course Search

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Spring ‘26

When you first learn how to paint, the focus is typically on gaining facility with the application and manipulation of paint to articulate the subject. In this intermediate course, we shift our attention to the often overlooked step that precedes painting: preparing the surface. 

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 do we transition to a low-carbon economy in a manner that doesn’t reinscribe the social and environmental injustices that have plagued our fossil-fueled economy? On one hand, the continued burning of fossil fuels is producing environmental crises that threaten to destabilize the very foundations of collective life, with poor and historically marginalized communities bearing the brunt of the suffering. On the other hand, renewable energy technologies are far from environmentally and socially benign.

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Spring '26

Working in collaboration with the local Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, students will create a new archive of the historic dress collection.

Economic inequality is often described in terms of uneven distribution of income and wealth. Yet, more importantly, it reflects uneven access to opportunities, advantages, and life chances. Why do some people enjoy a higher standard of living and better quality of life than others? Are such inequalities fair and just? What role do history, policy, and institutions play in sustaining or reducing inequality?

Why does chronic hunger endure even in times of prosperity? How can famine devastate entire regions in extreme cases, while food deserts quietly persist in wealthy countries like the United States? And what does it mean to treat nourishment not as charity or commodity, but as a right of citizenship?

To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem to be be in constant flux. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from Chinese American lesbian poets of the 1980s to Fatimah Asghar's recent cross-genre coming-of-age novel; from David Henry Hwang’s reimagining of Madame Butterfly to queer Hawaiian reclamations of aloha; and beyond.

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.

This course is for experienced student artists with a firm commitment to serious work in the studio. Students will work primarily on self-directed projects in an effort to refine individual concerns and subject matter. Students will present work regularly for critique in class as well as for individual studio meetings with the instructor. Development of a strong work ethic will be crucial.

Fake news, reality television, “IRL” – asserting the veracity of our perceptions is a constant preoccupation in contemporary culture. What is real? Realism is a widely used term with multiple connotations: verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, truth, fact.

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what the actions mean to them. This course is intended for students who wish to learn more about the impact of theoretical frameworks on their ongoing knowledge projects at Bennington College.