Spring 2026 Course Search

This class is an extension of the Black Music Division at Bennington College that brought dancers and musicians together for live performance in the composition of Improvisation. It is co-taught by Susan Sgorbati and Michael Wimberly. 

Musicians and Dancers will study and practice together a Solo Practice and an Ensemble Practice, building compositional structures for performance. 

Historical Dress: The Park-McCullough Project Spring ‘26

Genesis is the first book in a compilation known collectively as the Bible. It is a text of enormous literary value, and one of our earliest historical chronicles, providing foundational material for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet how many of us know what it actually says?  How did it come together, what is the narrative, and how does it relate to ideas, cultures, and events in the ancient world? We will not be considering Genesis in terms of its status as scripture.

The aim of this course is to think about books. Not just books as objects, but books as the signifiers of a wealth of relationships – between reading and writing, between people and ideas, between people and people, between technologies and desires. For centuries, our ideas have been shaped by the rhythms and hierarchies inherent in the nature of print.  But the nature of the book itself has changed enormously over time – from the painstaking creation of ancient papyri and scrolls to Gutenberg and the fifteenth-century printing revolution.

How does influence travel from one thing to another? In Newton’s mechanics of particles and forces, influences travel instantaneously across arbitrarily far distances. Newton himself felt this to be incorrect, but he did not suggest a solution to this problem of “action at a distance.” To solve this problem, we need a richer ontology: The world is made not only of particles, but also of fields. As examples of the field concept, we study the theory and applications of the electric field and the magnetic field.

All but a handful of the objects you see in the night sky are stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Although we know about these stars only from studying their light, we know today that they are not just points of light, but large, gravitationally‐bound balls of plasma governed by the laws of physics. Stars, together with dust, gas, and dark matter, are found in larger structures – galaxies. In turn, galaxies, are located in even larger structures called galaxy groups and galaxy clusters.

The physics of light and color initially appears simple: light is a wave and the wavelength of light determines color. While this basic physical description of light is easy to state, going deeper quickly opens up large range of questions. How do different wavelengths of light combine to make colors? How does light from different sources interfere? How does light change path when it travels through different materials? How do humans sense light both in and outside of the visible spectrum? How does our perception of color affect how we interpret our world?

Physically, sound is simply the compression of air around us. However, this relatively simple description obscures a much richer understanding of sound. From how different sounds are generated and perceived to how different sounds can combine to make something new to how to design acoustically pleasant spaces, the physics of sound plays a key role. This course is about the fundamentals that underlie sound and is designed to serve as an introduction to those who are interested in going further.

In this course, students will gain experience with using simple programmable robots and how they can be utilized in STEM education. The focus of this class will be on learning and designing lessons for K-12 students utilizing these robots. This class is accessible for students at all levels of computer programming experience (including none). 

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.

This advanced seminar offers students the opportunity to pursue a term-long project in history.  Asking the historian’s three basic questions – why this? why here? and why now? – each student will be able to do a deep dive into their chosen piece of the past.  For some, this will be the venue for writing their SCT senior theses.  For others, this will be the place where they can produce a historical project appropriate to their Plan. Writing will take place throughout term, and all students in this seminar will receive weekly feedback.

The Tuning in the Trees is an advanced seminar in microtonality that treats tuning systems as both technical structures and living landscapes. Students will explore how musical intervals emerge from natural patterns—such as tree bifurcations, harmonic ratios, and number sequences—while engaging deeply with Just intonation, Meantone, Bohlen–Pierce, and other non-Western tunings.

This course is an introductory survey course of U.S. history that pays particular attention to changing norms around gender and sexuality, and how people contested or subverted those norms. Topics include: same-sex intimacy in Early America, turn of the century panics around miscegenation and white slavery, the invention of hetero and homosexuality, cross-dressing in the American West, and the HIV/AIDS crisis.

This course examines the history of immigration to the United States. How did this country become a “nation of immigrants”? How did immigration become so central to American national identity? What are this country’s purported ideals on the subject and has it ever lived up to them?  

The Holocaust is one of the most ethically challenging, traumatic, and consequential occurrences in modern history. This seminar aims to give students a granular understanding of the mass oppression, enslavement, and genocide that occurred in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, in order to then consider how it has been represented in poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction both by survivors of the this historical humanitarian crisis and those who've followed.

Music reflects the powerful journey of the people This course will study Music of the Struggle for Freedom, Rebellion and Civil and Social Rights, beginning with the African American journey in the United States from late 1700s to present day, and expanding to other cultures throughout the world.

Students will observe using the telescopes at Stickney Observatory for a series of astronomical observing projects. After a range of initial assigned projects designed to acquaint students with the capabilities of the observing equipment and astrophysically interesting observations, students will propose and carry out their own observing projects looking at astrophysical phenomena of interest to them. As this is a projects class, it is expected that students will be able to devote significant time (mostly at night) observing on their own or in small teams.