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. 

According to "All Englang," Joan Acocella's essay in The New Yorker, Geoffery Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, "was the freshest, clearest, and sweetest of the great English poets." She goes on to say that, living in the 14th century, he was also perhaps the first great English poet. Still.

That writers of color earn less than their white peers in advances and fees is anecdotally well known. But we lack exhaustive data. Gearing up for such data collection the next few years in a faculty-driven project at Bennington, this course provides an overview of the broader ethical and social landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in publishing. Major inquiries will include:

We will spend the term immersed in in-depth reading and analysis of the plot, structure, and language, and cultural context of six Shakespeare tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. We will focus on the themes of power, corruption, betrayal, revenge, despair, and madness, among others. We will also spend considerable time discussing representations of gender, race, and old age in Shakespeare.

In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin spoke of creative writing as a means of "finding out": "When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." This is writing as a form of inquiry, so deep-seated that it's involuntary: the only real, consistently available means we have of gaining better purchase on the world around us, and on ourselves.

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.

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.