Spring 2026 Course Search

In this course, students will pursue advanced work in linguistics via topics and forms approved by their respective Plan committees.  The course will frame habitual and productive practices in the conduct and presentation of linguistic research, guide the growth of individual students' topical expertise, and present opportunities for the sharing and collaborative improvement of student work.  Through the pursuit of individual projects, students will develop and refine skills in the formulation of research questions and methods, the synthesis of existing scholarly literat

This course is designed to equip students with the basic methodologies necessary to carry out linguistic fieldwork with speakers/users of un(der)documented languages. Students will be trained in the skills and tools of language documentation and description by working with a speaker of a language previously unknown to them.

This course is a seminar focusing on films that were made by filmmakers and collectives which saw themselves as inaugurating a new kind of filmmaking modeled neither on the commercial American filmmaking, nor on the European “Auteur” Cinema, instead crafting a third position, a cinema that was implicated in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles of the time. These works challenged ideas of authorship, questioned the role of the filmmaker in political transformation, and proposed alternatives to the forms of production that filmmaking made use of.

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.

This course will feature presentations and conversations with Bennington alumni with the purpose of providing guidance to current students about how to leverage their own experience in designing their education to the next step in their growth: designing a career. The skills and capacities that undergird the Bennington approach to liberal arts are intended to also help students secure and thrive in rewarding professional careers.