Spring 2026 Course Search

This course introduces students to econometric approaches to asking and answering questions about the economy relating to employment, health, and well-being. The primary aim of the course is to understand how economists analyze data to determine causal effect. We will analyze data sets to ask and answer socioeconomic questions such as: What factors affect a person’s income, and how do we know? How might we investigate the main causes of unemployment?

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.

“When I combine imagery and text, I'm really just trying to surprise myself,” writes poet Diane Khoi Nguyen. In fact, there are many pathways to surprise when we start to experiment with multimedia. Certainly the result must have been surprising when the late John Giorno, in 1968, developed the phone-based, poetry performance project, Dial-a-Poem.

Balkan music is fierce brass, complex harmonies, and mind-bending asymmetrical dances. It is spirited Macedonian wedding music, dissonant village songs, devastating Bosnian love ballads, Greek polyphonic songs, and heart-pounding Turkish rhythms. In the Bennington Balkan Ensemble, we will learn to perform a variety of traditional, urban, village, and popular music from Southeast Europe. Singing and playing indigenous, orchestral, and electronic instruments, we’ll explore repertoire from Albania, Greece, Bosnia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosova, Turkey, Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia.

This course explores the art and science of mixing and producing audio for both emergent immersive formats and traditional legacy platforms. Students will gain hands-on experience with spatial audio technologies such as Dolby Atmos, Ambisonics, and binaural mixing, while also mastering industry-standard techniques for stereo and 5.1 surround sound production.

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.

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 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.

It is a commonly felt experience, in our current age of climate crisis, misinformation, pandemics, declining birth rates, late-stage capitalism, and the apparent twilight of democracy, etc., that we are living through (or at, or near) the end of the world. Where do we look for precedents for this feeling? To what extent does this dark life imitate art, or vice versa? Where does ‘dystopia’ end and realism begin?