Spring 2026 Course Search

In this course, films are used as textbooks to learn the French language and explore the French-speaking world. In order to hone their language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), students will listen to selected film dialogues to improve their listening comprehension, read and analyze excerpts from scenarios and reviews to strengthen their understanding of syntax and widen their vocabulary, mimic the pronunciation of actors and write on film to improve their spoken and written French.

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.

In lieu of more conventional advanced Spanish classes, paralleling a series of often disparate tutorials, with tutees working in relative isolation, the proposal is to allow students free reign over an idea for a final, term-long project, while concurrently offering them an educated, exoteric audience to assist in fleshing out their work.

The Scriptorium, a “place for writing,” is a class for writers interested in improving their critical essay-writing skills. We will read to write and write to read. Much of our time will be occupied with writing and revising—essai means “trial” or “attempt”—as we work to create new habits and productive strategies for analytical writing.

This intensive advanced translation workshop focuses on student work. Meant for those who have taken Ethical Translation and learned the nuts and bolts of translation there – or otherwise have translation and/or extensive foreign language experience – here we dig into your longer translation projects. The aim of the course is to leave with a polished translation that is worthy of publication and a general audience.

This course will examine movement–travel, migration, and transition–in the French-speaking world. We’ll examine the travel tale as philosophical form (Candide), the sonnet, Orientalism, the graphic novels of Marjane Satrapi, films of Josephine Baker, queer movement in the work of Abdellah Taïa, the North Atlantic Triangle (Maboula Soumahoro), and the gender transition of Océan. Students will write a variety of critical and creative texts, make individual and group presentations, and develop their reading skills. Conducted in French. Intermediate-high level.

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.

Theoretical Ethics aims to uncover the sources of moral knowledge and the foundations of moral obligation. You will engage in a detailed reading of two classical moral theories and study contemporary interpretations and applications of these theories. You will be expected to contribute substantially to class discussion, write two essays and present a draft of your final essay to the class.

How do actors bridge the gap between themselves and the role they are playing? How do actors rehearse with other actors in order to explore the world of the play? 

This non-performance based class is designed to help individual actors discover their own organic, thorough rehearsal process. Step by step we will clarify the actor’s process: character research, character exploration, text analysis, identifying actions, working with scene partners, emotional preparation, and scene presentation. 

Delights of Ephemera explores the significance of mass-produced materials in the context of art movements and exhibitions. Contrary to its definition, ephemera can have power and permanence, giving agency to marginal and marginalized groups and providing a record of actions outside institutional structures. A poster for an exhibition can be as important—or, in terms of its historical presence, more important—as the exhibition itself.

In the United States, recent years have witnessed an upsurge in right-wing organizing and violence, culminating in the 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol that sought to overturn the legitimate results of a democratic election. This is not a uniquely American problem. Across much of the globe, political parties organized around hyper-nationalism have gained steam, in some cases mobilized through charismatic leaders wrapping their hateful politics in faux-populist rhetoric.

This class is fundamentally an advanced rehearsal techniques class for actors and directors with a focus on physical sensory work. The questions investigated include: What is substitution and how can it help bring the relationships of a play to life? How do you create the physical, sensory world of the play? Where are you coming from when you enter a stage from the wings? How do you personalize and endow the set and props your character thinks of as real?

This course offers a continuing introduction to the history and development of world theater and drama. We will experience the vibrant pageant of theater history through an exploration of its conventions and aesthetics, as well as its social and cultural functions. Starting in the nineteenth century, we will read representative plays ranging from the advent of stage Realism and Naturalism with Ibsen and Strindberg, through modern and contemporary drama (from the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa).

The dramaturg serves as a powerful medium in the theatre. They bridge the past and the present, the creative team and the audience, while providing critical generosity and historical and literary insight. Focusing upon the practical application of dramaturgy, this course will offer students a credited platform for dramaturgical work oriented toward production.

Discrete mathematics studies problems that can be broken up into distinct pieces. Some examples of these sorts of systems are letters or numbers in a password, pixels on a computer screen, the connections between friends on Facebook, and driving directions (along established roads) between two cities. In this course we will develop the tools needed to solve relevant, real-world problems. Topics will include: combinatorics (clever ways of counting things), number theory and graph theory. Possible applications include probability, social networks, optimization, and cryptography.

An actor honors and bears witness to humanity by embodying and giving voice to the human element in the landscape of theatrical collaboration. Investigating the impulses and intuitions that make us unique as individuals can also identify what constitutes our shared humanity. Through exploration of the fundamentals of performance, students address the actor’s body, voice, and imagination as instruments for creating drama, conflict, action, and story.

This is a multi-modal course that examines how the body serves as a repository for knowledge. It is open to any student who wishes to explore the complex ways in which histories form around discourses of the body, culture, aesthetic philosophy, and power. Specifically, we will examine the theoretical proposals embedded in the history of modern and postmodern dance, and place this work within a larger social, cultural and political context. We will activate our understanding of these histories through embodied movement practices.

The seventeenth-century Flemish painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens is at the heart of a course that proposes the intrinsic baroqueness of diverse strains of high modernism. Our transdisciplinary project crosses entrenched nationalistic and chronological borders between modern and early modern art and artists including Bacon, Guston, Manet, Newman, Picasso, Bearden, and Titian in addition to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), himself a more conceptually various and possibly more prolific artist even than Rubens (1577-1640) to whom some 3,000 paintings and drawings have been attributed.

In this course, we will explore various projects that aim to connect people with their surroundings and communities.
We will also explore the strategies that various artists have implemented to increase their audiences and interest in the arts.
We will analyze and design projects that seek sustainability, diversification, and access to the experience of art and culture.

By evaluating environments we could design artistic projects that promote art, artistic education, and the promotion of cultural products as actions to build community, identity, and a creative economy.

In this course we focus our attention on a few of the most exciting composers of the late twentieth-century, and discuss how their music has influenced the music of the current period.

How do we read photographs? What are the stories contained within their borders? How does two, three, or a sequence of images convey a narrative? In this intermediate course, students are guided through a series of assignments that explore the photograph as a narrative pictorial space using analog and digital processes. Structurally the assignments may take a traditional documentary format or a creative thematic narrative format. Image editing and sequencing to strengthen narrative structure will be a key goal of the course.

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.

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.

This course explores how ideas about the economy – from money, to labor, to distribution – have changed over time. We will focus on different schools of thought in economics, including mercantilism, physiocracy, classical political economy, the Austrian school, Post-Keynesianism, and neoclassical economics, placing these ideas in their global context. A central focus will be on how different thinkers conceptualize capitalism: both its benefits and pitfalls.

Drawing from news articles, interviews, archival materials, and more, writers throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries have sought to document the world through poetry.

This course is an introduction to the theory of knowledge in the analytical tradition. We will engage with topics such as skepticism about the external world, the nature of belief, truth, and justification, as well as foundationalism and coherentism,, internalism versus externalism, along with other topics.

John Rawls (1921-2003) was arguably the most important and influential political philosopher of the twentieth century. His first major work, A Theory of Justice (1971) transformed the field of political philosophy and his ideas and arguments remain at the center of the philosophical debate on the question of justice. This course consists of a careful study of the main arguments in his early and late work as well as a consideration of some of the critical literature.

How are language and thought connected, and does speaking multiple languages affect these connections?  Most people have had the experience of struggling to come up with a particular word or phrase, sometimes recalling it after a substantial delay.  This course will unpack the mental processes involved in that experience and explore the ways that cognitive psychology -- the study of thought -- has been broadened by investigations of monolingual and multilingual language use.

Human mobility has been an inherent human condition throughout history. From earliest human history, women and men have migrated in search of a better life, to populate other places on the planet, or to escape and survive human-made or natural dangers. Today migration is a fact of life for an increasing number of people around the world: there are more than 281 million migrants that cross borders, about 71.2 million that are internally displaced and around 40 million seeking asylum. Almost half of them are women.

This course is designed for new (or new-ish) playwrights, although more experienced playwrights who want to dig into the fundamentals are also welcome. We will focus on eight essential elements of playwriting craft: character, language, subtext, power, place, theatricality, surprise, and an elusive element called the gap. We will experiment with a variety of ways to start a play, and we will gain a greater understanding of our own individual creative methods and routines.

This class will examine interesting thinkers about our future.  Artists, anthropologists, afro futurists, writers, scientists and philosophers have all thought about what we are facing in our futures. Books and essays such as “The Fourth Turning” by Neil Howe, “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber, “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama,  "Emergent Strategies" by Adrienne Maree Brown, “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit, “The Work After Our Rage” by Kenneth Bailey and Lori Lobenstine”, "DeltasUNite and the UNCCRD" and others.

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.

Conducted through research focusing on the development of Japanese subcultures in the Post World War II period, this course poses various critical inquiries about the effects of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on contemporary global consumer society, visual culture and the production of art.

The essay is an intellectual and an artistic endeavor, and work in the form means work in thinking—about life, values, our own ideas and the ideas of others. Good personal essays entertain, inform and move us through the rendering of, and reflection over, our own life experiences. Essays and stories by artists such as Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, Daniel Orozco, Annie Dillard, Alexander Chee, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin will provide students with a foundation for approaching and understanding their own stories.