Course  Description

The relationship between media and culture; how media affect culture (i.e., socialization and role modeling); and exploration of new forms of mass communication.

About Dr. Timmins

Dr. Lydia Timmins brings a wealth of professional TV experience to the college classroom. After graduating from Penn State, she began a 22-year career in TV news. She spent the bulk of her career at NBC10 in Philadelphia, PA, and also worked in Binghamton, NY; New Castle, DE; Kansas City, MO. She worked in all aspects of TV, in front of and behind the camera. While working, she completed her master’s degree and PhD at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her teaching interests focus on media production, and the impact that media has on society. She is a strong proponent of media and news literacy, and wishes that everyone would just pause for 5 seconds before sharing or commenting.

What Dr. Timmins Would Like Students to Know:

• Interacting with the material is how you learn. Thinking about how your worldview impacts and is impacted by the material—rather than rote memorization—is key.
• Teaching and learning takes many forms. Throughout your education, you will be exposed to many kinds of teaching and learning. Each has benefits and drawbacks, but will offer you the chance to find out something previously unknown.
• Learning can’t happen inside a closed box. Learning is the process of expanding on what you do know to encompass and that which you previously didn’t know. In this sense, it can be painful—painful to realize there’s another way to look at the world, and painful to realize your view was restricted. But working through that pain leads to growth.
• No one has all the answers. Not even the teacher.

Course Description

Study of causes and conditions determining women’s status in society, as evidenced in institutional structures and personal relations between men and women. Taught from multidisciplinary perspectives.

About Dr. Glass

Dr. Glass is an Affiliated Assistant Professor in the Women and Gender Studies department with specializations in gender and sexuality, urban history and culture, and place-based identity. She has a diverse background that not only includes teaching, but also working with regional non-profits, leading community efforts in economic development and social justice, and documenting cultural landscapes as a photographer. She has participated in committees on diversity and inclusion and is passionate about working with the LGBTQ+ community. She has served on the Board of Directors for the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania and is currently on the board of directors for the Ephrata Performing Arts Center (EPAC) and serves on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee for the Fulton Theater in Lancaster. She is currently working on a book-length project, entitled, Gentrification, Interrupted: Documenting Place-Based-Identity, Vanishing Landscapes, and the War on Gentrification in Urban America.

What Dr. Glass Would Like Students to Know:

• We will be respectful of diverse perspectives and experiences: Together, we will think critically, practice self-reflection, and work collaboratively to learn from others 
• We will be open to learning from new sources: From television to digital culture, advertising to music, students will have the opportunity to analyze, interpret, and examine different types of cultural texts and look at media and popular culture from a gendered perspective  
• We will analyze and discuss power dynamics: We will examine and understand power, privilege and oppression, especially structural and institutionalized forms of oppression in society and culture. For example, we will talk about gender and education, politics, religion, economics, the healthcare system and the media. 
• We will think globally: Students will critically examine gender in a global context, as well as consider the intersection of gender with other aspects of identity such as race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and ability. We will discuss the lived and gendered experiences of people and cultures throughout the world.

Course Description

Current and historical media processes and their impact on art, design and culture. Image making and manipulation, video, audio, interactivity, and connectivity. Viewing fine art and design projects, the historical aspects of design and digital media, basic media theory, and universal principles of software and digital media. Projects include writing, creating visual media, and making presentations. Unfamiliar media experienced firsthand through exhibitions, screenings, lectures, online exploration and consumer media devices.

About Dr. Cox

Dr. Cox is president of the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER Foundation) and an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Delaware. He serves as a Board Member of the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania, is a 2013 National Geographic Explorer and Full Fellow of the Explorers Club. Cox has directed over twenty photographic study abroad programs across the globe including destinations to Antarctica, South East Asia, Tanzania, Australia, Tasmania, Argentina and Peru. He was a pioneer in the field of digital photography, served as the adventure photographer/writer for Digital Camera Magazine and authored two Amphoto digital photography books. Cox is a co-recipient of a National Geographic Society Grant to support a collaborative cultural mapping initiative with the Ese’Eja Indigenous community living in the Amazonia basin of Peru. He co-authored a book titled, Ancestral Lands of the Ese’Eja: The True People and co-created a traveling exhibition to accompany this project titled, The Ese’Eja People of the Amazon: Connected by a Thread that is currently on tour across the US. Cox also co-authored Hadzabe, By the Light of a Million Fires with an accompanying traveling exhibition titled Hadzabe: Roots of Equality. Cox is currently working with the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware on a collaborative cultural mapping and land restoration project supported by the Delaware Humanities, University of Delaware and the National Geographic Society.

What Dr. Cox Would Like Students to Know About This Course:

• We will engage in an introduction to Media, Design, Culture with a variety of passionate Artists and Designers working in a diverse range disciplines from community-based art, to painting, to cartooning through a series of asynchronous activities
• Be willing to consider diverse perspectives and new attitudes on how we approach themes Media, Design, Culture    
• You have the ability to express yourself by making work that investigates your own personal awareness of the world through hands-on studio-based assignments which reinforce course content.      
• A successful student is self-motivated and willing to challenge the way they conduct research using online and other source materials to cast a wide net in order to define a clearer personal vision with regards to specific projects.

Course Description:

Survey of astronomy emphasizing early and modern concepts. Stars, planets, galaxies, cosmic evolution and intelligent life are studied in the context of physical principles which describe the dynamics of the universe. Scientific process is used to interpret observations that shape our perceptions of the cosmos.

About Dr. Dodson-Robinson

Dr. Dodson-Robinson received her Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from University of California at Santa Cruz in 2008, then took a Spitzer Postdoctoral Fellowship at NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. She is now an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of Delaware. In 2013, she won the American Astronomical Society’s Annie Jump Cannon award for her contributions to the study of planet formation. As a member of the 100 Earths planet-search team, which is observing the back-and-forth wobbles of nearby sunlike stars, Dr. Dodson-Robinson is developing algorithms for distinguishing true planet discoveries from parasitic signals due to star rotation and convection.

What Dr. Dodson-Robinson Would Like Students to Know:

• Be excited to learn about the mysteries of the Universe. This course will focus on two main questions: how we know that there are other planets out there in the Universe, and what gravitational waves tell us about the most bizarre objects out there—black holes.
• Organization is critical to succeeding in a college course. You will be in charge of your study schedule, and are responsible for keeping up with items in the syllabus and Canvas.
• Everyone is capable of “doing math” and I am here to help you learn. Here’s an example—you want to go to Philadelphia, which is 30 miles away. You know the speed limit on I-95 is 60 mph. How long will it take to get there? You may have intuitively known—without realizing you were doing math—that it will take you about 30 minutes (30 miles / 60 mph = 0.5 h). This problem-solving technique is exactly the same if instead your car was a spaceship heading out for Pluto, and the speed limit was the speed of light.

Course Description:

This course focuses on scientific information while examining how and why our food system works as it does, in the context of feeding the world and the global food system. We will tackle contemporary issues facing today’s world where we attempt to feed the world in an economical fashion and maintain sustainability while doing so.

About Dr. Kniel

Dr. Kniel is incredibly passionate about integrating food safety across the curriculum and ensuring that classroom topics resonate with our daily lives. Dr. Kniel is an internationally recognized for her research on foodborne diseases, including those caused by viruses, protozoa, and bacteria. Dr. Kniel served as President of the International Association for Food Protection from 2019-2020. While she loves working with students in the laboratory and in produce production environments, Dr. Kniel is passionate about communicating science and education and has been teaching for over 15 years. Dr. Kniel travels around the US and the world teaching and talking about food safety and food production.

You can learn more about Dr. Kniel’s research with One Health and leaping listeria.

What Dr. Kniel Would Like Students to Know:

• Be excited to become more aware of our food systems. In a way we all become somewhat complacent about our food supply, after all most often we shop and buy food. But it is really an incredibly highly complex system based on scientific principles that touches us all.
• Be open to critical thinking. So much of what happens within out food supply is not evident from a package of food or a bag of fresh fruit. We will discuss the roles of important issues like biotechnology and fair trade and look at these and other topics from multiple angles.
• Each individual experiences food differently. An incredible aspect of food is the emotional connection that we each have. We will discuss the critical cultural aspects of food and consider ways in which we may all eat the same. For example, one ingredient may be used or consumed one way in the United States and in a completely different way on another continent.

Course Description:

Coming Soon

About Dr. Hill

Professor Jason Hill specializes in the histories of modern and contemporary art, photography, and media, focusing on American art’s longstanding and always dynamic relationship with the cultures of mass media and journalism. He is presently writing a book that considers the technological and cultural alignments of lens-based news media and police in the United States since the widespread introduction of police radio systems in the 1930s. Jason’s recent book, Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (2018), considers this 1940s New York City newspaper’s activation of creative visual media (especially cartooning, illustration, and photography) in the service of combatting both fascism and the related dangers inherent in journalism’s otherwise normative claims to objectivity. He is also co-editor (with Vanessa R. Schwartz) of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury, 2015), which assembles an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars to chart the shifting terrain of pictorial journalism from the early nineteenth century to the present. Jason received his Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Southern California in 2011, where he also completed the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. 

What Dr. Hill Would Like Students to Know:

• When we look we make and remake the world. Looking and seeing are not passive practices. What we bring to how we look has the power to change the world.  
• Visual culture is about art and history but it is also about vision and power and justice, right now, right here, today. We are all prolific makers and consumers of images, and so it is essential that we try and understand the forceful and dynamic ways that images work to make sense of the world. A very big part of what we see boils down to how we look and the ideas that we carry into our own artful practice of looking and seeing (our world, each other, and ourselves).  
• We learn by looking–actively, productively, and collectively. The best way to sharpen skills in navigating our visual environment will be to look at the contemporary image worlds around us. In this class we will study the history and theory of visual culture, but we will also actively draw upon our own day-to-day image environment (social media, art, news, entertainment, etc.) as a resource, and we will work together to share our ideas with each other as we work towards fuller understanding of the power of visual culture in our lives.  

Course Description

Current and historical media processes and their impact on art, design and culture. Image making and manipulation, video, audio, interactivity, and connectivity. Viewing fine art and design projects, the historical aspects of design and digital media, basic media theory, and universal principles of software and digital media. Projects include writing, creating visual media, and making presentations. Unfamiliar media experienced firsthand through exhibitions, screenings, lectures, online exploration and consumer media devices.

About Aaron Terry

Aaron Terry works in traditional and nontraditional printmaking, sculpture and sound pieces with a focus on the importance of art as a means of fostering dialogue around socio-political issues with a specific interest in Post-Cold War ideologies and changing perspectives (reflected in art) that relate to the years since the “end” of the Cold War. He is currently working on a grant from the Engagement Scholarship Consortium titled “Inform, Inspire, Empower!” The purpose of grant is to enhance public pandemic education while facilitating the development of a respectful and healthy mindset in the community through displayed posters around the state in conjunction with DART and SEPTA transportation centers. He is also working on a General University Research Grant titled “Considering Contemporary Agitprop Pop in Post Cold War Satellite States.” The research is focused on how truth is determined today in the media and how different cultures—influenced, impacted and involved in the Cold War—continue to process and respond to a new, post-Cold War global politic taking shape today. 

 Aaron has lived and worked in Latin America organizing and running language immersion programs and building creative exchange with arts organizations with the intention of fostering creative, cultural exchange between communities abroad and in the USA. He has directed programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. Terry holds a BA in Latin American Studies from Connecticut College and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Delaware, where he runs the Printmaking Department.

What Terry Would Like Students to Know About This Course:

• We will engage in an introduction to Media, Design, Culture with a variety of passionate Artists and Designers working in a diverse range disciplines from community-based art, to painting, to cartooning through a series of asynchronous activities
• Be willing to consider diverse perspectives and new attitudes on how we approach themes Media, Design, Culture
• You have the ability to express yourself by making work that investigates your own personal awareness of the world through hands-on studio-based assignments which reinforce course content.
• A successful student is self-motivated and willing to challenge the way they conduct research using online and other source materials to cast a wide net in order to define a clearer personal vision with regards to specific projects.