Special Topics in Communication

Recent topics have included Public Relations, International Media, Family Communication, Conflict Resolution, American Theatre and the Vietnam War, Human Communication Theory, American Film and Culture and Writing for Stage, Screen and TV. This course number may be repeated for credit with different topics.

Current Semester Information

401A: Tps:Shakespeare Festival

Tps:Shakespeare Festival

Based on the educational wing of Shakespeare & Company's (Lenox, MA) nationally renowned and recommended high school Shakespeare program, this course prepares DePauw students to do Shakespeare with local high school and middle school students. Part classroom activity and part in-school practicum, the course stresses the visceral, emotional, and intellectual power of experiencing Shakespeare's language physically and vocally. Culminates in a festival of Shakespeare's plays performed by local students at DePauw at the end of the semester. Repeatable for credit.

401B: Tps:Financial Basics

Tps:Financial Basics for Communication

Overview of how business and markets operate and the role of government in a capitalist system. Strong emphasis placed on critical-thinking skills: Reading and interpreting financial statements (balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows), contrasting non-profit and for-profit enterprises, learning financial analysis basics, developing budgets and making personal financial decisions. Students will follow a public company for the semester and explore various aspects of its operations. Prerequisite: Junior standing, Econ 100 or permission of instructor. Recommended: Eng 232, Econ 140, student media experience.

401C: Tps:Visual Rhetoric

Tps:Visual Rhetoric

Images permeate the way we receive and understand the world; at no time in human history have constructed images been as prevalent as they are today. In this class students will engage visual culture as rhetorical artifact studying the way images influence the politics, culture, and attitudes of public life in the United States. Students may engage traumatic, gendered, political, cultural, sexualized or other elements of visual culture. Readings will be drawn from contemporary scholarship and students will be expected to produce scholarly/artistic work to complete the course.

401D: Tps:GreenwichVillage1913

Tps:Greenwich Village 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman

This course takes students to the beginning of the modern era when urbanization, industrialization, and massive waves of immigration were transforming the U.S. way of life. As the game begins, suffragists are taking to the streets demanding a constitutional amendment for the vote. What, they ask, is women's place in society? Are they to remain in the home or take an active role in the government of their communities and their nation? Labor has turned to the strike to demand living wages and better conditions; some are even proposing an industrial democracy where workers take charge of industries. Can corporate capitalism allow an economically just society or must it be overturned? African-Americans, suffering from the worst working conditions, disenfranchisement, and social segregation, debate how to support their community through education and protest, thereby challenging their continuing marginalization in both the South and the North. Members of all these groups converge in Greenwich Village to debate their views with the artists and bohemians who are in the process of remaking themselves into the new men and new women of the twentieth century. Their spirited conversations not only show a deep understanding of nineteenth-century thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Karl Marx; they are also informed by such contemporaries as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, John Dewey, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud. The game asks what social changes are most important as well as how one can or should realize these goals.