FMS's Spring 2025 Media Studies Courses: Video Games, Manga, TV, Algorithms, and More!

The FMS program offers a range of media studies courses. Students will examine historical, cultural, theoretical, technological, industrial, and cross-media dimensions of radio, television, video games, social media, virtual reality, and other platforms. Through these classes, students will develop an understanding of how media continue to influence one another aesthetically, industrially, and culturally.

FMS faculty bring to these courses research expertise in areas such as game studies, social media, computing, and media convergence as well as experience in game design and screenwriting. Additionally, students have the opportunity to take FMS-approved media studies courses from other departments including Music, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  

For Spring 2025, FMS is excited to offer the following media studies courses: 

• Film 3164: Adaptations: Literature / Film / TV 

• Film 327: Anime and Manga 

• Film 338: Global Game Industries 

• Film 350: History of Electronic Media: From Radio to Television to Digital 

• Film 353: Writing Episodic Television 

• Film 4040: Cultural Analysis of Social Media Algorithms 

• Film 4260: Media Archives: Political and Technological Interventions

• Film 4300: Topics in Chinese Media Culture: China and the Screen: From the Early 20th Century to the Present 

• Film 478: Topics in Transmedia Franchises 

• Film 5050: The Art of Vision: Stan Brakhage in His Time

• Film 507: The 007 Saga: James Bond and The Modern Media Franchise

 

Previous media studies offerings have included: 

• Film 1122: First-Year Seminar: Multiverses and Mind Games in Film and TV 

• Film 114: First-Year Seminar: Superhero Media 

• Film 115: First-Year Seminar: Ways of (Machine) Seeing 

• Film 116: First-Year Seminar: Cult TV: Critical Approaches to Fans and Fictions 

• Film 119: First-Year Seminar: Anime as Popular Culture 

• Film 120: First-Year Seminar: Horror Across Media  

• Film 121: First-Year Seminar: Youth Culture and Visual Media 

• Film 3211: Contemporary Chinese Popular Culture 

• Film 337: Retro Game Design 

• Film 342: Introduction to Video Game Studies  

• Film 344: Children's Television 

• Film 346: From Golden Age to Wasteland: U.S. Television in the 1950s and 1960s 

• Film 349: Media Cultures 

• Film 356: Television Culture and Cult TV: Critical Approaches to Fandom 

• Film 357: Quality Television and the "Primetime Novel" 

• Film 3644: "Look Here, Karen": The Politics of Black Digital Resistance to White Femininity 

• Film 3900: Screening East Asia: From Scroll Painting to Haptic Interface 

• Film 419: Theories of Mass Media 

• Film 423: Histories of Media Convergence 

• Film 424: Broadcasting Equality: Radio, Television, and Social Change in Postwar America 

• Film 425: Seminar in Video Games: Video Games, Gender and Sexuality 

• Film 429: Mass Culture and Modern Media: Fantasylands: Cinema, Spectatorship, and the Spatial Imagination 

• Film 4300: Topics in Chinese Media Culture: Charting Identity in the Digital Age 

• Film 445: Horror in Japanese Media: Tales of the Strange, Scary, and Supernatural 

• Film 451: American Television Genres 

• Film 453: Experiential Design for Immersive Media 

• Film 457: From Vitaphone to YouTube: Popular Music and the Moving Image 

• Film 479: (In)Visible Media: Connection and Crisis in Contemporary Japan 

• Film 485: Visualizing Orientalism: Art, Cinema and the Imaginary East 1850-2000 

• Film 527: Radio Drama