News
Wintersession 2008
Students embarked on two weeks of intensive learning in January.
01.17.2008
From January 2nd to January 13th, 56 ambitious Manhattanville undergraduate and 70 graduate students braved the cold for Wintersession 2008. For two academically intense weeks, students took classes in Art, English, Music Management and many other subjects.
English Professor Jeff Bens, Director of the Creative Writing Program at Manhattanville, certainly challenged his students who took Screenwriting 2 during Wintersession 2008. Each completed a draft of a full-length feature screenplay begun in Screenwriting 1 the semester before.
“I think the class worked out great,” says Professor Bens. “The concentrated nature of the class allowed focused work and rigorous feedback. Students brought in a lot of work and generated even more.”
Students in Professor Peter Gardella’s class, The World’s Religions in NYC, spent two weekends experiencing the rich religious life of New York City. The demanding immersion course included visiting temples, synagogues, cathedrals and museums, among many other sites. .jpg "gardella insert")
“Wintersession is an ideal time to teach this course,” says Professor Gardella, “because weekends are essential if you’re going to look at religious practice.”
Those who took the course explain that experiencing different ceremonies is more powerful than reading about different religions, though the course is also heavy on texts. Student Kabir Mahmood sums it up. “The last two weekends have been a completely gratifying and eye-opening experience,” he says.
Eight movie-loving students got condensed doses of genre theory, film history, and horror film exposure in the eight classes of Professor David Lugowski’s Topics in Film Genre: Horror. Professor Lugowski, Director of Communications Studies and Associate Professor of English, says, “It’s what you would call ‘immersion’ learning as you have several hours of reading per night, class Monday through Friday, and then you do the papers on the weekends.” The course covered everything from German Expressionism to “art cinema” horror to teen slashers, with much in between.
Other classes offered during Wintersession 2008 included Photography, The Third Reich, Japanese Popular Culture, Opera as Theater, The American Museum Today and Pop Songs and the Music Business.
(Photo: Six students from Professor Peter Gardella's class, The World's Religions in New York City, were introduced to Buddhist meditation at the Chan Meditation Center in Queens on January 12, 2008. Their instructor was the Venerable Guo Chian, a Buddhist nun who serves as Vice-President and Senior Teacher at the Center. From left to right are Elizabeth Martinez, Alessandra Padula, Kimberly Zinaman, the Ven. Guo Chian, Professor Gardella, Melissa Bonee, Kabir Mahmood, and Elizabeth Duffy.)