Undergraduate Education Overview

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester

Current and Past Semester Courses–Spring 2005 Courses

Instructors

Undergraduate Certificate

Documentary Studies Courses and Cross-Listed Courses

Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies

Student Opportunities at CDS




Past Semester Courses

Fall 2004


DOCST 101 Traditions in Documentary Studies
Instructor: Rankin
TTH 10:05-11:20 (Lyndhurst 007)
Traditions of documentary work seen through an interdisciplinary perspective, with an emphasis on twentieth century practice. Introduces students to a range of documentary idioms and voices, including the work of photographers, filmmakers, oral historians, folklorists, musicologists, radio documentarians, and writers. Stresses aesthetic, scholarly, and ethical considerations involved in representing other people and cultures.


DOCST 104S Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography
Instructor: Moses
W 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 201)
Seminar focuses on the intersection of documentary photography and the medical community. Students will complete semester-long documentary photo project, as well as weekly journals and a five- to ten-page final essay. Part of each class devoted to reviewing students’ works-in-progress. Permission required.


DOCST 105S The Documentary Experience: A Video Approach
Instructor: Hawkins
W 1:15-3:45, Lab W 6:15-8:45 (Lyndhurst 001)
A documentary approach to the study of local communities through video production projects assigned by the course instructor. Working closely with these groups, students explore issues or topics of concern to the community. Students complete an edited video as their final project. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 110S Introduction to Oral History
Instructor: Rubio
TTH 1:15-2:30 (Lyndhurst 104)
Introductory oral history fieldwork seminar. Examines oral history theory and methodology, including debates within the discipline. Students will do background historical reading and look at (and listen to) oral history interviews. Object is to develop skills and appreciation for the components and problems of oral history interviewing as well as different kinds of oral history writing. By semester’s end, each student will complete a thematic oral history research project whose product is an oral history audiotape suitable for archiving.


DOCST 114S Large Format Photography
Instructor: Satterwhite
TH 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 201)
Advanced black-and-white photography course exploring unique creative latitude of large-negative format. Students are supplied with 4x5 monorail view cameras; given technical instruction in creative control of exposure, perspective, and plane of focus; and shown advanced printing and toning techniques and alternative processes such as platinum/palladium. Through assigned readings and a survey of artists who have worked in large format, the class examines the role of intuition and motivation in creating art. The focus is on achieving technical proficiency in the first weeks with short assignments, which include portraiture, landscape, and a documentary study. For the remainder of the course, each student develops an independent project, exploring visual language and drawing connections to the sciences, environmental philosophy, and literature. Crosslisted as ARTSVIS 114S. Prerequisite: Visual Arts 115 or its equivalent. Consent of instructor required.



An exhibition of toned black-and-white silver gelatin contact prints made from 4-x-5-inch negatives by students using large-format view cameras. Duke University students in a Fall 2004 course at the Center for Documentary Studies were encouraged to find their own visual language to investigate and describe something deeply held.



DOCST 115 Introduction to Photography
Instructor: Hunter
T 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 201)
Foundation class in black-and-white photographic process as the basis for using photography as a visual language. Students learn to make a printable exposure using black-and-white film, make a "proper proof," and make an 8 x 10 enlargement. Assignments include portraits, alternative techniques, landscape, and a final portfolio that embodies a single visual idea. Consent of instructor required.


DOCT 146S Sociology Through Photography
Instructor: Hyde
M 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 104)
Documentary photography used as a tool to see the world through a sociological lens. Classes devoted to looking at and discussing visual culture. Students will learn to make photographs that reveal basic sociological principles, while learning to read sociological stories in each other’s photographs. Basic theories include social construction of reality, generic components of social organization, power relations and social inequalities, and social identities.


DOCST 162S Farmworkers in North Carolina
Instructor: Thompson
TH 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 201)
Focus upon those who bring food to our tables, particularly those who labor in the fields of North Carolina and across the Southeast. Farm work from the plantation system and slavery to sharecropping, and to the migrant and seasonal farm worker population today. Documentary work and its contributions to farmworker advocacy.


DOCST 176S American Communities: Intro to Documentary Photography
Instructor: Rob Amberg
M 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 001)
Theory and practice of documentary photography. Students complete a documentary photographic study of a community outside the university. Study of the documentary tradition and classic documentary books while emphasizing the photographs produced by the students.


DOCST 177S Advanced Documentary Photography
Instructor: Paul Weinberg
T 6:15-8:45 (Lyndhurst 001)
An advanced course for students who have taken the prerequisite course or have had substantial experience in documentary fieldwork. Students complete an individual photographic project and study important works within the documentary tradition. Prerequisite: ARTSVIS 118S, PUBPOL 176S, DOCST 176S, or consent of instructor.


DOCST 190S.02 Special Topics: Memories of Home
Instructor: Love
W 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 104)
Students will read oral history classics and memoirs that explore Southern families of diverse backgrounds. Also will trace some of the landscapes, geographic sites, myths and legends different families imbue with meaning. Students will design their own oral history research projects focusing on specific family sagas and the themes they illuminate. In the process they’ll have the chance to explore in depth how family experiences, memories, and myths shape people's perceptions of reality and also how individuals—embedded in families and profoundly shaped by them—make significant life choices that affect the larger history of their time.


DOCST 190S.03 Special Topics: Reframing Asian America
Instructors: Truong and Chia
TH 3:05-5:35 (Lyndhurst 104)
This course takes documentary photography as a lens to examine how Asians have been represented—or framed—in American visual culture (by popular media as well as by both European American and Asian American artists). Students will learn how to make photographs that reflect on the ways in which images construct identity, while also learning how to deconstruct images. We will examine the role of visual culture in the construction of nationalism and racial ideology, and vice versa. We will pay particular attention to images of Asian Americans in U.S. visual culture, exploring such key themes as social documentary, war photography and identity, consumer culture, and family.


DOCST 190S.05 Special Topics: Writing Fiction, Decoding American History
(Cross-listed ENGLISH 169CS)
Instructor: Allan Gurganus is the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill for Fall 2004–Spring 2005.
W 3:00-5:30 (Lyndhurst 113; Greenlaw-Second Floor, UNC-Chapel Hill) This course will meet at Duke and at UNC, alternating locations each week. The first class will meet at Duke (Lyndhurst 113, CDS).

This class involves telling our own valued personal tales even as we trace—within them—those national and historical traits we all embody. A Fiction Writing Class is meant to be protective of its writers’ Personal Lives. Other courses are intent on charting the national, historic sources that continually shape our expectations, our very present-tense methodology. Whereas this class seeks to fuse these two lines of inquiry. We will study those documents that hint at essential elements of the American Self: from Locke to Franklin to Twain to Faulkner to Toni Morrison to Soap Opera News. The class seeks to fuse the creation of “personal” fiction with an exploration of our collective inheritance via “public” documents, emblematic autobiographies, group explanations. Students will write their own tales. Some of these will be ventriloquized in the manner of great American novelists, criminals, presidents. The documentary impulse will be conjoined and complicated by that of personal subject matter.

For a full course description, see Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill


RELIGION 164S Anthropology of Hinduism
(Cross-listed CULANTH 164S, Documentary Studies)
Instructor: Prasad
W 4:40-7:10 (Gray 220)
European colonial, North American, and Indian accounts of Hindu practices and worldviews. The limits and possibilities of "anthropological" approaches to understanding Hinduism. The intersections between Hindu "traditions," ethnography, and diasporic movements. Topics include everyday practice, pilgrimage and performance traditions, devotional literatures, and contemporary politics of Hinduism.


HOUSECS 79.08 Putting Documentary Work to Work
Instructors (and contact for permission numbers in second week of Drop/Add): Linda Arnade lja4@duke.edu, Margaux Joffe. Faculty sponsor: Thompson.
F 6:00 p.m.–8 p.m. (Craven House E Commons)
The purpose of this house course is to initiate dialogue and learn about the process of documentary dissemination, particularly documentary work in a global context. We want to provide a space for motivated undergraduates to learn about different types of documentary work, and how it can be used to make a statement about global policy and the contemporary political landscape. Throughout the semester, we will draw from students and faculty who have significant experience with putting documentary work to work.


See listing of required and elective certificate courses


Spring 2004

Fall 2003

Spring 2003






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Untitled, from the series Latino Pastimes—La Vida y el Fútbol. Photograph by William L. Plaxico, from the course "Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape," taught by Professor Tom Rankin.