Undergraduate Education Overview

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester

Current and Past Semester Courses – Spring 2006 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 2005

DOCST 101 Traditions in Documentary Studies
Instructor: Rankin
TTH 10:05 a.m.–11:20 a.m. (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 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (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 will be devoted to reviewing students’ work in progress. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 105S The Documentary Experience: A Video Approach
Instructor: Hawkins
W 1:15 p.m.–3:45 p.m., Lab W 6:15 p.m.–8:45 p.m. (Lyndhurst 104)
A documentary approach to the study of local communities through video production projects assigned by the course instructor. Working closely with local groups, students will explore issues or topics of concern to the community. Each student will complete a ten-minute edited video as a final project. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 110S Introduction to Oral History
Instructor: Taylor
TTH 1:15 p.m.–2:30 p.m. (Lyndhurst 104)
Introductory oral history fieldwork seminar that 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. The 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 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 201)
Advanced black-and-white photography course exploring unique creative latitude of large-negative format. Students are supplied with 4-by-5 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 will develop an independent project, exploring visual language and drawing connections to the sciences, environmental philosophy, and literature. Crosslisted: ARTSVIS 114S. Prerequisite: ARTSVIS 115 or its equivalent. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 115.01 Introduction to Photography
Instructor: Hunter
MW 10:05 a.m.–11:20 a.m. (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-by-10 enlargement. Assignments include portraits, alternative techniques, landscape, and a final portfolio that embodies a single visual idea. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 125S.01 Behind the Veil
Instructor: Jones
MW 1:15 p.m.–2:30 p.m. (Lyndhurst 001)
Oral history methodology and documentary techniques, centered on the Jim Crow South. Focus on the Behind the Veil project’s oral history collection, video, audio, and secondary reading materials. Course will cover demography, theory and practice of oral history documentary methodology, fundraising, preservation, processing, dissemination, promotion, releases, copyright, and other legal matters.


DOCST 135S.01 Introductory Audio Documentary
Instructor: Biewen
T 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 104)
Recording techniques and audio mixing on digital editing software for the production of audio (radio) documentaries. Various approaches to audio documentary work, from the journalistic to the personal; use of fieldwork to explore cultural differences. Stories told through audio, using National Public Radio–style form, focusing on a particular social concern such as war and peace, death and dying, civil rights.


DOCST 144S.01 Literacy Through Photography
Instructor: Ewald and Friesen
T 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 113)
Children’s self-expression and child development through writing, photography, and documentary work. Focus on the reading and critical interpretation of images. The history, philosophy, and methodology of Literacy Through Photography. Includes internship in elementary- or middle-school classrooms.


DOCT 146S Sociology Through Photography
Instructor: Hyde
M 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (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 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 104)
Focus on those who bring food to our tables, particularly those who labor in the fields of North Carolina and across the Southeast. Course will cover farm work from the plantation system and slavery to sharecropping, and to the migrant and seasonal farmworker population today; and documentary work and its contributions to farmworker advocacy.


DOCST 176S American Communities: Intro to Documentary Photography
Instructor: Harris
M 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 001)
Theory and practice of documentary photography. Students will complete a documentary photographic study of a community outside the university. Covers the documentary tradition and classic documentary books while emphasizing photographs produced by students in the course.


DOCST 190S.01 Poetry and the Muse of History
Instructor: Natasha Trethewey is the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill for Fall 2005–Spring 2006.
T 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 113)
William Faulkner has said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” Similarly, in a 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot declared that the “historical sense is indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” These writers are talking about slightly different things — both of which will underscore our concerns in this course: an awareness of history, of past events and their lingering effects on the present, and a knowledge of the literature of the past and its influence. Furthermore, as scholar James Longenbach puts it, “In addition to being many other things, poems are statements about our place in the world, and like every other act of communication, they are historical.” Thus, this workshop will focus on the writing of poems that seek to engage and document local histories — those histories both public and private — that allow us to place the explorations of our own experiences within a larger historical context. In so doing, we will explore the rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and small, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories. We will discuss the ways in which some poets have used history in their work, define some strategies for using information gathered from our research, and begin writing some new poems that engage those histories to which we have some connection.


DOCST 190S.03 Color Photography
Instructors: Harris
M 7:15 p.m.–9:45 p.m. (Arts Warehouse)
A field-based course about color photography as a documentary tool. Students will gain knowledge about the aesthetic and technical foundations of color photography by using recent digital technology. The class will also conduct an intensive examination of the work of historic and contemporary color documentary photographers. Utilizing the new Arts Warehouse multimedia classroom, students will learn advanced techniques in film scanning, Photoshop 8, and color pigment printing. Students will be required to complete a semester-long color photographic project and to produce a series of color pigment prints as a final project.


DOCST 190S.06 Documentary Fieldwork Practicum: Durham’s Black Wall Street
Instructor: Wise and Lau
M 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 201)
This fieldwork course offers direct involvement in a community development effort in Durham. Working with the Parrish Street Advocacy Group, students in this course will assist instructors and Center for Documentary Studies staff in completing documentary projects that highlight and explore the unique historical and cultural legacy of Durham’s “Black Wall Street” through photography, oral history, video, the Web, and other mediums. Readings will relate to the history of African American economic and cultural development, community documentary fieldwork, ethics of documentary work, along with the special challenges of community development work and heritage tourism.





See listing of required and elective certificate courses

Spring 2005

Fall 2004

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.