Future Programs
Programs by Semester
Director: Robert Knight, Professor of Art
Phone: 315-859-4266
Email: rbknight@hamilton.edu
Open to all majors.
Concentration credit will be accepted for Studio Art (College 395 and 398); Art History (College 395 and 398); Cinema and Media Studies (College 395) and Digital Arts minor (College 395).
No prerequisite, but preference is given for students who have taken a Studio Art or Art History course.
New York City has long been at the epicenter in the development of photography as a fine art. The first galleries devoted to the medium were founded there in the late 1890s by the legendary modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In the 1940s, The Museum of Modern Art launched the first photography department at a prominent museum, with New York-based photographer Edward Steichen as its founding curator. Alongside such institutional support, New York nurtured a burgeoning art scene with photographers’ studios and darkrooms occupying former industrial and warehouse spaces across the city. This program will focus on the intersection of those two histories, focusing specifically on the development of “street” photography as a genre and the institutions that helped catapult photography onto the center of the art world stage.
College 395: Documentary Photography in the Digital Age
This is a photography production course in which we will use smartphone and DSLR cameras to explore the fabric of the city as a site for photographic investigation, closely examining its rich cultural, racial, and socioeconomic diversity. Each week, we will use the history of New York-based “street” photography as a road map for site-specific photographic field trips. Since the early 1900s, the streets of New York have served as an inspiration to generations of photographers such as Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Roy DeCarava, Margaret Bourke-White, and Helen Levitt, among many others. Class will be a combination of classroom-based technical training, critique, and in situ production. Potential photographic sites include Times Square, Central Park Zoo, Chinatown, South Street Seaport, Washington Square Park, Prospect Park, Coney Island, and Governor’s Island.
College 398: Arts Leadership in NYC
This seminar will provide students with a macro perspective on the role of the arts in various industries. While we will often focus specifically on photography, we will also consider other arts, such as theater, music, design, and dance. New York has long-served as the institutional capital of the art world. This seminar will take advantage of New York’s status through visits and meetings with arts leaders at various NYC-based institutions, including The Whitney Museum, the International Center for Photography, The Studio Museum Harlem, Christie’s, Phillips, Pace/MacGill Gallery, The New York Philharmonic, The Wooster Group, The New York Public Library, The Armory Show, among others. Field trips will be supplemented with classroom lectures, readings, and discussions.
College 397: Internship
Work experience with an artist, business, organization, agency, or advocacy group appropriate to the theme of the course during four days a week. Weekly electronic journal entries chronicling and reflecting upon the experience required.
College 396: Independent Study
Supervised tutorial resulting in a substantial photographic project and/or written paper that integrates experience and learning from the internship with an academic perspective and knowledge gained in the seminars or other tutorial readings.
Director: Pat Reynolds, the Stephen Harper Kirner Chair in Biology
Phone: 315-859-4723
Email: preynold@hamilton.edu
Open to all majors. No prerequisites. Four Hamilton course credits.
Concentration elective credit for Biology and Environmental Studies has been pre-approved for College 398 NYC: Urban Ecology and College 395 NYC: Manhattan Ecopractice. Alternatively, either College 397 NYC: Internship or College 396 NYC: Independent Study can be considered for concentration credit on a case-by-case basis. A maximum of two concentration credits can be transferred from off-campus study.
New York City is widely recognized as a global commercial and cultural capital—a dynamic crossroads that fuels the globalization shaping human civilization in the twenty-first century. It represents the quintessential urban landscape, where countless dimensions of human culture converge, interact, and blend into a rich, ever-evolving mosaic.
At the same time, the city is a hub of biological diversity—a meeting point of native and non-native species, of natural and constructed habitats that coexist in an ecosystem unlike rural environments. Far removed from conventional notions of “nature,” this urban biome challenges our understanding of ecological systems and how they function within human-altered spaces.
This program offers an in-depth exploration of New York City through an ecological lens. Students will gain a foundational understanding of the urban anthropogenic biome, investigate topics in ecology and environmental studies on a scale not available in Clinton, develop insight into how New York City manages and conserves urban biodiversity and ecosystems, and discover the diverse non-human life that calls “The Big Green Apple” home. Above all, students will gain potential career-related experience in biology, environmental studies, and other fields of their choice through the internship.
College 398 – NYC: Urban Ecology
Urban ecology is a relatively new subfield of ecological science that offers crucial insights into some of the least understood ecosystems on Earth—those created by humans. In these environments, habitats are changed utterly from their original incarnations and contemporary flora and fauna are dependent on the human activity that shapes their environment. Given that more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, understanding these ecosystems is essential to a comprehensive view of the biosphere. This course will provide an overview of urban ecology, from the perspective of non-human city life, to human dependence on urban ecosystems, to how humans shape the urban environment. The course is structured around an environmental timeline—beginning with Manhattan before European contact, tracing
the development of the modern urban landscape, and exploring visions for sustainable cities of the future.
College 397 – NYC: Internship
Work experience with a firm, organization, or advocacy group for about four days a week, as appropriate to the student’s concentration or career interests. Internship placements must be relatable to the program theme through the independent project (College 396). Students will keep a digital journal as a reflective written account of the experience.
College 396 – NYC: Independent Study
A project that relates, with an academic perspective, the internship (College 397) to the program theme. Integrates direct work experience or research on a specific aspect of the internship organization's activities with insights gained from seminar readings, guest speakers, and class discussions (College 398 & College 395).
College 395 – NYC: Manhattan Ecopractice
The course will be based on presentations by those working in urban ecology, broadly construed, in New York City. This group of leading urban ecologists are passionate about their work and dedicated to improving the City from an environmental perspective. We will hear from those involved in developing policy and conducting field work on a wide range of NYC environmental issues, from managing city wildlife, to developing infrastructure resilience to climate challenges, to planning a sustainable future city. This course explores how concepts about urban development of natural environments, explored in College
Director: Stephanie Bahr, Associate Professor of Literature
Phone: 315-859-4369
Email: sbahr@hamilton.edu
Director: Wei Zhan, Assistant Professor of Economics
Phone: 315-859-4074
Email: wzhan@hamilton.edu
Director: Russell Marcus, the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of Philosophy
Phone: 315-859-4056
Email: rmarcus1@hamilton.edu
Director: Nigel Westmaas, Professor of Africana Studies
Phone: 315-859-4299
Email: nwestmaa@hamilton.edu
Director: Robert Knight, Professor of Art
Phone: 315-859-4266
Email: rbnight@hamilton.edu
Contact
Contact Name
Maddie Carrera
Director of Experiential Learning
