Undergraduate Education Overview

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester

Current and Past Semester 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 2007

DOCST 101 Traditions in Documentary Studies
Instructors: Kalow, Thompson
MW 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.01 Medicine and 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 a 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.01 Documentary Experience: A Video Approach
Instructor: Hawkins
W 1:15 p.m.–3:45 p.m.; 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.01 Introduction to Oral History
Instructor: Cline
W 1:15 p.m.–3:45 p.m. (Lyndhurst 001)
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 111S.01 Documentary Writing
Instructor: Cecelski
T 10:05 a.m.–12:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 113)
Techniques of independent field research and reporting in the documentary tradition. Emphasis on structure, development, and style of factual narrative--including exercises in redrafting and editing--culminating in a final piece of documentary writing based on students' fieldwork experience. Historical development of documentary writing in relation to the diverse cultures that produced it.


DOCST 112S Freedom Stories
Instructor: Tyson
W 1:15 p.m.–3:45 p.m. (Lyndhurst 113)
Documentary writing course focusing on race and “storytelling” in the South, using fiction, autobiography, and traditional history books. Students will produce narratives using documentary research, interviews, and personal memories. Focus on twentieth-century racial politics.


DOCST 113S Digital Documentary Photo: Capturing Transience
Instructor: Post-Rust
Th 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Smith Arts Warehouse - Multimedia Lab 228)
Digital photography and documentary approach. Investigates subjects in transition, with focus on changing and somewhat transient physical and social landscapes of North Carolina. Digital darkroom techniques include digital capture, film scanning, Photoshop, ink-jet printing as well as other methods of dissemination offered in digital age. Digital photographic impermanence as well as social transience discussed in unison.


DOCST 114S.01 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. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 115.01 Introduction to Photography
Instructor: Hunter
TTh 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 117.01 Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape
Instructor: Rankin
W 10:05 a.m.–12:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 201)
Emphasis on the tradition and practice of documentary photography as a way of seeing and interpreting cultural life. Includes the techniques of black-and-white photography—exposure, development, and printing—and diverse ways of representing the cultural landscape of the region through photographic imagery. Also covers the roles that objectivity, clarity, politics, memory, autobiography, and local culture play in the making and dissemination of photographs.


DOCST 135S.01 Introduction to 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.


DOCT 146S Sociology Through Photography
Instructor: Hyde
WF 11:40 a.m.–12:55 p.m. (Lyndhurst 113)
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. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 148S.01 Planning the Documentary Film: From Concept to Treatment
Instructor: James
T 3:05 p.m.–5:35 p.m. (Lyndhurst 201)
Historical documentary film preparation through narrative, character-driven stories. Students learn to tell a film story with a beginning, middle, and conclusion that resolves conflict that escalates throughout the film. While the documentary filmmaker cannot invent characters, plot points, or conflict, she or he must find them in the raw material of real life. Choices, which are grounded in sound journalistic principles, must be made concerning style, interpretation, point of view, and format. Learn how to organize the conceptual process for historical documentary films, framing a logical sequence of events; how to determine the focus of a story; how to select characters and storytellers; how to work with historians; and how to structure a documentary for dramatic effect. Just as important, learn how to get others (as in funders) to understand your story. This course will take class members from concept, through research and casting to outline, and, finally, to treatment. It will focus on the pre-production activities and principles that lead to a treatment that is engaging, journalistically sound, historically accurate, and the foundation for an efficient and successful shooting schedule.


DOCST 176S American Communities: A Photographic Approach
Instructor: Sartor
T 7:15 p.m.–9:45 p.m. (Smith Arts Warehouse - Multimedia Lab 228)
Theory and practice of documentary photography. Course of study includes exploration of the documentary tradition and classic documentary books with emphasis on photographs produced by the students. Students complete a documentary photography project of a community outside the university. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 178S Color Photography
Instructor: Harris
M 7:15 p.m.–9:45 p.m. (Smith Arts Warehouse - Multimedia Lab 228)
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. Consent of instructor required.


DOCST 180S The Photographic Essay
Instructor: Harris
M 1:15 p.m.–3:45p.m. (Smith Arts Warehouse - Multimedia Lab 228)
A course exploring the ways in which particular photographers have created photographic essays that communicate to a wide audience. Research and study of the classic and contemporary masters of photography. Students learn to choose, sequence, and pace images as exhibition-quality inkjet prints, according to the format of their final presentation (book, magazine, exhibition, and web-based).

See listing of required and elective certificate courses

Spring 2007

Fall 2006

Spring 2006

Fall 2005

Spring 2005

Fall 2004

Spring 2004

Fall 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.