Graduate Courses

This year-long master’s-level proseminar offers an immersive introduction to contemporary issues, innovations, and debates shaping today’s global media and communication industries. Across four sessions spread over two semesters, students will engage directly with leading professionals from journalism, entertainment, advertising, public relations, and digital media and technology sectors. Through a combination of keynote talks, moderated conversations, and roundtable discussions, guest speakers will share insights into evolving industry practices, shifting audience dynamics, emerging technologies, and the strategic, ethical, and creative challenges facing media organizations worldwide. The proseminar is designed to complement and deepen students’ classroom learning by exposing them to real-world perspectives and current professional discourse. Each session encourages active participation, giving students opportunities to ask questions, network with practitioners, and explore a range of career pathways. To synthesize their learning, students will produce two 500-word critical response papers, one due at the end of each term, that reflect on key themes, debates, and takeaways from the guest presentations. By bridging academic study with industry engagement, this proseminar equips students with a sophisticated understanding of contemporary media landscapes and prepares them to navigate, and contribute meaningfully to, the media and communication industries.

This course provides a comprehensive exploration of the key theories and frameworks used to study communication and media industries, with a particular focus on their role as agents of social, cultural, and political power. Taking a historical approach, students will trace how economic, political, and socio-cultural forces have shaped the development of communication and media industries and their relationship to wider structures of cultural production. In the final third of the course, we will bring these frameworks into conversation with pressing issues of the 21st century – platform capitalism, global media flows, and emergent geopolitical realignments – and highlighting their implications for industry practices and social and cultural life. The main assessment requires students to situate their capstone research project within these critical conversations and to curate a focused body of scholarship that will inform sustained research in later semesters.

This course traces the contours of the emerging immersive media industry. It lays the foundation for students to think critically about immersive media technologies and practices, including augmented and virtual reality, digital twins, and spatial computing amongst others. The course surveys a range of contexts where immersive media products are being rapidly adopted: from virtual production and culture and entertainment to city planning using virtual twins, and a revolution in healthcare with the help of XR technologies. Students will develop their own critical understanding of immersive media products and practices, learn from leading industry experts, and gain a deeper knowledge of how these technologies operate and are re-shaping our media landscape as we know it.

This course equips students with the methodological tools to critically investigate communication and media industries across multiple levels of analysis – from policy and ownership structures to production practices, distribution systems, and audience engagement. Built around a multi-level analytic framework, the course pairs close reading of key exemplar studies with hands-on exercises that connect theory to research practice. Each unit begins with foundational readings and landmark works of scholarship that illustrate methodological approaches such as political economic analysis, textual and discourse analysis, ethnography, and institutional research. Class discussions will critically assess the design, execution, and limitations of these studies, emphasizing how methodological choices shape the knowledge we produce about communication and media industries. Students will locate scholarship relevant to their capstone project that exemplifies the level of analysis under discussion, preparing and presenting critical overviews to the class. The major assessment culminates in a detailed methods proposal for the student’s capstone project, comparing and justifying their chosen approach in relation to existing research.

This course offers an inside look at the business of ‘artist representation’ with application to any career. Students will engage in real world / real time analysis, interact with guest speakers and visit an entertainment company to meet the players and hear industry updates on topics discussed in class. We will explore the career-defining decisions talent reps make about talent, who to sign/who to sell to, pitching, dealmaking, and other industry practices. Students will take on the critical and analytic thinking required of industry leaders and practice the tools of creating your own narrative, knowing your audience, and communicating with purpose to influence outcomes. Participation outside of students' comfort zone is encouraged when presenting ideas, conducting mock pitching exercises and practicing the all-important pivot from the daily rejection that talent representatives experience. With a focus on the U.S., this course examines the technological, social, political, economic, and cultural developments shaping the current Hollywood marketplace.

The phenomenal expansion of digital media infrastructures and platforms are transforming the production, promotion, and circulation of films, television programs, music, video games, and other media entertainment and popular cultural forms. Moreover, media artifacts routinely move across national borders with audiences playing an increasingly participatory role. This course focuses on the operations, discourses, and logics that drive contemporary media industries in major media capitals around the world including Mumbai, Seoul, Istanbul, Mexico City, Dubai, and Los Angeles. Taking a historical approach, we will examine the economic, political, and socio-cultural factors that shape developments in the media industries, relationships between powerful centers of media and cultural production, and the ways in which industry professionals respond to the challenges and opportunities of digitalization and new geo-political alignments in the 21st century.

The Spring Capstone Research Seminar provides structured, faculty-guided mentorship to help students develop a robust and well-designed media industries research project. Building on the intellectual foundations established in the program’s first semester, the course guides students through the iterative process of refining a research topic, formulating a feasible and appropriately scaled research question, and mapping the conceptual frameworks and scholarly conversations their project will engage. Because the early stages of project development often involve trial, error, and recalibration, the seminar emphasizes frequent feedback, proposal drafting, and thoughtful scoping of the project’s aims. Throughout the term, students design and implement their data-gathering strategy, which may include interviews, field observations, focus groups, or the use of publicly available datasets. By the end of the semester, they are expected to complete their primary research and conduct a comprehensive review of relevant academic and industry literature. The course culminates in a 10-page capstone proposal that articulates the research question, intended audience, significance, conceptual grounding, and analytic plan. This proposal serves as the foundation for writing the full capstone project in the summer.

The Summer Capstone Writing & Completion course supports students as they transform their spring research proposal and collected data into a polished, original capstone project. With primary research already completed, students spend the summer analyzing their data, integrating scholarly and industry sources, and crafting a clear and compelling argument that demonstrates mastery of media industry studies. The emphasis during this term shifts from research design to sustained writing, analytical depth, and refinement of the project’s contribution to ongoing academic or industry conversations. Students work closely with their advisor to structure their chapters or sections, interpret findings, and situate their analysis in relation to both their conceptual framework and the broader field. The final capstone should be accessible to an informed but non-specialist audience and comparable in scope and rigor to a 25–30-page scholarly paper. Students submit their completed project in early August, after which they prepare for a celebratory presentation day in late August showcasing their work to faculty, peers, alumni, and media industry professionals.