Witness trees, as designated by the National Park Service, are long-standing trees that have witnessed key events, trends, and people in history. In this joint studio/liberal arts course, students have the unique opportunity to study and work with a fallen witness tree, shipped to RISD from a national historic site. The course will involve three components:

1) a field trip to the tree's site at the beginning of the semester

2) classroom-based exploration of American history, memory, landscape, and material culture

3) studio-based building of a series of objects from the tree's wood, in response to both the site and students' classroom study

Overall, the course will explore both how material artifacts shape historical understanding and how historical knowledge can create meaningful design.

This is a co-requisite course. Students must register for HPSS-S732 and FD-2451.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

You may register for this section if your EFS studio days are Tuesday/Thursday/Friday.

This goal of this course is to convincingly answer the question: when was rock’n’roll invented? In order to define “rock” and mark its emergence, we will interpret a variety of musical and non-musical texts in light of key changes and trends in American politics, economics, society, and technology between 1900 and 1955. Much of this history concerns the dramatic effects of urbanization and war on both Black and white Americans, emerging post-war generational divisions, opportunity and exploitation in the commercial recording industry, and popular music’s relationships to rigid--but also changing—structures of race, class, sexuality, and gender in American society in the early- to mid-20th century. While thinking about different disciplinary perspectives on such issues, through readings from American studies, Black studies, history, musicology, literary criticism, religious studies, queer studies, and journalistic criticism, we will engage primarily in the methods of media and textual analysis, source investigation, evidentiary synthesis, and reflective scholarly argument that are at the core of cultural history’s reconstruction of the past.

Transfer and upper-level students should register for one of the evening sections.

Major Requirement | BFA

You may register for this section if your EFS studio days are Tuesday/Wednesday/Friday.

This goal of this course is to convincingly answer the question: when was rock’n’roll invented? In order to define “rock” and mark its emergence, we will interpret a variety of musical and non-musical texts in light of key changes and trends in American politics, economics, society, and technology between 1900 and 1955. Much of this history concerns the dramatic effects of urbanization and war on both Black and white Americans, emerging post-war generational divisions, opportunity and exploitation in the commercial recording industry, and popular music’s relationships to rigid--but also changing—structures of race, class, sexuality, and gender in American society in the early- to mid-20th century. While thinking about different disciplinary perspectives on such issues, through readings from American studies, Black studies, history, musicology, literary criticism, religious studies, queer studies, and journalistic criticism, we will engage primarily in the methods of media and textual analysis, source investigation, evidentiary synthesis, and reflective scholarly argument that are at the core of cultural history’s reconstruction of the past.

Transfer and upper-level students should register for one of the evening sections.

Major Requirement | BFA