Bilkent students can check the complete list of current COMD offerings on STARS.

CURRENT COURSES

COMD 513  Film and Genre (Fall)

This graduate-level course aims to explore key concepts, debates, and texts in contemporary cinema and media by focusing on the interconnected areas of genre, stardom, and director/creator studies. Required readings must be supplemented by independent research covering each topic.

COMD 321  Analysis of Moving Image (Fall)

This course, part of the core COMD curriculum for both majors and minors, introduces the basic building blocks of audiovisual media: cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound, and narrative. Using written and video essays, students propose their own original analyses of moving image media.

COMD 538  Adaptation in Media (Spring)

Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared that the content of one medium is always another medium. In no area of media studies is this interconnection made more central than in the study of adaptations between and within media platforms, including film, literature, television, theater, games, and comics. This seminar explores a number of issues related to adaptation and intertextuality: how transmedia practices build franchises with global reach; how transnational adaptation crosses linguistic and cultural divides; how audiences and users recognize and process adapted content; and other developments in adaptation studies.

Selected Topics: Media specificity, remakes and seriality, appropriation, parody, paratexts

COMD 322  Film Theory and Criticism (Spring)

This undergraduate elective focuses on major film theories as they relate to the historical, aesthetic, and ideological concerns of cinema production and its cultural circulation. Key concepts in film criticism such as genre, stardom, authorship, spectatorship, and national/transnational production contexts will be introduced as major approaches to film analysis. Short- and feature-length films will be discussed using these and other theoretical perspectives.

Selected Topics: Genre, authorship, ideology, stardom, spectatorship, transnational cinemas, feminist criticism

PAST COURSES

COMD 511 Research Methods in Media & Visual Studies (last taught Fall 2017)

This graduate course introduces the major methodologies in current media and visual studies, aiming for M.A. students to organize and launch their independent thesis research during their first semester of study.

COMD 203 Introduction to Communication Studies (last taught Fall 2019)

Mass media are more integrated than ever before in every aspect of our lives. The academic discipline of communication studies, broadly defined, examines the social implications of this integration and looks closely at how media create and disseminate meaning within a wider cultural environment. This course (required for both the major and minor in COMD) will focus on analyzing media content: What explicit and implicit messages are embedded within the products of the media machine? How can we interpret and critique them? What might they tell us about the culture that produced them?  We will explore how the methods of close reading and content analysis structure scholarly research that can help answer these questions.

Selected Topics: Semiotics, narrative, genre, representation, ideology