celebrity culture

Music: The Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca (2005)

Today I finished prepping both my graduate seminar and my large lecture undergraduate class. I'm excited about teaching both classes, but I'm particularly pumped about my undergraduate class, which is brand spanking new. I have not prepped a new undergraduate class, in fact, for five years. At LSU I was helping to rebuild the curriculum with Laura, and so new course preps were the norm for the first couple of years. When I got to UT, however, the curriculum was already set, and so I basically got to teach whatever I thought was important to teach. I simply have taught what I have already prepped.

The year before last a benefactor---apparently an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood---donated funds with the express condition that the college develop an "entertainment studies" track. I proposed that we develop a "celebrity culture" course to get on this gravy train. The gravy ain't coming yet (perhaps never), but the course got developed anyway and I'm teaching it for the first time this fall.

I enjoyed reading the stuff in preparation for the class, and was happy to discover that there is a lot of scholarship out there on celebrity and the influence of celebrity on culture. There's so much good stuff out there, in fact, that I had trouble deciding what I should teach!

I'm also excited to see how my new "group project" assignment will go. Basically, a student group has to upload a video on YouTube.com or start a blog and promote it. Their grade is based on how many viewers or readers they are able to get over the course of two months. We shall see!

Anyhoo, if you'd like a peek at the tentative syllabus, you can download a PDF here.