REQUIRED Courses for Scholars Admitted Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 

 For Fall 2022 and later, all Scholars Required Courses must be taken in order to ultimately complete the Scholars Program.  Please see the Scholars Program Completion Policies for more information.

2024-2025 Courses for Second-Year Scholars Students (Admitted Fall 2023): 

These courses should be taken by Scholars in the Fall and Spring of their second year at SAIC, as indicated. 

Scholars Studio Symposia Courses offered in the Fall Semester: 

All Second-Year Scholars must take one section from the three options listed: 

UGDIV 2098 + HUMANITIES 2098, Section 001: SAIC Scholars Studio Symposia: Writing Everywhere

Faculty: Sherry Antonini, Jenny Magnus

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:00 am – 3:00 pm

• This Studio Symposium course awards 6 credits: 3 towards Humanities/Liberal Arts Elective AND 3 towards Studio Elective.

• Students are required to enroll in two co-requisites (UGDIV 2098 and HUMANITIES 2098) in order to take this blended course.

This blended academic/studio course offers Scholars Program students an opportunity to explore and analyze art forms that incorporate text within interdisciplinary projects. Our academic investigations will serve as a base of information and inspiration to facilitate students’ processes of writing and making in creating text-inclusive interdisciplinary work. We’ll engage in viewing, listening, reading, writing responses, and discussing pieces created by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robert Ashley, Patti Smith, Kurt Schwitters, Idris Goodwin, Claudia Rankine, and Emil Ferris. We’ll then consider what we’ve seen, learned, and discussed as we work in the studio, moving across generative exercises, writing workshop sessions, and individual making time focused on developing and fine-tuning both words and structures for new projects. Students will experiment with their writing in combinations involving 2d and 3d image, sound, and performance ideas, with critiques as follow-up feedback. Students should expect to work loosely, but passionately, to create distinct trial projects reflecting assigned investigations, as well as meet related reading and written response deadlines along the timeline of the semester. Final projects will present further steps of revision toward a chosen finished piece.

UGDIV 2098 + SOCIAL SCIENCE 2098, Section 2: SAIC Scholars Studio Symposia: Queer Worldmaking

Faculty: Kirin Wachter-Grene, Jade Yumang

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:00 am – 3:00 pm

Modality: In-Person

• This Studio Symposium course awards 6 credits: 3 towards Social Science/Liberal Arts Elective AND 3 towards Studio Elective.

• Students are required to enroll in two co-requisites (UGDIV 2098 and SOCIAL SCIENCE 2098) in order to take this blended course.

We live in a world we didn’t create. But we innovate how to exist within it. This Scholar’s blended academic/studio symposium course explores what it might mean to “queer” space through installation strategies. Installation art is the desire to transform the perception of space to produce new experiences. What could it look like and feel like to take up space while simultaneously making room with others and for others? Together, we will explore these questions through the lens of feminist and queer historical texts that archive radical experiments, aspirations, and failures in kinship, collectivity, and utopian world building efforts. Additional readings will look at affect theory, disorientation, desire, accessibility, and community-building. Students are expected to keep up with the reading weekly and to come to class ready to write about it and discuss it in depth. Studio work, solo and group, will explore and transform space through different techniques such as the arrangement of found/rescued objects, soundscape, light manipulation, video projection, smell, activation via performance, haptic textures, and other modes of site-specific strategies. Artists in focus will include Allyson Mitchell, Nayland Blake, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, Jacolby Satterwhite, Chris E. Vargas, Ernesto Pujol, Kang Seung Lee, AK Burns/Katherine Hubbard, and more.

UGDIV 2098 + SCIENCE 2098, Section 3: SAIC Scholars Studio Symposia: Discovering Science and the Art of Communication

Faculty: Elizabeth Freeland, Caroline Bellios

Day/Time: Tuesday, 3:30pm – 9:15 pm

• This Studio Symposium course awards 6 credits: 3 towards Science/Liberal Arts Elective AND 3 towards Studio Elective.

• Students are required to enroll in two co-requisites (IUGDIV 2098 and SCIENCE 2098) in order to take this blended course.

In this studio symposium we will explore how we gain knowledge, what we do with it, how we communicate it, and the motivation to gain further knowledge. We will ground our understanding of this cycle in the works of Émilie du Châtelet in the 1700s and Mary Somerville in the 1800s. Both women’s contributions to the physical sciences, in original works and in gathering, processing, and communicating the revolutionary ideas of their time, were crucial and indispensable. Complementing their extraordinary work in science, they contributed to a wide range of human endeavors, from theater and poetry to philosophy and mathematics, all of which had to be balanced by expected societal performances. Their complex lives, built in realms that the majority of their contemporaries could not imagine intersecting, serve as an invitation for you, as an artist, to make and communicate the science of our time as a part of your interdisciplinary practice. Readings will include excerpts of works by Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Somerville, and their biographers. They will also include modern texts about climate change and the communication of climate science.

Course work will include labs and activities investigating topics of 18th and 19th century experiments and scientific practices, creative responses to these ideas, weekly assignments to assess factual understanding or synthesis of ideas, and acts of doing that would have been performed by women of those times. In a final project, students will translate, transmit, or communicate the modern scientific issues important to them through their own art practice.

Scholars Sophomore Seminar Courses Offered in the Spring Semester: 

All Second-Year Scholars must take one section.

TBD SOPHSEM 2900 Sophomore Seminar sections for Scholars in spring 2025 will be posted here in fall 2024. 

2024-2025 Courses for Scholars Students (Admitted Fall 2024)

These courses should be taken by Scholars in their first and second semester at SAIC, as indicated.  For Fall 2022 admits and future admits beyond that point, ALL Scholars Required Courses must be taken in order to ultimately complete the Scholars Program.

Fall Semester 2024 

• ART HISTORY 1001 SECTION 09S: Advanced Survey of World Cultures and Civilizations: Pre-history to 19th Century

• ENGLISH 1001 First Year Seminar I 

• CP 1020 Research Studio I

• CP 1010 Core Studio I 

• Studio Elective

Winter Interim 2005

• CP 1022 Research Studio II  Scholars Trip to  Siena, Italy (optional)

Spring Semester 2025

• ART HISTORY 1002 SECTION 04S: Advanced Survey of Modern to Contemporary Art and Architecture

• ENGLISH 1005 First Year Seminar  II

• Core Studio II 

• Studio Elective

• Studio Elective