Literary & Visual Arts
Babson may be a business school, but it’s also a campus where you will find the renowned makerspace, the Weissman Foundry; a robust visual and performing arts programming sponsored by BabsonARTS and housed in the beautiful Sorenson Center for the Arts; a Writing Center; a ceramics studio; and a curriculum that values the liberal arts and sciences as a partner to your business studies.
The literary and visual arts studies concentration features active engagement with a range of literary, visual, musical, and creative arts courses. These courses challenge you to think, perform, and write with increased depth, independence, and creativity, similar to coursework found in a visual arts major, or a bachelor of visual arts. You will experience how the arts express and shape individuals as well as cultural experiences and identities.
Where the Literary & Visual Arts Concentration Will Take You
You should expect to take visual arts classes, study formal, aesthetic concerns, as well as explore the artistic process as a dynamic and strategic series of expressive choices. A portion of Babson undergraduates go into the arts and entertainment industries after graduating, or get a visual arts degree, among other creative pursuits.
The communication, collaboration, leadership, critical thinking, and conceptual skills you gain from the literary and visual arts studies concentration will benefit you in any industry, whether it be marketing, event planning, curation, education, philanthropy, communications, technology, and, of course, the arts themselves.
What You Will Study in Your Literary & Visual Arts Courses
Students take four creative arts courses. There are over 20 elective options to choose from that cover art from various national and global perspectives (as well historical and modern ones).
The following courses are a sample of the types of literary and visual arts courses you may take and not the official course listing. For more information on the literary and visual arts concentration requirements, please visit the undergraduate catalog.
This class examines the history of art during the Age of Enlightenment (1600–1800), a time marked by revolutions in science, industry, philosophy, and the declaration of human rights. You will learn about artists who grappled with the image of a changing world. Throughout the semester, you will critically assess how art shaped the founding ideologies of our modern world.
Effective theatrical performance and communication begins with focused concentration, a free and active imagination, physical poise, and a controlled voice. In this course, you will hone these skills while reading, analyzing, and experimenting with contemporary acting strategies and methods. Your work on the stage will be guided and grounded by careful study and consideration of acting theory and history. You will not only have an understanding of the discipline and rigor required for successful performance but will also have a theoretical understanding and tools to create compelling and viable characters for the stage and for a public audience.
This course explores the uses and genre development of detective fiction and film noir and their functions as social commentary, applying examples from different times and places. Through the works of current and popular writers and filmmakers we consider the legacies of dictatorship in Spain and Latin America, and the genre’s use in investigating and exposing a conflictive past (or fear of what one might find). We will look at the female detective in varied works.
Explore the captivating and dangerous ways in which writers construct foreign worlds of "East" and "West" and how they trespass, distort, and dream the border between themselves and other civilizations. From the Argentinian Borges' depictions of Arabian labyrinths to the Syrian Adonis' depictions of New York City alleyways, from the French Baudelaire's meditations on Oriental opium-dens to the Persian Hedayat's meditations on the madmen of Paris, you will see how authors represent unknown and outsider cultures. Ultimately, you will interrogate the experience of radical otherness and its use as a complex force of creativity, consciousness, and imagination.
Explore more literary and visual arts courses
You Will Learn From the Best
At Babson, our faculty are experts, innovators, and forward thinkers in their chosen fields. Here are just some professors sharing their expertise and support with our students.
Have Questions?
Faculty Contact: Beth Wynstra
Sponsoring Division: Arts & Humanities
