ESP Biography

From the pages of Agatha Christie to the grisly gore of CSI, the murder mystery is a major part of our popular culture. In this class, we will briefly go over the history of the murder mystery, but we’ll spend the majority of the course analyzing the structure of what makes for a compelling, logical, and thoroughly entertaining murder mystery. Our discussion will culminate in a small tour around campus as we try to find suitable locations for our class’s own SPLASH Day Murder Mystery.

In this class, we'll learn how to analyze a museum, breaking it down to understand what it's trying to say and how it's saying it. Like a piece of literature, a museum is a carefully crafted experience intended to convey a certain message to its audience. Everything from a museum's layout, to its architecture, to the objects displayed, to even the little description labels advance some sort of purpose. We'll start by going over the history of museums— from 17th century cabinets of curiosities to 21st educational theme parks and world's fairs. After analyzing a few example museums together, we'll take a brief field trip to Stanford's Cantor Art Center where students will explore the museum to analyze it for themselves. From there, we'll regroup to discuss our findings.