Registration is rolling until March 18 at 11:59PM EST. No application is required (except for financial aid— Applications for financial aid are due March 13 at 5PM EST).

$250 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

4 week class: Mondays 6-8PM EST, March 25, 2024- April 15, 2024

The internet has democratized cultural criticism—now anyone has the ability to rate movies on Rotten Tomatoes, restaurants on Yelp, and books on Goodreads. What is the role of the professional critic in this landscape? In “A Critic’s Manifesto” for The New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn writes of reading criticism in that very magazine as a teenager as an education “more important than the one I was getting in school.” He writes, “I thought of these writers above all as teachers, and like all good teachers they taught by example; the example that they set, week after week, was to recreate on the page the drama of how they had arrived at their judgments.” Those meaningful judgments consist of two key elements: knowledge and taste. In this course, we will read and write cultural criticism that combines knowledge and taste, that analyzes and interprets everything from a meal to a novel. Our models may range from Hanif Abdurraqib on music, to Parul Sehgal on books, to Inkoo Kang on television, and Jennifer Wilson on Film. Students will pitch, write, and workshop a review.

Kristen Martin (she/her) is a writer and cultural critic. Her debut narrative nonfiction book THE SUN WON'T COME OUT TOMORROW will be published by Bold Type Books. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Università degli Scienze Gastronomiche in Italy, where she was a Fulbright-Casten Family Scholar. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Columbia University, and CUNY Baruch College, as well as for the Philadelphia literary community Blue Stoop. She lives in Philadelphia.