For the first time this fall, the VES department will offer a film studies concentration track for undergraduates.

Assistant Professor J.D. Connor ’92—who was named as VES’ assistant director of undergraduate studies for film studies this spring—wrote in an e-mail that he was enthusiastic about the new track and one course he developed for it, VES 195, “The Contemporary Hollywood Cinema.”

“My class has a screening list filled with pleasures—guilty and otherwise, a reading list that will convince students that Hollywood not only can, but should be treated with intellectual seriousness, as a business and as an aesthetic system, and lectures that will cultivate, I hope, the sense that Hollywood’s industrial narcissism is its great contribution to the possibilities of collaborative popular art,” he wrote.

He will also teach VES 172h, “Histories of Cinema II: Sound, Space, and Image to 1960,” which will be one of three classes required of all film studies concentrators.

Connor wrote that he thought the new track would attract more students to the concentration.

VES is not the only department that hopes to see an increase in enrollment numbers. African and African American Studies will offer its introductory course—African and African American Studies 10, “Introduction to African and African American Studies”—for Historical Study A Core credit for the first time since former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 left the department in 2002.

This year, Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies Evelynn M. Hammonds will assume full teaching responsibility for the course.

The change, Hammonds wrote in an e-mail, could entice more students to take the class.

Lewis said students who took the course last year were eventually awarded Core credit—but as the decision was not made until after the course began, the class was not advertised as fulfilling a Core requirement.

Lindsey D. Olier ’07 expressed her approval of the decision to allow the course to count for Core credit.

“I feel that it should remain a Core class simply because it may attract individuals who never venture to the Social Studies or Af-Am concentration section of the course catalog to consider taking the class and seeing how the history and lives of roughly 8 percent of their peers are relevant to their own,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Brandon M. Terry ’05, the president of the Black Men’s Forum, wrote that he encouraged all students to consider taking the class.

“Unfortunately, too many people, black and white, think they can know all there is to know about black culture and race in America by listening to Bill Cosby rant, watching Soul Plane and buying 50 Cent records,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I do encourage all students at Harvard who are interested in really understanding why racial disparities exist and what black culture is all about to take this course.”

For some students, the fact that the class could fulfill a Core requirement will provide more incentive to take the course.

“I didn’t know that it was a Core,” Evan Hepler-Smith ’06 wrote. “I was considering taking it, [and] this may push me over the edge.”