This course is designed as an introduction to human communication as the study of culture. Any study of human communication entails an understanding of culture, and vice versa. As an examination of cultural institutions, ideologies, artifacts, and productions, work in cultural studies and communication is concerned with the integral relationship of cultural practices to relationships of power. Therefore we will focus on some of the key methodologies of cultural analysis and some of the primary themes of cultural study, with an emphasis on how they intersect with central issues in the field of human communication. The first half of the course will be devoted to general approaches, key concepts, and overarching questions, with a particular emphasis on the study of media, popular culture, and communication. The second half will focus more specifically on distinct units of study—rhetoric, gender, pop music, brand and image cultures and others—as individual case studies of cultural analysis. We will pay particular attention to how notions of both culture and cultural study have changed over time, and how those legacies influence contemporary debates around cultural productions, cultural identity, and global cultural change.