The Humanities Institute for Lifelong Learning (HILL) offers opportunities for adult education to residents of the Greater Capital District of New York. HILL provides six-week Fall and Spring semesters with courses taught by distinguished faculty from across the region.

HILL Fall 2026 Semester

The Fall 2026 HILL semester will begin Monday October 5th. Three six-week courses will be offered.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Construction of the Thriller
Mondays 1:30-3:30
Jim de Seve, Senior Artist-in-Residence and Director of Film Studies, Union College. 

“I enjoy playing the audience like a piano,” Hitchcock once remarked.  The psychologically troubled director of over fifty films knew when he moved from silent film title card artist to director, he needed to learn what chords and notes would set his audiences on edge, while also delighting them. Hitch, as he was known, set about creating methodical rules of production that would earn him the title, Master of Suspense.

This course will explore Hitchcock’s cinematic evolution.  Hitchcock named his theory of visual storytelling “pure cinema.” Film, he insisted, is constructed not only through dialogue or plot but by the precise arrangement of images.  We will discuss the narrative and cinematic techniques Hitchcock used to build suspense and analyze the cinematic innovations he either originated or refined. Among the films we will examine are The 39 Steps (1935), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960). The course will also consider the psychological dimensions of Hitchcock’s work, examining how recurring preoccupations with control, voyeurism, and culpability informed both his storytelling and his formal choices, as well as implicating his audience in a kind of shared perversion. 

“A Delightful Musick:” Concert Life in Early America
Tuesdays 1:30-3:30
Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, Director and Violinist, Musicians of Ma’alwyck

This course will examine what music was available to Americans from the 1730s until the early 1800s, including a look at the Old American Company, itinerant musicians, performance venues, music in the early American home, and more. The trajectory of music in America is a fascinating one, with musicians of the Catholic church establishing themselves in Charleston, gentlemen’s orchestras forming in Annapolis and other towns along the eastern seaboard, and British theater singers and instrumentalists looking for a “refreshing” of their careers in America. A rich mosaic of musical offerings, informed by taste in London and Europe, drives American taste and perceived refinement. You may find it surprising that even as we fought the British we couldn’t get enough of their culture.

“A People’s Contest”: A Social and Political History of the American Civil War Era
Wednesdays 1:30-3:30
Melinda Lawson, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, History Department, Union College

This course will explore the extraordinary story of the American Civil War, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of the people who were there and why they made the choices they did. This is not a military history. We will begin with an overview of slavery and the coming of the war, from the Constitutional Convention to John Brown’s raid, then turn to the war itself, discussing such issues as:

  • The secessionist mindset: 75% of southerners were not slaveholders. Why did they vote to leave the Union and form their own nation with slavery as its “cornerstone”?
  • The soldiers’ experiences: who were they, why did they volunteer, and what conditions did they encounter?
  • The role and experiences of African Americans, enslaved and free
  • Lincoln’s evolution and the changing meaning of the war
  • Women and the war
  • The Confederate nation: wartime exigencies, conflict, and change
  • Dissent on both homefronts
  • The war’s death toll, which scholars now estimate at 750,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians: how it got so high and its impact on the homefront
  • Lincoln’s assassination and the extraordinary three-week 1700-mile funeral train
  • The triumphs and tragedies of Reconstruction

Information regarding the format of these courses (in-person, Zoom, hybrid) and registration procedures for the Fall 2026 semester will be posted on or about September 1st.

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