First-Year Seminars

Instructor(s): Ty Blakeney

Description:

Although heterosexuality is often thought of as a natural phenomenon, historians of sexuality have demonstrated that modern heterosexual identity is a recent invention which postdates the invention of its opposite, homosexuality.

In this course, we will think about the ways that heterosexuality has been socially constructed since its invention, drawing on a range of films from France and North America. We will address questions like: how does the construction of heterosexuality interact with the oppression of women? How does the definition of heterosexuality depend on queer others? How does the history of heterosexuality relate to the history of whiteness and racism? After reflecting on the history of heterosexuality, students will be asked at the course’s conclusion to present and analyze an artifact of heterosexuality from their own experience. Students will learn the basics of film analysis and write analytical papers.

Instructor(s): Zekeria Denna

Description:

This Freshman seminar examines contemporary African politics through creative works by African writers and filmmakers. We explore how writers and filmmakers narrate, aestheticize, and dramatizes political life and relations on the continent. The quarter begins with key historical junctures such as the colonial domination and independence before focusing on key themes in post-colonial African politics, including but not limited to political regimes, resistance, violence, conflict, religion and politics, political economy, inequality, the struggle for democracy and human rights, Africa in the world…We connect ideas and themes from the artistic material from across the region to the relevant political science scholarship to interpret and think comparatively about politics in Africa.

The seminar requires students to read, and watch assigned material in preparation for class discussions. Students work will be assessed through in-class participation, short-writing assignments and a final paper.

Instructor(s): Michelle Huang

Description:

Small, cute, quiet? Asian American girls are made, not born. From The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Belly Conklin to Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra, Asian American girls and women are ironically gaining representational visibility in the same historical moment of the Atlanta shootings and a wave of gendered anti-Asian violence.

Taking this disjunction as its entry point, this class will explore theories of race, gender, and sexuality through an intersectional approach centered on Asian American girls as subjects worthy of study. We will situate their figuration within histories of immigration, imperialism, and racialization in the United States and Asia. This course will also introduce students to best practices for reading and writing in the humanities, such as close reading, argumentative writing, and public media creation.

Instructor(s): Marquis Bey

Description: This course will introduce students to the parameters and textures of black life, trans life, and black trans life. Popular discourse has either depicted black trans people as glamorous superstars or always and already predisposed to death. This course, then, seeks to usefully complicate these narratives and focus on black and trans life. To that end, the course will task students with gaining an understanding of the nuances of black life via its entanglement with the afterlife of slavery and contemporary radicalism; with trans life via its troubling of the gender binary; and black trans life via the ways that blackness and transness interact and converge. This is, in short, a course on black life, full stop; trans life, full stop; and black trans life, full stop.

Instructor(s): Antawan Byrd

Description:

In recent decades, portraiture of Black individuals has taken on heightened visibility, its prominence ebbing and flowing across museum collections, major exhibitions, public art commissions, popular culture, and contemporary debates about race and representation. This first-year writing seminar examines Black portraiture as a cultural, social, and political practice from the advent of the twentieth century to the present. Encompassing a wide range of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, film, music, and comics, the course will critically question what portraiture promises, what it obscures, and whose interests it ultimately serves.

A central emphasis of the course is the process of writing. With scaffolded assignments, peer review, and sustained revision, students will develop facility and confidence in articulating complex ideas about race, portraiture, and material culture in written form. We will interrogate the role of art criticism and the art market in shaping the value, reception, and institutionalization of portraiture. Through museum visits and close engagement with artworks, students will develop skills in first-hand observation, visual analysis, and the formal description of objects, grounding their writing in sustained encounters with artworks. Students will ultimately develop a deeper understanding of recurring approaches to producing and theorizing the likeness of Black subjects, while also gaining insight into the cultural and political stakes of portraiture as a genre of representation.

Instructor(s): Mark Lockwood

Description:

On October 11th, 2005, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson's seminal anthology Black Queer Studies was published by Duke University Press. The anthology brought together essays by scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality, highlighting the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Following up with his groundbreaking edited collection, Johnson published No Tea, No Shade in 2016. Building on the foundations laid out in Black Queer Studies, No Tea, No Shade spoke new truths about the black queer people, and the black queer experience, whose radical imagination insist on always recalibrating blackness, its embodiment, and performance in an ever-changing political economy.

The goal of this course is to problematize the terms "queer," "gender" and "sexuality," with efforts to question assumptions that attend the usage and deployment of these terms in discourse. We will closely analyze films alongside other popular culture forms - television shows, performance art, and other visual media - to think about how these texts are in conversation with one another and uncover topics related to black queer genders, sexual practices, vulnerability, queer cultural invisibility, sex work and survival, and LGBTQ kinship. This class will offer students an introduction into black queer theories, analytics, knowledge, and activism that emerge from LGBTQ people of color who examine the intersections of, primarily, race, class, gender, and sexuality, and other vectors of powers and categories of social life. Likewise, this course will expose students to black queer film and media and challenge us, within the academy, to close the gap between popular and academic meditations on black queer life.

Instructor(s): Meaghan Fritz

Description: Get hungry! This course explores the art of composition through writing, reading, and talking about food. From reflecting on personal food memories to crafting arguments about how and why we eat what we do, this course will hone your writing skills in areas crucial to college level writing.

Instructor(s): Paul Ramirez

Description:

Conquest is one of the most pervasive metaphors in global history and especially so in Latin America. This course explores the meanings of conquest in Latin America through analysis of some of the major textual and non-textual sources for the history of Spanish colonization. We will look at letters and chronicles of early encounters; annals, pictographs, and maps that shed light on non-European perspectives; and more recent reinterpretations of Spanish colonization in art, literature, and film. How do we account for the remarkable endurance of the conquest framework, in the past and present?

The aim is to attend to the range of actors who participated as interpreters, military allies, and chroniclers, with special emphasis on women and people of native American and African descent; to examine how visual art, literature, and film translate historical topics; and to provide a critical introduction to some of the major themes in the historical study of colonialism and Latin America.

Instructor(s): Daniel Majchrowicz

Description: This course will introduce students to the rich history and culture of Indonesia and locate it within its regional setting in Southeast Asia. We will examine particularly how its location at the center of one of the world’s most important trade routes has shaped its cultural development through sustained interactions with India, the Middle East, and China, as well as Europe. We will examine particularly Indonesia’s literary, cinematic, and musical past. Through the course, students will be introduced to major methods, theories, and concepts in the study of culture and society. We will focus particularly on learning how to read strategically, formulate arguments, and write efficiently. 

Instructor(s): Santiago Molina

Description: What is Latinx futurism? Most of the imagined futures we are exposed to in the United States have been crafted by white authors. From Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novels about robots to high-production value blockbusters. An alternative cannon, Afrofuturism, has begun to blaze a path for understanding why the political, racial, and cultural position of those doing the imagining matters. In do so, Afrofuturism aims to inspire us to think carefully about how we deal with the pressing social issues of our time and have offered a new lens for thinking about the future. This discussion-based seminar takes this as a departure point and works towards including Latinx futurism in this frame. This seminar is an introduction to a way of thinking sociologically about technology, science, and society from the perspective of Latinx and Latin American communities. In their reading and writing assignments students will explore a broad array of topics, from the origins of postcolonial states, Zapotec science, and borderlands epistemology.

Instructor(s): Laiba Paracha

Description:

In a world shaped by the rise of nation-states, dreams of global unity, and “melting pots” of cultural diversity, we still find ourselves haunted by the figure of the exile—the migrant, the refugee, the stateless traveler, the border-crosser. This course invites you to explore how the stories we tell ourselves about home and displacement challenge our deepest assumptions about identity, nationhood, the cost of separation, and what it means to belong. We begin with the archetype of the homeward-bound Odysseus and unravel how the “exiled hero” has been reimagined across times and cultures. How do these figures disrupt national myths? What new forms of storytelling—literary, visual, and performative—do we need to truly grasp the experience of exile?

Together, we’ll read, watch, and travel alongside protagonists of diverse genders, sexualities, and abilities as they navigate perilous seas, scorching deserts, and today’s heavily surveilled borders. In the second module, we turn the idea of “heroism” on its head, examining how labor, gender, and the politics of belonging reshape our understanding of courage and resistance. Our texts span genres and geographies—from short stories such as Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun” and Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”, to the exile poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nazim Hikmet, to cinematic representations of otherness. This seminar is not just about reading stories—it is about rethinking the very idea of home in a world where movement, loss, and resilience define so many lives.

Instructor(s): Brendan O'Kelly

Description:

This seminar navigates Mars’ unique place in the human imaginary, from ancient associations with gods of war, death, and plague to the current billionaire-dominated space race. Especially since astronomer Percival Lowell’s late 19th century sighting of supposed “canals” as evidence of Martian engineering, Mars has served as the primary object in human fantasies about the colonization of other planets, whether utopian or dystopian, and has provided ripe fodder for allegories about hostile alien invasions.

Interdisciplinary course materials including literature, film and marketing to astronomy and the history of science will provide ground to consider how human attitudes toward Mars reflect issues on Earth, especially given current escalations in the climate crisis. The course will conclude with a research-based essay that allows students to pursue the subject in relation to their own interests and major.

Instructor(s): Michael Slattery

Description:

We often recognize music as expressively charged, but what stories does it tell? How can music be meaningful without the specificity of language? This course explores musical meaning—the possibility of music to express moods, ideas, sensations, and narratives. It focuses on the last of these, musical narrative, which involves identifying musical features that correspond with elements of story, such as conflict, plot, and temporality. In pursuit of this goal, we investigate how musical narrative might be distinct from other forms of musical meaning and from narratives in other media.

Throughout the quarter, we will engage in debates about musical meaning and narrative, evaluating arguments for and against musical narrative as a phenomenon. We will take up analytical methods for identifying and describing musical narratives, applying these methods to pieces of music. In conjunction with these tasks, we will also learn how to write about music with specificity.

As a first-year writing seminar, this course will emphasize the development of writing skills. These include formulating thoughtful questions in response to academic work and artistic objects; crafting appropriate arguments; supporting such arguments with well-cited and thoughtfully selected evidence; and remaining attentive to grammar, organization, and style in pursuit of a clear authorial voice.

Instructor(s): Megan Baker

Description: Native/Indigenous Feminisms are key to understanding settler colonial societies like the United States and Canada. As a field of study, Native/Indigenous Feminisms analytically centers Indigenous sovereignty to examine how settler colonialism evolved to displace Indigenous peoples politically and within their own lands. This course will examine the historical formation and dynamics of settler colonialism to elucidate how it has shaped the lives of all people living within settler societies.

Instructor(s): Alexandra Ibarra

Description:

We are experiencing firsthand the technological future predicted by classic science fiction, and these texts’ questions resonate still: What are the ethics of technological development? Do AI and other technologies connect us or make us lonelier?

In this course, we will consider these questions and more as we traverse science fiction genres like the short story, novel, and movie. Throughout the quarter, we will explore how figures such as the robot emerge and transform across classic and contemporary works of science fiction—and what this shifting figure can tell us about ourselves and our world. The course will feature texts by Isaac Asimov, Martha Wells, and Nnedi Okorafor, and visual media such as Her, Sleep Dealer, and “Love Death + Robots.” By engaging with these cultural objects, our class will consider the ways that technology impacts our world, our daily habits, and even our writing and thinking practices. Assignments will use sci fi as a foundation to develop core argumentative writing skills.

Instructor(s): Mayda Velasco

Description: Climate change is an empirical fact based on many sources of experimental data. This observation and analyses show the importance and predictive power of science. In this course, we will start with what Physics reveals about climate change at the most fundamental level. At the end of the course, each student will develop their own vision of what a proper policy should be, based on the facts and predicted challenges ahead.

Instructor(s): Matthew Davis

Description:

In this seminar we will read, discuss, and write about short stories. Many of the stories, as well as the organizational scheme, will be taken from an unusual anthology, Points of View, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny.

In this anthology the stories are categorized according to the mode of narration used in the story. One section of the anthology contains “interior monologues,” in which we seem to be inside the main character’s head, overhearing his or her thoughts; another section contains “dramatic monologues,” in which we hear the narrator speaking aloud to another character; a third section contains “epistolary” stories (i.e., stories told in letters); a fourth contains stories that are made up of a series of diary entries; and so on. We will look at eleven different modes of narration in all -- and we will read two examples of most modes.

As far as writing is concerned, students will learn some principles of composition and complete some brief writing exercises. The more substantial writing assignments will be two narratives and two academic essays. In the narratives students will tell a story (old or new) using one of the modes of narration we have studied. In the academic essays, they will be asked to make a claim about one of the stories we have read and then support that claim with evidence. Each essay will be drafted, workshopped, and revised.

Instructor(s): Rowan Mellor

Description:

Most of us have basic ethical commitments: it's wrong to kill, we ought to help others in need, etc. But if we take a moment to reflect, it turns out that these commitments can come into conflict with each another, or else lead to injunctions which many of us find unacceptable. Is it wrong to kill one person, if doing so will save others? If helping the world's neediest individuals would require us to put our own lives hold, sacrificing our own personal hopes and ambitions for the benefit of others, then is this what morality requires of us? Can we justify putting the interests of our family and friends ahead of those of strangers?

In this course, we will work to develop your writing and critical thinking by exploring some of the most enduring problems in moral philosophy. By focusing on the precise structure of these puzzles, and how philosophers have tried to resolve them, we will cultivate skills of rigorous analytical thought, critical dialogue, and oral presentation.

Instructor(s): Liz McCabe

Description:

The sitcom was a mainstay of mainstream cultural life in the US from the mid-20th century through at least the early 21st century--and fans of the genre's gems continue to grow. From I Love Lucy to Good Times to Parks and Recreation and beyond, a genre often mocked for its formulaic plots, canned laughs, and bland vibes has also been enduringly beloved. New swells of fervor keep building around series like Friends, Seinfeld, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as young audiences discover the nostalgic pleasures of shows made well before they were born.

What is it about the sitcom that keeps us coming back? How have experiments with the form variously met or fervently side-stepped the cultural and political issues of their times? What can the sitcom teach us about core concepts of narrative study, like plot, character, and genre? And how has literature anticipated and grappled with this pop form? We will watch an array of sitcoms, sampling shows chronologically since the mid-1950's. Course readings will include several poems, pieces of short fiction, and a play, pulling from writers such as P.G. Wodehouse, Don DeLillo, Jericho Brown, and Anne Washburn.

Instructor(s): Katherine Hoffman

Description: Stories can communicate information or entertain, but they also connect, persuade, and mobilize people. This seminar explores storytelling as communicative practice, individual creation, and anthropological subject. We will look at diverse oral traditions in the US and abroad, personal narratives, and digital media. Just as importantly, we will study how organizations and activists use stories to raise awareness, inspire action, and shape public opinion. Along the way, we'll ask how stories are shaped by power and resistance to it and what stories reveal about identity and community. Students will experiment with crafting their own personal narratives, analyzing those of others, and discovering how narrative connects people across time and space.

Instructor(s): Daniel Horton

Description: The challenge of sustainability to "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" has evolved over the past few decades. This course will introduce fundamental concepts of sustainability, consider the application of these concepts in diverse societal, economic, and cultural settings, and explore the potential of climate science and sustainable development to act as forces for environmental and social justice.

Instructor(s): Robert Ryder

Description:

From automata to cyborgs, this course explores ways in which mechanical devices have served as models to gain a deeper understanding of the human and nature in German literature, philosophy, film, and music. While the course is structured around the short prose and poetry of Eichendorff, Kafka, and Wiener, as well as Jünger’s Glass Bees and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, we will also read excerpts from significant texts by La Mettrie, Descartes, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Friedrich Kittler.

The course material will not only echo each other’s concerns and contexts, but will also allow us to ask significant questions that are as historically determined as they are philosophically oriented: how does the eighteenth-century automaton become a central symbol for the debate over the mind/body relationship? What is the relationship between the human worker and the machine, and the machine and the diabolical? In what way does the introduction of the machine redefine both “labor” and “war” in the twentieth century? And perhaps above all: in what ways does the writing process take on mechanical attributes, from the typewriter to Kafka’s torture machine?

Instructor(s): Stephanie Knezz

Description:

Biased interpretations of scientific results have been used to justify oppression based on race, gender, and other axes of identity for centuries. It was often argued that people of different races and different genders were fundamentally different, and as such their roles in society should differ as well. Improved scientific data has helped debunk many of these claims, but cracks in scientific communication keep some of these old narratives alive. While today many people reject the claim that race and gender have substantial effect on a person's abilities or capacity, these claims are alive and well in other spaces. How did science help facilitate these claims in the first place? How can scientists communicate and clarify the truth about race, gender, and ability? What are the cracks in the structure of science that allow scientific results to get manipulated?

In this course, we will explore the role of science in historical oppression based on race and gender. We will identify key scientific studies and their subsequent legacy to reveal the precarious nature of scientific interpretation in the hands of biased individuals. We will discuss how power structures can infiltrate scientific integrity and propose safeguards to prevent this kind of infiltration in the present day and the future.

Instructor(s): Tessie Liu

Description:

Through the autumn and winter of 1799 in central France, a naked boy was seen swimming and drinking in streams, climbing trees, digging for roots and bulbs, and running at great speed on all fours. He was captured in January 1800 by local farmers and brought to Paris. This “wild boy” from Aveyron became an overnight sensation, the object of curiosity and endless speculations about the relationship between instinct and intelligence and questions about the differences between humans and animals. A young doctor Jean-Marc- Gaspard Itard, who undertook the task of socializing and educating the wild child, carefully recorded the boy’s progress. Itard’s work ultimately lead to the transformation of the treatment of mental retardation and to a revolution in childhood education that is reflected in every preschool program in our time.

This course introduces students to the philosophical and attitudinal changes regarding nature, childhood, and family life that enabled society to view the “wild boy” not as a freak or savage, but as a person inherently capable of civility, sensibility, and intelligence. The story of the “wild boy “teaches why it is important for humans to treat nature with respect and not fear. In order to protect the human rights of the boy, society must extend protection to the non-human beings among us. The course is designed for students interested in intellectual history, environmental history, psychology, and education.

Instructor(s): Ginger Pennington

Description:

Can we trust what we see online? How do deepfakes, AI-generated text, and algorithmic echo chambers shape what we believe? This seminar examines psychological and social forces behind misinformation while developing skills in critical reading, research, and academic writing. We'll explore how human cognition makes us vulnerable to deception, why institutions have been losing credibility, and what individuals and societies can do about it.

Readings draw from psychology and related fields. Writing assignments progress from analyzing persuasive strategies to constructing evidence-based arguments, with opportunities for revision based on feedback. Students will learn to pose compelling questions, evaluate sources, build arguments, and write for different audiences. Topics include: cognitive biases, conspiracy theories, scientific expertise, fact-checking effectiveness, and AI's impact on truth.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Weintritt

Description: How does a work of literature become a “classic?” What separates a classic from all the other good books that exist? What belongs in our educational curriculum or “What to Watch” lists, and who decides? In this course, students will practice "thinking through writing" as we divide our attention between one classic, Vergil's Aeneid, and the critical apparatus that has maintained its special status for millennia.

Instructor(s): James Mahoney

Description:

Why are some countries richer than others? Why have some countries witnessed repeated industrial transformations, whereas others have economies that remain significantly non-industrial and agricultural? When and how did certain countries “get ahead” of others in the global economy? To what extent can less-developed countries “catch up” with more developed ones? How does “globalization” affect these chances? These are some of the questions that we will explore in this class.

The goal of the seminar is to enhance our understanding of differences in levels of development among countries of the world, and to explore competing hypotheses designed to explain those differences. We will examine both the contemporary global economy and the historical processes that brought the current situation into being.

Instructor(s): Julia Oliver Rajan

Description:

Today’s job market values hands-on experience just as much as classroom learning. Research shows that volunteering can increase employment prospects by 30% and make candidates up to 80% more attractive to employers. Yet college students volunteer at lower rates than both their parents and high school students.

This seminar not only encourages students to engage in local volunteer opportunities that offer real-world experience, skill-building, and career exploration, but it is also a writing-intensive course. Through reflective writing and essays on a range of social issues, students strengthen their critical thinking and communication skills.

By dedicating just 8 hours to community service, students gain practical insight, develop a deeper sense of purpose, and improve their writing while enhancing their overall employability.