FYS Fall 2025 Course Descriptions

Please note that this schedule may be subject to change. Students are encouraged not only to revisit this page, but also to confirm the course listings and see the scheduled days and times in the online Directory of Classes.

FYS BC1001.001

ARTFUL ADAPTATIONS

Monica Cohen

Can the violent fantasies of a fairytale shape romantic comedy? Can dance tell the same story as classical tragedy? What does Bollywood have to do with Renaissance England? Can ancient mythology animate American slave narrative? As biologists ask why does life appear in such a dazzling array of forms, this class asks why do certain stories get told and retold in such a dazzling array of varieties? Using as possible textual anchors Snow White, Medea, and Romeo and Juliet, this course will explore poems, short stories, plays, novels, paintings, films, musicals, dance, illustration, advertisement, song, memes, and other cultural objects to consider the accretion of meaning that results when stories cross, historical, cultural, and generic borders.

FYS BC1001.002

DRAMA, THEATRE, AND ART

Patricia Denison

Drama, Theatre, and Art will consider the ways in which the performing arts and the visual arts help change the ways we see art and life. Beginning with reimagined classics and Shakespeare’s plays, we will move to the 18th-21st centuries and note how views of individual agency, social justice, and collective responsibility have changed over time. We will also ask what the performing arts and visual arts of the past have to say about issues confronted in the arts of the present. This will help us to understand how evolving aesthetic movements such as realism, impressionism, and modernism promote and critique our cultural perspectives and our social values. Plays may include Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, Euripides' The Trojan Women, Sally Carson's Crooked Cross, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Yasmina Reza’s Art; novels include Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; musicals include Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. We will attend NYC productions. Art from the Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and other sites will promote student engagement, visual and verbal interactions, and cross disciplinary conversations.

FYS BC1001.003

STORYTELLING

Michael Shelichach

Why do we tell stories? Why do we feel a need to relate the things that happen to us? Why do writers and artists make things up? In this section of First-Year Seminar, we will explore these questions as well as others connected to the fundamental practice of storytelling. We will read and discuss short stories, novels, and memoirs that reflect on or call into question the narrator’s reasons for telling the story. We will also consider essays by literary critics, psychologists, and scientists on the human impulse to narrate. Literary texts may include works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Haruki Murakami, and Carmen Maria Machado. Critical and theoretical texts may include works by Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion.

FYS BC1001.004

CREATIVITY & INSPIRATION

Christopher Prodoehl

Where do creative ideas come from? The Muses, according to Plato. The unconscious, according to some later thinkers. One thing both answers share is the thought that creative ideas come from something “other than” or “not controlled by” the creator – or, as we’ll put it, that creativity requires inspiration. In this class, we will explore this and related ideas in Western thinking about creativity. In doing so, we’ll examine how creative people themselves have described their own creative process and experiences. We’ll examine approaches to creativity from the Taoist tradition, comparing them with the Western approaches that will be our main focus. At the end of the class, we’ll think about whether computer programs can be creative, and what it might mean for claims about inspiration if they can be.

FYS BC1001.005

MIGRANT NARRATIVES

Duygu Ula

This first-year seminar brings together texts, films and contemporary art that focus on migrant, immigrant, refugee, expat and exile experiences. We will explore how migrant subjects negotiate dominant discourses of nationality and citizenship, and how their identities as migrants intersect with their other positionalities, with a particular emphasis on race, gender and queerness. Some questions we will consider: How do authors (re)define concepts such as immigrant, refugee, exile, or border? How are contemporary issues in immigration framed and depicted in media, and how might we respond to these? How do immigrants, migrants and refugees negotiate belonging when they cross cultural, national, linguistic and religious borders? How do these authors, filmmakers and artists resist erasure and complicate our understanding of home, belonging and identity?

FYS BC1001.006

ON FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN

Elizabeth Weybright

How do we reﬂect on the intimacies of friendship, and what might be particular to such intimacies between women? What makes a friendship good or bad? What tensions or correspondences might we trace between friendship and adjacent categories of relationality—’frenemies,’ sisterhood, lovers? In this course, we will apply close analytical examinations of literary and cultural texts in order to theorize the various shapes friendship may take. Throughout the semester, we will question how the friendships we encounter are situated within and/or against a variety of cultural and socioeconomic contexts. In doing so, we will explore friendship’s conceptual role in narratives of emotional development, education and intellectual life, work, community, and domesticity. Literary and theoretical texts may include works by Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Kamila Shamsie, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Jean Chen Ho, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Anahit Behrooz, Roxane Gay, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Selections from ﬁlm and television may include the tv dramatization of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Georgiana Cavendish in The Duchess, among others. In discussions and writing assignments both formal and creative, we will consider how the (un)friendly relationships represented in these texts shift, break, and thrive given the conditions under which they are conducted.

FYS BC1001.007

POETRY, IDENTITY, WORD SORCERY

Quincy Jones

Poetry is a very complicated series of words found in perpetually dust-covered books written by white men who died a half of century before you were born. Or is it? Poetry is archaic. Poetry is academic. Poetry is hard. Or in the words of Ntozake Shange, it’s “razzamatazz hocus pocus zippity-do-dah.” The magic of poetry is not in its mystery, but in its ability to connect with people, and to connect people with people, even across space and time. In this class we will explore how poetry speaks to identity, speaks to history, and speaks intersections of race, gender, sexuality, tragedy, triumph, and trauma. We will read poetry – mostly contemporary poets, mostly female-identiﬁed poets, mostly poets of color, and mostly poets from the margins – read theories on poetry, and maybe try our hand at a little poetry writing. Readings will include such authors as Tina Chang, Yolanda Wisher, Jillian Weise, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Tracie Morris, Audre Lorde, Laylia Long Soldier, and the word sorceress herself Sonia Sanchez.

FYS BC1001.008

A PLACE TO LIVE: FINDING SHELTER IN GLOBAL CINEMA

Daniella Gitlin

Beginning with the 15-minute British documentary Housing Problems (1935), this course will explore films and literature from across the globe which take having a place to live as a central theme. We will discuss the visual as well as literary storytelling techniques and moral problems the filmmakers and writers engage, reading critical texts to inform our conversations. Some questions guiding us will include: How have filmmakers and writers across cultures and decades and genres—both documentary and fiction—encountered the idea of home or its absence through their work? What are the stories about family and kinship told by these films and texts? What ethical challenges arise when poverty and suffering are aestheticized? What are the specific affordances of film, on the one hand, and literature, on the other when it comes to elucidating the stakes of having a roof over one's head?

FYS BC1001.009

WRITING & THE ENVIRONMENT

Linn Mehta

Beginning with the Popol Vuh, the Mayan myth of creation, which records the ﬁrst moment of contact with the Spanish conquistadors about 1555, we will explore American nature writing up to the present. Description and interpretation of nature has shaped artistic representation from the very beginning of human history. We will look at indigenous narratives, at activist texts, and at writing and images from the Americas in relation to selected European works, moving from Crevecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer” (1765) to excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude” in England (1798), which in turn inﬂuenced Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836) and Thoreau’s writing in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1851). Twentieth century works include selections from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962); and John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid” (1971). Painting, photography and ﬁlms will be included, with images from the Hudson River School, photographs of National Parks, and contemporary environmental ﬁlms. An essential element is the study of activist organizations alongside international collaborations (COP27), the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and issues of environmental justice. Finally, we will both write and analyze contemporary environmental journalism, including Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature” and Liz Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.

FYS BC1001.010

ACTIVISM, PERFORMANCE, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Shayoni Mitra

This seminar examines how different publics engage in the political process through performance. We start our exploration with the notion of "the publics" as introduced by the twentieth-century German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and then expand our view of this concept to the contemporary political setting. We will look at both how elected representatives use theatrical tropes to shape their public personas, and equally at how popular protests stage large scale public interventions. How might performance as a series of citational strategies allow us to think about the political process? We will draw heavily on the works of feminist performance scholars like Judith Butler, Shannon Jackson and Peggy Phelan, who discuss the different ways in which gendered bodies navigate public space.

FYS BC1001.011

REACTING TO THE PAST

Mark Carnes

In these seminars, students play complex historical role-playing games informed by classic texts. After an initial set-up phase, class sessions are run by students. These seminars are speaking- and writing-intensive, as students pursue their assigned roles objectives by convincing classmates of their views. Examples of games played in First-Year Seminar Reacting class include: 1) The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. explores a pivotal moment following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, when democrats sought to restore democracy while critics, including the supporters of Socrates, proposed alternatives. The key text is Plato's Republic. 2) Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor examines a dispute between Confucian purists and pragmatists within the Hanlin Academy, the highest echelon of the Ming bureaucracy, taking Analects of Confucius as the central text. 3) The Trial of Anne Hutchinson revisits a conflict that pitted Puritan dissenter Anne Hutchinson and her supporters against Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and the orthodox ministers of New England. Students work with testimony from Hutchinsons trial as well as the Bible and other texts. 4) Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman investigates the struggle between radical labor activists and woman suffragists for the hearts and minds of Bohemians, drawing on foundational works by Marx, Freud, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.

FYS BC1001.012

REACTING TO THE PAST

Jennifer Worth

FYS BC1001.013

READING DANCE

Kate Glasner

Dance as action takes place in a variety of places and by organisms, and is represented in literature, film, the proscenium stage in just as many ways as there are forms of dance. Reading Dance will explore how authors employ movement to enrich narrative, reflect the human condition, view class and gender, experience how choreographers use text to support a silent form of communication and consider choreography itself text. Primary sources will include Jane Austen, Renée D'Aoust, Ntozake Shange, T.S. Eliot, Martha Graham, Michael Jackson, and Brian Friel.

FYS BC1001.014

ART, SEX & AMERICAN CULTURE

Pamela Cobrin

Sex is the ultimate forbidden public topic and yet from the New England Puritans' sermons to Bill Clinton's (in)famous affair, sex has often been publicly staged in dramatic, literary, religious, political, legal and social forums. In this seminar, we will explore how issues of sex and sexuality have insinuated themselves into the formation of American identity. We will examine texts from the seventeenth century to the present with a particular emphasis on the arts, politics and sex. Texts include Puritan sermons, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, literature from Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, and theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler.

FYS BC1001.015

ÉMIGRÉ VOICES

John Wright

What happens to language and identity in immigration? To what degree can a "lost" home culture continue to affect its carriers in their new cultural matrix? What about the children of emigre parents? Readings will come from emigre authors who came to North America from the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or Eastern Europe more broadly. Naturally, these authors are a varied group. They come from various places and generations and have varied overarching concerns, such as fractured identity, survival techniques that look unusual within their new cultures, and the necessity of conscious self-fashioning. While many readings assigned for the course are works of literary fiction, the instructor will provide some historical and cultural context for each work during class meetings. And Art Spiegelman's work Maus will be treated at some length as an emigre work that has elements of autobiography, diary, and biography of an emigre parent. For the final project, each student will choose an assigned work of their liking and write an original exploration of her selected topic (to be chosen from a list or created in consultation with the instructor), or she will do the same assignment in the form of a presentation to the seminar during the last two weeks of our meetings.

FYS BC1001.016

MEMORY

Alexandra Horowitz

Memory is arguably the most important faculty that we possess. Not surprisingly, memory has been a ubiquitous topic in poetry, science, ﬁction, and in the media. Ironically, memory's value is perhaps best understood when it ceases to exist. Indeed, it isn't hard to imagine the devastation that comes with memory loss. In this course, we will survey various components of memory, including its role in writing and history, and its existence in various non-human populations. In addition, we will explore the fragility of memory, including distortions, unusual memories, and basic forgetting. Readings will include poems, theoretical essays, scientiﬁc articles, and ﬁction. Assignments will consist of essays, opinion pieces, and creative stories. Readings will include works from Emily Dickinson, Mary Carruthers, Francis Yates, Aristotle, William James, Elizabeth Loftus, Spinoza, Luria, J.L. Borges, S. Freud, Oliver Sacks and others.

FYS BC1001.017

MEMORY

Lisa Son

FYS BC1001.018

WITCHES

Wendy Schor-Haim

This course is about witches…but what are witches about? Witches are about gender, sexuality, fear, and authority, among other things. From Mesopotamian goddess worship to the frenzied witch hunts of early modern Europe to the child-devouring crones of folk tales from cultures around the world, we’ll delve into what the witch reveals about deeply-held cultural beliefs, desires, and anxieties.

FYS BC1001.019

VOICE

Lauren Ninoshvili

How has the Western philosophical privileging of mind over body marginalized the individual, embodied voice in its resounding singularity, material substance, and political potential? Thinking beyond the Western experience, what is at stake when “voice” is invoked in connection to speech, song, and social agency across a broad spectrum of culturally and historically speciﬁc practices? How can attending critically to voice make us better listeners, more ethical citizens, and more empathetic human beings? This course will be an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of voice as both embodied instrument and metaphor for identity, social position, and power. Course materials and discussion topics include sound recordings, ﬁlms, and literary and ethnographic texts; interpretive frames draw on anthropology, performance studies, critical race studies, and feminist philosophy. Writing assignments encourage students to be reﬂexive as they hone their own literary voice and practice representing the voices of others in written form.

FYS BC1001.020

ART, WRITING, & ARCHIVES

Veronica Tello

The archive has become crucial for artists and writers seeking to shape our understanding of the present. The archives they engage with can be filled with yellowing records, decontextualized photographs, scratched film, barely legible correspondence, pixelated images, corrupt files, and other aging materials. At times, they are plagued by omissions—absent voices, missing information, and broken links. In other instances, they are reduced to rubble after conflict, redacted by state or corporate organizations, or have disintegrated following environmental catastrophe. Whether tactile, conceptual, or ephemeral, the archive prompts artists and writers to undertake extraordinary initiatives to address the politics of being present with history. How do we witness, share experiences, narrate, or appear through the archive? This course aims to elucidate how and why the archive, as both a material and concept, is vital for shaping our subjectivities as individuals and communities, and our practices as writers and artists. The course introduces students to influential theories by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Tina Campt, and Saidiya Hartman, visual art practices by Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld, Arthur Jaffa, and Archie Moore, as well as the poetry and literature of Gloria Anzaldúa and Justin Torres, among others. Additionally, it encourages students to engage with archives as a method for constructing their sense of contemporary history, with the option to work across various modes of writing or creative practice.

FYS BC1001.021

To come

FYS BC1001.022

To come