Course Listings
First-Year Writing: Critical Conversations
First-Year Writing (FYW) courses invite students into the vibrant scholarly life of the college. Working in small, discussion-based seminar classes over the course of one semester, we read challenging literary texts and critical scholarship, helping students to develop fundamental skills in analysis and academic writing that allow them to take their place in vitally important scholarly conversations. Students may choose from a variety of special topics that focus on a particular literary tradition, theme, or phenomenon (see course descriptions for details).
A “critical conversation” is a conversation about ideas. It is sophisticated and thoughtful rather than one-sided and simplistic; it’s not about finding one right answer but rather about closely analyzing all of the evidence at hand and discovering something meaningful. By communicating what you discover clearly and cogently, you add to the broader scholarly conversation. When engaged in a critical conversation with other scholars, you consider their ideas in ways that help you develop your own thinking, rather than merely agreeing or disagreeing with what others have to say. The critical reading, discussion, and academic writing skills we focus on in First-Year Writing provide a foundation that crosses disciplinary boundaries and will help you in all of your courses.
Please see the list of First-Year Writing: Critical Conversation courses for Fall 2026 below. To view the full course description for a particular course, please click on the course name.
For First-Year Writing Workshop course listings, please continue to scroll down.
Fall 2026 Course Offerings
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-001 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-002 (section 2)
Instructor: Benjamin Breyer
Who has the authority to decide what counts as illness? This course examines how medical knowledge shapes the way bodies are understood and how diagnoses gain legitimacy. We begin with David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches, which recounts his childhood experience with cancer treatment and the loss of his voice after surgery. Through close reading of its visual storytelling and narrative structure, students examine how illness is represented and how authority operates within the family and the hospital. The course then turns to Porochista Khakpour’s memoir Sick, an account of chronic illness and years of misdiagnosis. Students interpret Khakpour’s narrative through theoretical approaches that question how medical institutions define illness and determine whose symptoms are recognized. In the final unit, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals expands the focus by examining how patients challenge medical authority and reclaim control over the meaning of illness and the language used to describe their bodies.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-003 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-004 (section 2)
Instructor: Duygu Ula
In this course we will read texts by feminist and queer authors that complicate and subvert mainstream and dominant scripts about gender, sexuality, race, nation, and class. What kinds of narratives do mainstream ideas regarding these categories leave out? How have authors resisted erasure through queering and subverting mainstream categories? How might we, as readers and critical thinkers, queer the script through our scholarly practice? Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship that calls for a radical restructuring of the ways we see and shape our worlds, we will consider how authors push back against dominant ideologies through literary, scholarly and cinematic works.
Texts are subject to change, but will likely include a selection from the following list: works by Nella Larsen, Carmen Maria Machado, Safia Elhillo, Celine Sciamma and Cheryl Dunye, and critical theory by Laura Mulvey, bell hooks, and Judith Butler. Required course texts will not exceed $10; in addition, all course texts are available as links and e-reserves through the library.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-005 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-006 (section 2)
Instructor: Nathan Gorelick
Attention is the foundation of investigation, action, and intention. It means concentration and deliberation. It can also mean distraction and confusion. Quietly reading a difficult work of literature, puzzling over a math problem, revising a paper for class, or cooking an elaborate meal are forms of attention. So is endlessly scrolling through social media, binge-watching a television series, or strolling aimlessly through the city. Where and how we use our attention is the foundation, the bedrock, of nearly everything we think and do. It is therefore unsurprising that gathering and directing our attention is also an enormous, lucrative industry. In this course we will study the science and philosophy of attention alongside the history of the "attention economy" and evolving techniques and technologies of attention harvesting. We will explore these subjects while reflecting upon and writing about our own habits of paying attention. By paying attention to attention, we will nurture a brighter awareness of the many interests vying for our time, mental engagement, money, our very lives, and of our abilities to scrutinize, critically examine, or resist our entrapment within the modern attention industry.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-007
Instructor: Alexandra Watson
How can the arts, particularly the literary arts, serve as tools for liberation and social change? How can writing be an act of defiance against forces of oppression? In this class, we will engage with texts that challenge dominant ideologies, resist oppressive structures, and envision new communities. We will attend to subtle and overt subversion in both the form and content of the works we discuss. The literary and theoretical works we read will provide models for creative intervention in public conversations around race, gender, sexuality, and class. Literary works may include works by Layli Long Soldier, Hala Alyan, Solmaz Sharif, Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Octavia Butler, Isabel Allende, and others. Theory may include writings by Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and others.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-008
Instructor: Meredith Benjamin
.In this First-Year Writing course, we’ll examine a series of questions centered on bodies and desires. How is the body both constructed and policed through narratives of gender, race, class, and sexuality? How are bodies and desire mediated through and represented in language? We’ll consider how bodies become not just sites of objectification or of power but also of pleasure. We’ll think about the politics of respectability, in questioning who can be a subject, rather than object, of desire. In our analyses, we’ll work to challenge fixed or binary understandings of gender and power. Readings are subject to change but may include: Nella Larsen's Passing, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, short stories by Luisa Valenzuela, Carmen Maria Machado and/or ir'ene lara Silva, poems by Sally Wen Mao and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and conversation texts by Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, John Berger, and/or Judith Butler.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-009 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-010 (section 2)
Instructor: Andrew Lynn
How does one represent things that seem too large, or too complex, to understand? What rhetorical strategies of compression, exemplification, typification, or visualization do we need to make such events or objects comprehensible? And what sorts of risks – aesthetic, ethical, political – do we run in trying to do so? In this course, we’ll move through a number of writers who have grappled with these basic problems of representation, focusing our attention on three particular kinds of excessively large objects: wars, cities, and economic systems.
Objects in this course may include: literature from Caryl Churchill, Teju Cole, Arthur Conan Doyle, Amitav Ghosh, Patricia Highsmith, Homer, Jamaica Kincaid, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf; maps from Charles Joseph Minard and John Snow; criticism and theory from Jane Jacobs, Immanuel Kant, Georg Lukács, Franco Moretti, Georg Simmel, Susan Sontag, and Raymond Williams. Course costs will not exceed $30.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-011
Instructor: Vrinda Condillac
In this course, we will study the way culture influences how we make sense of what we see. We will examine how power is exercised by making people feel as though they are always being seen, how this surveillance polices the way gender, race, class, and sexuality are expressed, and how people perform their identities to reinforce or push back against this policing. Literary texts will include Passing by Nella Larsen, "The Husband Stitch" by Carmen Maria Machado, Fantomina by Eliza Haywood, and the films Paris is Burning and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Secondary texts will include John Berger, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jack Halberstam, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Laura Mulvey.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-013 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-014 (section 2)
Instructor: Quincy Scott Jones
"The Future is Female" except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this class we’ll look at how speculative literature looks at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-015 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-016 (section 2)
Instructor: Michael Shelichach
In his now-classic book Capitalist Realism, cultural theorist Mark Fisher writes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Why is it so difficult for us to envision living under a different system? How deeply has capitalism shaped our assumptions and expectations, our hopes and predictions, our conscious and unconscious minds, our very desires? Is it possible for us to develop and implement another way of organizing society? Do we need to?
In this section of First-Year Writing, we will explore these questions and others related to capitalism’s effects on our subjectivities, politics, culture, and environment. We will begin by close reading short stories that consider the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of consumerism, as well as the tensions produced by inequality and class division. We will then turn to Franz Kafka’s influential novella The Metamorphosis and see if we can tease out of its nightmarish plot the contradictions of capitalism identified by its early critics, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Max Weber. Finally, we will use Ling Ma’s recent apocalyptic zombie novel Severance to think through whether capitalism is destined to collapse – and perhaps take the rest of the planet down with it – or whether we can transform ourselves and our civilization first.
Other literary texts might include short works by Lydia Davis, Shirley Jackson, Robert Walser, and Haruki Murakami. Critical and theoretical texts will likely include works by Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Samuel R. Delany, Raymond Williams, and Kohei Saito.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-017 (section 1) & FYWB-BC1001-018 (section 2)
Instructor: Emily Austin
Teenagers inhabit a strange land: in exile from childhood, still immigrating to adulthood. How have different writers mapped the liminal territory of the teenage experience? In this class, we will step away from the rich tradition of realistic Coming-of-Age narratives and explore how genre frameworks—including speculative, horror, fairy tale, gothic, and quest traditions—have been used to illuminate the Teenage Strange. How have writers used the strangeness of genre to render this slice of time? How does genre capture the teenage intersection between public and private inquiry—between larger questions about the world, and more private questions about the self? How does genre construct questions about fear, desire, rage, shame, power, culture, and love? How does it deconstruct reality so it can be seen, investigated, and felt? Readings may include work by Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Alice Sola Kim, Viktor Shklovsky, Jeffrey Eugenides, Helen Oyeyemi, Jia Tolentino, Parul Sehgal, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula K. LeGuin, bell hooks, and others.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-018
Instructor: Quincy Jones
"The Future is Female" except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this class we’ll look at how speculative literature looks at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-019
Instructor: Emily Austin
Teenagers inhabit a strange land: in exile from childhood, still immigrating to adulthood. How have different writers mapped the liminal territory of the teenage experience? In this class, we will step away from the rich tradition of realistic Coming-of-Age narratives and explore how genre frameworks—including speculative, horror, fairy tale, gothic, and quest traditions—have been used to illuminate the Teenage Strange. How have writers used the strangeness of genre to render this slice of time? How does genre capture the teenage intersection between public and private inquiry—between larger questions about the world, and more private questions about the self? How does genre construct questions about fear, desire, rage, shame, power, culture, and love? How does it deconstruct reality so it can be seen, investigated, and felt? Readings may include work by Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Alice Sola Kim, Viktor Shklovsky, Jeffrey Eugenides, Helen Oyeyemi, Jia Tolentino, Parul Sehgal, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula K. LeGuin, bell hooks, and others.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-021
Course description and instructor information forthcoming, and will be posted here when available.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-022
Course description and instructor information forthcoming, and will be posted here when available.
Course #: FYWB-BC1001-023
Course description and instructor information forthcoming, and will be posted here when available.
First-Year Writing Workshop
First-Year Writing (FYW) Workshop is a four-credit course designed for students who feel they would benefit from extra preparation for the critical reading and writing that you will do at Barnard. FYW and FYW Workshop are equally rigorous -- both courses have the same critical reading and writing goals, and both courses satisfy your First-Year Writing requirement. FYW Workshop, however, meets 3 days per week instead of 2; it is worth 4 credits instead of 3; and the class sizes are smaller. NOTE: FYW Workshop is only offered in the Fall (not in the Spring).
Read about students' experiences in FYW Workshop here.
Please see the list of First-Year Writing Workshop courses for Fall 2026 below. To view the full course description for a particular course, please click on the course name.
Fall 2026 FYW Workshop Offerings
Course #: FYWB-BC1002-001
Instructor: Penelope Usher
In this class we will read and discuss feminist fairy tales: adaptations of classic tales and newly-imagined stories which—rather than promising a simple and tidy “happily ever after”—privilege female agency and offer up critiques of patriarchal structures. In dialog with texts that center women and other intersecting identities, we will talk about colorism, sexuality, desire, misogyny, motherhood, and more. Analyzing how these texts unmask and challenge various forms of oppression, we will explore how and why the magical and often didactic nature of the fairy tale genre lends itself to thinking critically about our current world and to envisioning more equitable futures. Readings include literary texts by Ovid, Julia Alvarez, Olga Broumas, Charles Perrault, Luisa Valenzuela, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeanette Winterson, Amal El-Mohtar, and Kelly Link. In dialog with these literary texts, we will also engage with various theoretical texts and perspectives; with film (Georges Méliès and Disney’s Frozen); with artwork; and with music (Taylor Swift).
Course #: FYWB-BC1002-002
Instructor: Cecelia Lie-Spahn
In this course, we’ll think of the body as a text we can read—one that both represents and creates intersections between the body, science, and identity. We’ll read literary texts that reveal how scientific authority gets mapped onto the body and embedded in ideas of race, gender, class, sexuality, family, and nation; we’ll also analyze how writers in turn investigate and play with these scientific scripts. How do literary depictions of the body both represent and resist scientific authority? What do they teach us about the "factness" and fluidity of identity and belonging? Readings are subject to change, but will likely include literature by Ovid, Octavia Butler, Amy Bonnaffons, Isabel Allende, and Nella Larsen, as well as select texts from feminist science studies, critical race studies, and queer theory.
Course #: FYWB-BC1002-003
Instructor: Meredith Benjamin
In this First-Year Writing course, we’ll examine a series of questions centered on bodies and desires. How is the body both constructed and policed through narratives of gender, race, class, and sexuality? How are bodies and desire mediated through and represented in language? We’ll consider how bodies become not just sites of objectification or of power but also of pleasure. We’ll think about the politics of respectability, in questioning who can be a subject, rather than object, of desire. In our analyses, we’ll work to challenge fixed or binary understandings of gender and power. Readings are subject to change but may include: Nella Larsen's Passing, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, short stories by Luisa Valenzuela, Carmen Maria Machado and/or ir'ene lara Silva, poems by Sally Wen Mao and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and conversation texts by Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, John Berger, and/or Judith Butler.
Course #: FYWB-BC1002-004
Course description and instructor information forthcoming, and will be posted here when available.