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COURSE CATALOGUE
FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR
First-Year Seminar
332G Milbank Hall
854-3577
www.barnard.edu/fysem/
This program is supervised by the First-Year Seminar Committee:
Professor of Classics: Helene Foley
Professors of English: James Basker, Lisa Gordis (Director)
Professors of History: Herbert Sloan
Professor of Political Science: Flora Davidson
Senior Lecturers in English: Pamela Cobrin, Patricia Denison, Margaret Vandenburg
Senior Lecturer in French: Laurie Postlewate
First-Year Class Dean: Lisa Hollibaugh
Assistant Provost: Hilary Lieberman Link
Instruction in the First-Year Seminar Program is provided by the following regular members of the Barnard College faculty:
Professors: Lee Bell (Education), Taylor Carman (Philosophy), Mark Carnes (History), Elizabeth Castelli (Religion), Flora Davidson (Political Science and Urban Studies), Alan Gabbey (Philosophy), Lisa Gordis (English), Helene Foley (Classics), Robert McCaughey (History), Stephanie Pfirman (Environmental Science), Richard Pious (Political Science), Anne Prescott (English), Jonathan Rieder (Sociology), Herbert Sloan (History)
Associate Professors: Mindy Aloff (Dance), Hilary Callahan (Biology), Celia Deutsch (Religion), Sharon Harrison (Economics), Janna Levin (Physics and Astronomy), Kristina Milnor (Classics), Patricia Stokes (Psychology), Caroline Weber (French), Guobin Yang (Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures)
Assistant Professors: Stephanie Beardman (Philospohy), Orlando Bentancor (Spanish and Latin American Cultures), Ronald Briggs (Spanish and Latin American Cultures), Deborah Coen (History), John Magyar (Chemistry), Ayten Gündogdu (Political Science), Sun-Chul Kim (Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures), Kristin Mammen (Economics), Sonia Pereira (Economics),Lisa Son (Psychology), Alexandra Horowitz (Psychology), Rebecca Stanton (Slavic)
Lecturers and Other Faculty: Laura Ciolkowski (English), Pamela Cobrin (English), Dorothy Denburg (Dean of the College), Patricia Denison (English), Margaret Ellsberg (English), Georgette Fleischer (English), Lisa Hollibaugh (First-Year Class Dean), Mara Kaspher (Slavic), Gale Kenny (Religion), Jenny Labendz (First-Year Seminar), Katherine Levin (English), Linn Cary Mehta (English), John Pagano (English), Stefan Pedatella (English), Cary Plotkin (English), Laurie Postlewate (French), Jennifer Rosenthal (English), Judith Shapiro (Anthropology), Timea Szell (English), Maxine Weisgrau (Anthropology)
For a complete list of
faculty on leave see:
http://www.barnard.edu/provost/facleavelist.html
Mission
Every Barnard first-year student is required to take a First-Year Seminar during her first or second semester at Barnard. First-Year Seminars are designed to develop further the essential and prerequisite skills a student brings to Barnard in critical reading and analysis, writing, and effective speaking. First-Year Seminars are intellectually challenging interdisciplinary courses which explore important issues through significant texts ranging across genres and historical periods. Seminars also serve to initiate students into the intellectual community of the college.
Student Learning Objectives
- Students in First-Year Seminars will develop their skills in critical reading and analysis, writing, and effective speaking.
- They will assess and use textual evidence in support of oral and written arguments.
- Students will explore important issues through significant texts ranging across genres, disciplines, and historical periods.
First-Year Seminars fall into three categories: Reinventing Literary History, Reacting to the Past, and Special Topics.
Reinventing Literary History seminars explore literary history through a range of lenses. They are grouped in four clusters: Seminars on the Legacy of the Mediterranean feature classic texts representing key intellectual moments that have shaped Western culture, as well as excursions to the opera, the theatre, and museums. Offering revisionist responses to the constraints of canonicity, seminars on the Americas, Women and Culture, and Global Literature cross national boundaries, exploring the literary history of the Americas, the role of women in culture, and various approaches to global literature.
In Reacting to the Past seminars, students participate in role-playing games that enable them to relive important intellectual debates in three separate historical moments. In The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C., studentsdraw on Plato’s Republic as well as excerpts from Thucydides, Xenophon, and other contemporary sources to debate the prospects for Athenian democracy in the wake of the Peloponnesian War. In Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor , students study the Analects of Confucius and apply Confucian thought to issues of governance during the Ming dynasty. The final semester’s final game varies by section. Some sections explore seventeenth-century Massachusetts, drawing on the Bible, Calvin's Institutes, and colonial trial testimony to participate in The Trial of Anne Hutchinson. Other sections draw on texts by Marx, Freud, and Wollstonecraft to explore the contest between women's suffrage advocates and labor activists for the hearts and minds of "Bohemian" Greenwich Village in the spring of 1913.
Special Topics seminars reflect the variety of faculty interests and expertise, and thus vary in topic from year to year. They offer students and faculty opportunities to explore topics of interest across disciplinary lines, genres, and historical periods.
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