Information About First-Year Seminar Workshop Spring 2025

To students taking First-Year Seminar in Spring, 2025:

This spring, the First-Year Seminar (FYS) Program is offering two sections of FYS "Workshop," a four-credit version of FYS designed for students who feel they would benefit from extra support with critical reading and academic writing skills. FYS Workshop fulfills the FYS requirement and is equally as rigorous as FYS. There are three main differences:

• In addition to regular seminar meetings twice per week, FYS Workshop students meet one-on-one with a Writing Fellow for one hour every other week, giving you an opportunity to get feedback from and discuss your ideas with a trained peer throughout the semester.
• Each section of FYS Workshop is worth 4 credits (instead of 3).
• Each section of FYS Workshop is slightly smaller (capped at 14 students).

If you think you would benefit from the extra writing support FYS Workshop offers, please fill out this short application by Thursday, November 7th at 5pm. You will be notified (via email) about whether we can offer you a spot before the early registration period begins in November. You will receive special sign-up information at that time.

See course descriptions below.

If you have any questions about the FYS Workshop Program, feel free to email Professor Lie-Spahn at clie@barnard.edu.

First-Year Seminar Workshop Courses for Spring, 2025:

Dead and Undead

MW 2:40-3:55pm

Professor Penelope Usher

What does it mean to be dead? Why the fascination—across time and culture—with conceiving of ways in which the dead can become un-dead? And how is being undead different from being alive? To investigate and trouble the boundaries between life and death (and un-death), we will analyze works from various genres and media, discussing near-death experiences, beating-heart cadavers, and a range of figures including zombies, ghosts, and other revenants. Objects of study include texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Ovid, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Nalo Hopkinson, and Mary Shelley; music by Camille Saint-Saëns; artwork by Hans Holbein and Breughel; television and film (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie); and more.

Border Stories

TR 4:10-5:25pm

Professor Francesca Ochoa

The topic of this Seminar course takes an interdisciplinary approach to thinking about, and traversing, the constructs of the border. The U.S.- Mexico border delimits more than nations; it is both a political and a social geography, marked by bodies of water, mountains, walls, ideologies, repression, and resistance. The crisis currently taking place at the border is an unfolding story with many narrators. We will study literary texts: fiction, poetry, and memoir written by those who know the border, and borderlands, intimately. We will also engage histories, social movement doctrine, and media coverage to mine the stories they tell.