All entering Middlebury students take a First-Year Seminar during their first semester on campus. These seminars are writing intensive courses, limited to 15 students each, and they are taught by regular, full-time faculty members who also serve as students' academic advisers for their first three semesters at Middlebury. Seminar topics, which change from year to year, are selected by the individual professor and generally reflect that faculty member's research interests or an area of expertise not directly addressed in departmental courses. These are not survey courses. Rather they are designed to prick students' intellectual curiosity in a particular subject, and to encourage them to pursue a focused interest in depth. Many of the seminars offer interdisciplinary perspectives; most include activities outside the classroom; all seminars help students develop their reading, thinking, writing, and speaking skills.
Atwater Commons-based Seminars, Fall 2008
This year, eight first-year seminars are based in Atwater Commons. Students enrolled in Commons-based seminars all live in the same dorm, sometimes on the same hall. Animated discussions from the classroom can continue on in the dorm, bringing the academic and residential worlds together naturally and productively.
Here is the list of our Commons-based seminars and their professors:
FYSE 1048 Ecology and Conservation in Vermont (Fall)
The Vermont landscape reflects its history: glaciations, human land-use practices, and natural disturbances have all left their mark. We will explore the ecological history of Vermont, examining how natural and cultural influences have shaped the landscape that we see today. Further, we will explore how these influences interact to both create and solve a number of current conservation issues, including the management of national forests, and protection of endangered species. We will supplement our own explorations with extensive readings from published descriptions of Vermont both past and present. 3 hrs. sem/disc. SCI (S. Trombulak)
FYSE 1114 Classic Comedy: Drama, Film, Theory (Fall)
What is comedy? What are its values and view of life? What makes things funny? Why do we laugh and at what? What should or should not be ridiculed? A consideration of classic comedies and ideas about comedy from Aristophanes through Shakespeare and Moliere, to Shaw, with comparisons to classic comedies of American cinema and other forms of comic expression. Having a sense of humor is a prerequisite of this course. 3 hrs. sem. ART LIT (J. Bertolini)
FYSE 1159 Notions of Self in East Asian Religions (Fall)
How are we to understand our selves? What is the self? How and why have we come into existence? How are we to determine our proper task or role in life? What happens at death? We will consider the major responses East Asian religious traditions offer to these questions. We will read classic religious texts, including early Buddhist and Taoist works and the Analects of Confucius. We will also study autobiographical writings and fictional first-person narratives influenced by these traditions in order to understand how religious ideas contribute to the construction and interpretation of personal identity. PHL AAL (E. Morrison)
FYSE 1236 The Malleable Human (Fall)
Could you be more than you are? In this seminar we will explore possible and potential genetic, mechanical, and chemical modifications to the human form and how they influence our definition of ‘humanness’. The source material for the class will include film, classical literature, contemporary essays, and cutting-edge science writing. Students will create and edit their own non-fiction and fiction writings with the goal of stimulating discourse on human issues surrounding the intersection of technology, biology, and society. 3 hrs. sem. (J. Ward)
FYSE 1237 What is Life? (Fall)
In the small book What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger poses one of the great questions of our existence and concludes as a scientist that there must be an undiscovered law underlying life. Are we just the product of a blind watchmaker, the forces of physics, or is there something more to life? We will try to address these and other questions about the essence of life as we look at the early history of molecular biology by repeating classical experiments and by reading four books: Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life?, Freeman Dyson’s Origins of Life, James Watson's The Double Helix, and Matt Ridley’s Genome. 3 hrs. sem./ lab. SCI (S. Sontum)
FYSE 1254 Literature and Liberation (Fall)
When Abraham Lincoln finally met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), he is reported to have said: “So, this is the little lady that started the Civil War.” Published only one decade later, but a whole world away, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s controversial novel What is to be Done? (1863) has been described as the single work that “supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.” In this seminar we will study two novels that exerted an immense impact on society, had a powerful effect on human lives, and, in short, demonstrated the power to make history. LIT SOC CMP 3 hrs. sem. (M. Katz)
FYSE 1256 Captains, Kings, and Caudillos (Fall)
In this seminar we will consider the literary manifestations of caudillismo in both Spain and Latin America from the times of El Cid to the present. How is the “strong man” portrayed in fiction? How are women represented in this literary category? The historical and political background will be considered in our study of works by Lope de Vega, Sarmiento, Valle Inclán, and Julia Alvarez, among others. 3 hrs. sem. LIT AAL (R. Veguez)
FYSE 1257 Laughing Through Tears: The Comedy of Beckett, Pinter, Albee, and Frayn (Fall)
In this seminar we will explore various comic forms in the plays of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Michael Frayn, including farce, satire, comedy of manners and menace, situation comedy, and parody. Students will be engaged in class discussion, oral presentations, film viewing, and extensive written work. Acting experience is helpful but not a requirement. Many of the principles of comedy will be based on Henri Bergson’s On Laughter. 3 hrs. sem. LIT ART (R. Romagnoli)