First-Year Seminars

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.

This year, eight first-year seminars are based in Brainerd 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 1004 Segregation in America: Baseball's Negro Leagues (Fall)
Like many aspects of American life, organized baseball was segregated, black and white, from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. In this seminar we will examine the absorbing chronicle of baseball's "Negro leagues." We will learn about the great players and teams, and consider how this sporting phenomenon reflects American values and history. We will address important questions about sports and their cultural significance. What do sports tell us about ourselves and our past? Can we understand our cultural heritage by looking through the lens of sports, black baseball in this case? We will also consider how art is created from these historical roots. 3 hrs. sem. CMP NOR (K. Lindholm)

FYSE 1021 Love and Death in Western Europe, 1300-1900 (Fall)
History is not just names and dates; it also encompasses how ordinary people lived and felt. Emotions have a history because they have changed over time. This seminar deals with aspects of the history of desire and fear in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the industrial era. Topics will include sex, marriage, child-rearing, disease, suicide, and the belief in immortality. In addition to works of historical analysis, we will read literary and theoretical sources, including Dante, Goethe, and Freud. Our aim is to understand how common emotions have been altered by social and cultural circumstances. 3 hrs. sem. HIS SOC EUR (P. Monod)

FYSE 1239 Can We Really Do This? Finding Global Warming Solutions (Fall)
Global warming has the potential to affect —dramatically and in most cases negatively— our planet and the well-being of millions for generations to come. In this seminar we will first assess the potential impacts of global warming over the next century and beyond. We will then analyze a broad range of potential solutions, assessing their technological, economic, political, and social feasibility. We will place an emphasis on the developing world, which faces the twin challenges of alleviating poverty and reducing per-capita consumption of carbon-intensive energy. Each student will prepare a detailed policy brief on a particular large-scale solution. 3 hrs. sem. SOC (J. Isham)

FYSE 1242 Cinema and Memory (Fall)
Depicting the experience of memory is a challenge filmmakers have returned to repeatedly throughout cinema’s history. In this seminar we will screen films from around the world to explore the ways in which individual and cultural memory have found expression in cinema. We will screen narrative features, documentaries, and experimental films as we compare the various aesthetic strategies filmmakers from different periods and cultures have used to portray the complex relationships between past and present, real and imagined. Films screened will include After Life; The Bad and the Beautiful; The Long Day Closes; Hiroshima, mon amour; La Jetée; Shoah. 3 hrs. sem. ART CMP (C. Keathley) 

FYSE 1247 Everyday Life in South Africa, 1948-Present (Fall)
In this seminar we will explore some of the social worlds of South Africans amid the country's recent decades of turbulent and dramatic change. We will look at how different groups within the nation's diverse population have understood and experienced the rise of the apartheid system, its demise, and its legacies in their "everyday" lives and interactions. We will draw from various sources - non-fiction, fiction, film, music, and other forms of popular culture - to interpret these social dynamics and their ongoing significance in a post-apartheid society. 3 hrs. sem. HIS SOC AAL (J. Tropp)

FYSE 1249 Food and Choice (Fall)
In this seminar we will examine the choices that we make about food, both as individuals and as a nation. We will consider the importance of food to a culture and take a close look at American food culture. Looking more broadly, we will consider the U.S. response to poverty and hunger, both in the U.S. and abroad. Readings will include selections from The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Pollan and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Kingsolver. In order to help understand poverty in the U.S., we will work with a local agency on hunger issues. 3 hrs. sem. SOC NOR (E. Proctor)

FYSE 1252 Toward a Conservation Paradigm for the 21st Century (Fall)
As we enter the twenty-first century, finding an appropriate way for humans to live sustainably with nature is a central concern for humanity. In this seminar we will examine: (1) approaches to sustainable human communities, including those dealing with agriculture, forestry, and energy generation; (2) tensions between globalism and localism related to sustainability; and (3) methods to protect and restore sustainable natural communities through the preservation of wild lands. We will focus on examples from Vermont and the northeastern United States. 3 hrs. sem. SOC NOR (C. Klyza)

FYSE 1258 Performing Culture: Bodies Moving and Meaning (Fall)
In this seminar we will learn to think, research, write, and share our findings about bodies in motion from a cultural studies perspective. We will examine and compare movement behavior in settings as varied as athletic competitions, social occasions, and artistic performances of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We will be especially concerned with themes of gender, race/ethnicity, identity, and community as they manifest in movement, developing and applying cultural and movement analysis tools to filmed and live events. In-class experiential activities will supplement discussion of readings from introductory cultural studies texts and recent literature that bridges the divide between scholarly and embodied exploration and analysis. 3 hrs. sem./screening/lab. ART SOC CMP (P. Campbell)