First Year Seminar (FYS) Course Offerings

Fall 2025 Available FYS Courses

FYS 017 Making Change Democratically

What does social change in a democracy look like? This course equips students with a framework for understanding how social change happens and allows them to identify issues in the local and regional communities surrounding the college that can be tackled through democratic action. Students will learn how to connect academic skills with developing as informed, engaged, and effective civic agents.

FYS 018 Ten Ways to Know Nature

This class is a study of the different ways we interact with and thus know the natural environment. These ways include, among others, the scientific, technological, artistic, experience-based (hands-on), biographical, and religious; the forms of interaction follow from our lives as consumers, as eaters, and as thinkers, while we work, live, and play. The purpose of the course is to examine how those ways of interaction with nature influence how we know and then treat those environments.

FYS 025 Futbol: Inside the Beautiful Game

In addition to offering mass entertainment, soccer has been used as a government propaganda machine, is the pillar of multi-billion-dollar enterprises, and has led to wars and questionable social behaviors. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore how soccer is more than just a game. Drawing on readings from sociology, economics, and politics, we will look at soccer as a sport, a form of entertainment, a tool for oppressive regimes, a form of collective identity, and a major force for social change.

FYS 033 Gambling

In this FYS, we will interrogate the mechanisms of gambling and the games that are played while we focus on the benefits and costs of gambling, including those social, economic, and psychological. The role of technology, the ubiquity of mobile gambling, and analyses of government-run lotteries are just some of many course topics that will inform discussions around the motivating question of the course: is the proliferation of gambling good for society? Students must be at least 18 years of age by the start of the course.

FYS 036 Trials of the Century

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the “Trials of the Century” that have captivated the general public’s attention because of the highly controversial issues they raised, the publicity they received, and the decisions that resulted. By examining these great trials, using political, historical and legal academic lenses, we will refine our critical analytical skills and better understand both our legal and political systems, and the resulting changes in law and society.  

FYS 037 I Cannot Live Without Books

This course explores the field of book history, the study of the making and using of books. Hands-on work with Skillman Library’s rare books collection and librarians will be a key feature of the course, as will discussions, activities, and local field trips that will help us gain insight into how books and reading have featured in human culture, why that matters, and where that history still unfolds today. From artistic and literary angles to economic and legal contexts to the science and technology of text-making and sharing, book history exemplifies the cross-connections of a liberal arts experience. Whether you’re a lit nerd or a technical whiz or anything else, there’s a lot for you to love in this course!

FYS 047 Life Science: Human Endeavor in the Misinformation Age

In the current age of rampant misinformation, how can we identify and understand legitimate research in the life sciences? How can we learn to distinguish among reliable information, propaganda, advertisements, and outright falsehoods?  We will explore various controversies and contemporary subjects in the life sciences, particularly those which involve the manipulation of scientific (or pseudoscientific) information as a means to deceive. The reading and writing assignments in this course explore how scientific knowledge is generated, tested, challenged, archived, reviewed, summarized, presented, discarded when necessary, and frequently abused along with the ethical issues associated with animal and human subjects research. Finally, we will also explore who scientists are in the 2020s with a goal of illuminating both the humanity and diversity of the people generating scientific knowledge and the limitations and challenges that they face.

FYS 054 Indigenous and Settler Sites of Memory

The United States was created from land wrested from Indigenous inhabitants. How do people living in a society with such a foundation address the violence of conquest? How is this story told – or rewritten – on the land? How have settlers represented the Native past and present? In this course, we explore these questions using the local area as our focal point. In exploring Indigenous geographies and settler sites of memory — museum exhibits, burial grounds, historical markers, and place names–we will ask which pasts have been remembered publicly and analyze commemorative practices. Students will engage in ethnographic research and develop a digital database of important Native and settler sites of memory as we explore the local landscape.

FYS 056 The Worlds in Cookbooks: A Sociocultural Approach

Cookbooks are much more than simple collections of recipes. When approached critically, they allow us to analyze patterns of daily life, domestic ideals and practices, and power relations in the societies that produced and consumed them. In this seminar, we will answer the following questions: 1) What is a cookbook? 2) What can cookbooks tell us (and not tell us) about the societies in which they circulated? 3) What subjects can cookbooks encourage us to (re)consider? In examining these questions, we will explore topics including cookbooks as biographies and domestic advice, as well as genres of cookbooks including ethnic, commercial, and community cookbooks. Therefore, in terms of content, the learning objective of this course is to broaden your understanding of scholarly sources by learning to unpack cookbooks as complex worthy of serious scholarly consideration.

FYS 059 Feeding the World: Challenging Hunger

This course offers an interdisciplinary look at our food from planting to harvest, distribution and packing, to our tables. Emphasis on combining a social sciences perspective with an engineering human-centered design process to define and address problems of world hunger. Focus on investigation, problem definition, and project-based learning of issues related to global hunger.

FYS 063 Jewish Humor

This course examines Jewish humor within the context of theories of humor and the comedic and as a window to Jewish culture. It explores examples of Jewish humor past and present in literature, film, television, skits, stand-up comics, cartoons, and jokes. It considers questions such as: What makes us laugh? What is distinctively Jewish about Jewish humor? How does American Jewish humor differ from older European Jewish humor and contemporary Israeli humor? Do you need to be Jewish to “get” it? How is Jewish humor like and unlike other ethnic, religious, or minority humor? How do stereotypes and self-deprecation figure in the humorous? How did humor function as a coping and survival mechanism in the Holocaust?

FYS 064 Global Justice

While few people would deny that we have special, and sometimes quite demanding, obligations to help our friends, family, or even our fellow citizens, it is controversial whether we have these same kinds of obligations to complete strangers. The guiding question of this course will be what, if anything, do we owe such people? Three main topics will provide the focus of discussion: international economic inequality, climate change, and war.

FYS 075 Technological Citizenship 

What is the social impact of new technologies? Who in society benefits and who is harmed by the rapid development of modern science and technology? How is scientific knowledge created, and how does the public engage with science and technology? This first year seminar examines the rights and responsibilities of technological citizenship by fostering inquiry into how technology is developed and distributed, and how technology and society interact with each other. Drawing on readings from science, engineering, and the social sciences, students will reflect on technology’s role in their lives and its relationship to human values.

FYS 084 Music, Art, and Literature in the Year 1944-1945

As is often the case after cataclysmic world events, things change, as the war in Europe transformed into the Cold War between the US and the Soviets, humanity came under threat of nuclear annihilation. Music, art, and literature of this year provide great insight into these events; it will be our task to explore connections between the works of art created in response to the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War.

FYS 087 Urban Infrastructure

Civil infrastructure (also known as “the built environment”) undergirds every aspect of our lives. However, the relationship between people and infrastructure is bi-directional- we shape our infrastructure and our infrastructure shapes us. Sometimes it is destructive (for example in urban renewal) and sometimes it is more synergistic. This course helps students develop a framework for understanding these relationships and prepares them to engage in public discourse around civil infrastructure.

FYS 088 Communicating with the Dead

People from many times and places communicate with the dead through seances, prayer, spirit channeling, ghost hunting, ancestor veneration, and in many other ways. In this seminar, students examine various academic and popular sources to understand why the living often maintain active relationships and colloquies with ancestors, saints, ghosts, and other deceased people. Ultimately, this phenomenon can tell us much about the needs and desires of the living in diverse cultural and historical contexts.

FYS 099 The Way of Eating: Food in World Culture

Why do we fast, feast, kill animals, feed spirits, and throw potluck suppers? What various culinary traditions teach us about social diversity, cultural pluralism, gender (in)equality, and interfaith connection? This course explores how eating and cooking reflect ethics, identity, health, modernity, globalization, and more through readings, films, and field trips. No forks nor cooking skills required—just intellectual appetites! Together we explore how we use food to define ourselves and make sense of the world.

FYS 100 Minding Animals

Birds who plan ahead? Fish who recognize themselves in mirrors? Octopuses who excel at complex tasks? Rats who love being tickled? New findings in the science of animal cognition are challenging traditional understandings of animals and human exceptionalism. In light of these findings, how do we think about animals, and how should we? Looking at representations of animal cognition from the humanities, and social and natural sciences, this FYS explores the ever-narrowing gap between us and them.

FYS 102 Color: A History of Making and Meaning

Learn about the tantalizing history behind some of your favorite colors. Together we will travel to the lapis mines of Afghanistan in search of ultramarine blue and trek across the deserts of Mexico to find a tiny insect that fueled a global market in carmine red. We will study medieval recipes for pigments, read about the human cost and history of producing color, and discuss how this background impacts our understanding of material culture. This seminar will include hands-on instruction and assignments.

FYS 103 Images of Resistance

What is an image of resistance? How have images aided liberatory struggle and how are they implicated in the web of capital flows and imperialism? Drawing widely from history, anthropology, literature, and film and media studies, and case studies from Palestine, Southeast Asia, the United States and Latin America this course is a class of discovery, an opportunity to learn how images have been used for social movements and freedom struggles in a variety of geo-political contexts.

FYS 108 Silence

Silence. What the heck is it? It’s more than keeping your mouth shut. Some say it’s a language onto itself, its meaning framed by circumstance. We use it to convey anger and embarrassment, fear and uncertainty. We also use it to convey comfort and ease, deep feelings and respect. There’s the meditative silence of those seeking peace and reprieve from the chaos of a very noisy world. There’s also the sacred silence of prayer and the punitive silence of solitary confinement. During the semester, we will explore silence in its many iterations and my hope is you’ll develop your own relationship with silence and understand how it can benefit your life by relieving stress, inducing clarity and increasing focus.

FYS 110 Hocus Pocus

Few figures in global cultures are as ubiquitous, and complicated, as “the witch.” Though entwined with mythology from the start, the existence of and reaction to witches have had real consequences in communities around the world. We will consider how the representation of witches has changed, with attention to how these representations intersect with ideas about gender, race, and class. In doing so, we will investigate how “the witch” itself has been reshaped. 

FYS  115 The Monkey King

This course invites students to embark on a journey across the Globe with the Monkey King, a figure with Hindu and Chinese folkloric origins, who appears across a variety of movies, TV series, manga, anime, and video games worldwide. By comparing literatures and arts across cultures, this course explores topics such as religions and folklore, evolutionism, racial othering, cultural exchange, and transnational productions.

FYS 117 Demonstrating Science

Scientific demonstrations are used in lectures, science museums, and television shows to explain scientific principles and inspire wonder about science. How important are such demonstrations to a true understanding of science? Is seeing believing? Is seeing understanding? In this course we will explore the science behind some popular demonstrations and consider the ways in which such demonstrations have educated, obfuscated, or inspired their audiences.

FYS 119 Plants in Performance

Plants run the planet, but they rarely get the spotlight in TV, film, theater, and social media. In this course, we’ll shine some light on plants in performance, considering an array of perspectives on how plants biologically perform and how they are (mis)represented in the arts. Together, we’ll get the chance to think like a plant, analyze plant performances, and create our own plant art.

FYS 135 Factory Farms: The True Cost of Meat

As of 2020, it is estimated that in the U.S. 1.6 billion animals live on 25,000 factory farms, also known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). And yet most people know little about them. This course will explore the history of farming in the U.S. that led to CAFOs and their impact on health and the environment. We will question the ethics of farm animal treatment and the concept of what a farm is.

FYS 139 How to Tell a Story Using Pictures

The purpose of this class is to provide students with skills, practice and exposure to telling stories outside of traditional modes. For example: when we think about storytelling we often think about texts that follow plots. In “How to tell a story using pictures” we will use images and sound to construct stories that may function intuitively, non-linearly or emotionally. Students will make/construct stories using still photographs in visual sequences and audio recordings that animate place to explore alternatives to text-based storytelling. We will look at multiple types of sources that include film, video art, photography, sound art and picture books.

FYS 141 Mathematics of Social Justice 

Alexander Hamilton said, “The first duty of society is justice.” Today there is vociferous argument about the prevalence of justice. To what degree is society just? Are there practical ways to make it more just? This course considers the importance of understanding data and applying mathematics to ask these questions and to explore meaningful answers. Using mathematics that everybody is taught, we’ll try to make sense out of conflicting opinions, so as to discover the importance of quantitative literacy for all citizens in a democracy. 

FYS 149 The Boring Class

Through readings from thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Beckett, Blanchot, and Pessoa, along with studies on boredom’s role in education, psychology, and digital culture, this course examines boredom as both a barrier and a bridge to knowledge. Is boredom universal or a symptom of modernity? How is it portrayed in literature, film, and art? Is it an affliction to escape or a state to embrace? Students will rethink boredom’s implications for society, creativity, and personal growth

FYS 150 Plastic

Plastic: Greatest technological advance of the 20th century or ecological scourge? Plastics, or polymer, are so pervasive in our everyday lives that their use and disposal often are taken for granted. As a result, their environmental impact is scrutinized heavily. In this course, we will discuss the science, history, pop culture, and social impact of this controversial material. Most importantly, we will think critically about the future of plastics in the context of environmental concerns.

FYS 152 Radio, Revolution & Liberation

Amidst the raging revolutionary wars in 20th century colonial Africa, a parallel war was taking place on the airwaves. Underground radio stations owned by African revolutionaries and liberation movements, often operating in exile were engaged in “wars of the airwaves” against colonial radio stations. Students are expected to seriously consider and engage questions of how “liberation” was imagined by African revolutionaries; and how radio technology, and contestations over “censorship” and “propaganda” shaped decolonization in Africa.

FYS 153 Designer Genes: The Science and Ethics of Genome Editing

Scientists have developed tools to directly manipulate DNA, but should we use them? In this FYS, we will examine the history of attempts at genetic modification leading up to the technologies available today. We will work along the way to separate fact from fiction in the public discourse on this topic and explore the broad range of considerations beyond just the science going into decisions about where to draw the line on allowable genetic modifications.

FYS 158 Nonviolence: Theory & Practice

This course explores both the theoretical development of nonviolence and the practice of nonviolence as a means for waging and resolving conflict. Using the examples of Mohandas Gandhi and India’s independence movement, the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, the power of music in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, as well as the personal testimonies of individuals and various groups pursuing nonviolent change in the Lehigh Valley, this course explores the principles of nonviolence in action.

FYS 159 What’s Inside ChatGPT?

This seminar demystifies Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a focus on Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, Claude, and others. Through interdisciplinary exploration of historical texts, news articles, science fiction films, and modern documentaries, we will examine how AI systems work, their limitations, and ethical challenges. Hands-on experiments and reflective writing will equip you with the skills to evaluate and integrate emerging AI tools responsibly, preparing you to navigate an increasingly digital and AI-driven society.

FYS 162 Music in European Society

The course does not assume knowledge of music on the students’ part; nor does it require that they master notation or become conversant with musical analysis. Rather, the course examines developments in European history that have left their traces in the music. It relates music to developments in European culture and explains the distinctive characteristics of the music of a period in relation to those larger developments that underlie its cultural productivity.

FYS 164 Adaptation (in the Humanities)

Part of a being a human being is adapting, transposing and renovating narratives and ideas into new formats. How do we understand this human process in the twenty-first century? This course is dedicated to the study of adaptations (literary, filmic, musical, and plastic) in the Spanish-speaking world, with a special focus on the topic of memory. In this course we will rid ourselves of hierarchies and analyze each work (and genre) as a text with its own language and with its own historical, social, and cultural context. By the end of the course students will be able to analyze and criticize a variety of texts and adaptations from a variety of cultural perspectives and backgrounds and employ a series of concepts, terms, and ideas to the universal human practice of adaptation and create their own “adaptations”.

FYS 168 Playing and Being Played

From their conception in the early 1970’s table top role-playing games (TTRPGs) have been delegated to fringe culture, assumed to be at best self-actualization for social outcasts, or at worst a malicious analogue for occult activity. Today the narrative surrounding this pass time has flipped entirely. TTRPGs have centered themselves squarely within the interests of pop culture, with varied manifestations represented in nearly every flavor of consumable media. Reading, writing, and research assignments in this course will engage with TTRPGs, and roleplaying more broadly, to analyze and evaluate varied systems of play, explore their intrinsic relationships to world building, character development, and collaborative storytelling.

FYS 169 The 1960s:  The Causes and Effects of Social Change

The Civil Rights Movement, the Antiwar Movement, the Space Race, and, of course, Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll…Through an examination of written and oral histories, documentary film, the poetry, music and visual arts of the Sixties, students will explore the underlying causes for change during the nation’s most tumultuous decades. In addition to the causes, students will determine for themselves the influences that the 1960s have had on the present day. 

FYS 170 Running

Running is many things to many people: sport, exercise regimen, mental health practice, hobby, profession, punishment, conditioning—the list goes on. This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on how and why running is so widely celebrated and hated. Running is how some people do their best thinking and sometimes very little thinking at all. Others consider running the most accessible sport on offer or the worst cardio option in the book. This course asks, What running is to you?

FYS 173 LatinX

Popular media from the news to film is filled with references to Latinos and Latinas, but what do we really know about them? This course explores the Latinization of the United States, highlighting the social, demographic and cultural forces that have shaped Latino/a experiences in recent decades. Specific course content includes social scientific studies of Latino/a immigration and community formation, and representations of and by Latinos/as in novels, essays, TV and movies.

FYS 180 From Fred Rogers to Taylor Swift: The Influence of America’s Public Theologians

“Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out.” ~ Taylor Swift. “You are loved just the way you are.” ~ Fred Rogers. Public figures like Taylor Swift and Mister Rogers, are people who help to embody, identify, and evaluate how theological traditions often influence public narratives. While such figures typically are not professional theologians, they can be understood as “public theologians,” i.e., celebrities, media personalities, activists, and artists whose work engages significantly with a wide variety of spiritual, religious, and ethical themes. Students in this course will consider how public theology and the work of public theologians shape culture and policy in the United States. Students will analyze and critique how public theologians call upon communal resources, insights and values to contribute to the welfare of society.

FYS 195 Russia Today Through Fiction and Film

 “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” This is how Churchill described Russia a century ago. In our own time and in a new era of Russian aggression, this seminar immerses students in the world of Russian culture, history, and politics through critical analysis of its internationally acclaimed fiction and cinema. How has the Putin era challenged, reshaped, and coopted what for some is Russia’s most important export: its culture? 

FYS 196 Exploring Chinese Culture