First-Year Writing (FYW) seminars are a core component of the Furman Advantage. Seminars are taught by faculty from across the university who have designed intellectually stimulating, interdisciplinary course topics that provide a platform for you to learn about and practice college-level reading, writing, and research skills. Prior to summer orientation, you will be asked to review the FYW seminars being offered in order to rank your preferences.
You will find below a list of the seminars being offered for Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, arranged by category and with brief topic descriptions. Keep in mind that all FYW seminars will introduce you to and give you practice in the following:
• writing effectively in multiple genres
• developing a flexible writing process
• choosing the right style, medium, and evidence for the situation
• writing successfully in academics and in professional environments after graduation
Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 FYW Seminars
FYW 1116 – Language, Argument, and Culture
- Students will explore how visual images–from photographs to murals to memes and everything in between–make arguments.
FYW 1244 – Learning Politics Through Battlestar Galactica
- FX’s series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) provides the launching point to explore the world of politics and much more.
FYW 1000 – Muslim Feminisms
- This course offers an interdisciplinary perspective on feminist and queer movements in Islamic communities by introducing students to the ways feminist activism unfolds among Muslim and queer organizations across the globe.
FYW 1263 – Representations of Prisons in Print and Film
- Through reading texts and watching their visual counterparts, students will examine how the U.S. prison system is presented in print and film in order to consider how different mediums allow for a multitude of understandings of the prison system in the popular imagination.
FYW 1124 – Social Media and Body Image
- This seminar will explore the relationship between social media and body image, and the many ways in which social media impacts how we perceive our own and others’ bodies.
FYW 1167 – American Disaster Literature
- An introduction to college writing that focuses on disaster literature as a means to improve students’ interpretive, analytical, and argumentative writing skills.
FYW 1289 – Conflict and Its Transformation
- Students will study and explore conflict in interpersonal, environmental, racial, and political arenas.
FYW 1316 – Evolutionary Anthropology: Facts, Fantasy, Frauds
- Students will develop critical thinking and writing skills through lens of Evolutionary Anthropology by examining topics such as history of evolution in the United States, famous forgeries and hoaxes, and even bigfoot.
FYW 1267 – Fairy Tales and Childhood
- In this course, students will critically examine fairy tales and the broader categories of folklore and children’s literature as ongoing cultural processes.
FYW 1111 – Haunted Mansions
- This course explores how Gothic conventions, as they appear in novels, short stories, and films, help authors to reflect on and reveal truths about the American experience.
FYW 1319 – Music and Mysteries of the Universe
- This course examines the function of music in numerous esoteric cultural and intellectual traditions (i.e., worldviews that value hidden knowledge) throughout history.
FYW 1178 – Academic Autobiography
- Write research papers about important events that you personally experienced during your lifetime.
FYW 1294 – America Through Baseball
- Studying American history through the lens of baseball, students will critically analyze historical figures and key events in the game and complete a research project on a topic related to baseball and issues such as media, globalism, race, and economics.
FYW 1161 – Contemporary Issues on Film
- This seminar will focus on films that address global, political, and social issues.
FYW 1311 – Game On! Tabletop Play and Contemporary Culture
- Exploring tabletop games—board and card games, role-playing games, and others—serves as the ground for intellectual curiosity and engagement on which students will build a solid foundation of academic writing.
FYW 1260 – Tudor-Stuart Texts
- By examining the methods of reconstructing (often with limited textual evidence) historical lives, narratives, and social boundaries that existed in 16th– and 17th-century society, students will look at the variety of experiences and identities that people had in the Early Modern period.
FYW 1202 – Medieval Forests in Literature and Law
- Engage contemporary ecological criticism to discover how historical representations of “wilderness” in English and French Arthurian romances, Robin Hood ballads, hunting treatises, and forest law can deepen our understanding of today’s environmental debates.
FYW 1148 – Southern Women: Black & White
- This seminar will explore the experiences of Southern Women from 1800 to the present by reading the literature (novels, short stories, slave narratives, etc.) written by and about them in order to describe the culturally defined image of Southern women, trace the effect of this definition on female behavior, define how the realities of Southern women’s lives were often at odds with the ideal, and examine the struggle of black and white women to confront racism and cultural expectations and to find a way to achieve self-determination.
FYW 1286 – Spanish in the US
- Students will consider key notions of multilingualism, multiculturalism, and language ideologies as they relate to Spanish speakers in the United States.
FYW 1127 – To Walk the Land
- We will examine connections between humans, community, culture, and the natural world, including through readings and by crafting our own observations and interpretations on walks and hikes in the upstate.
FYW 1237 – Welcome to Greenville
- Introduction to the city and county of Greenville, South Carolina, focusing on the region’s government and politics and considering its history, economics, sociology, arts, and religion.
FYW 1211 – Chocolate
- Utilizing primary and secondary sources, students will use their own writings to go beyond the symbolism of chocolate to examine the cultural, economic, and ecological impact of chocolate production from the early Mesoamerican period to the present.
FYW 1137 – Freedom or Oppression: Human Rights in Asia
- Using the UN Declaration of Rights for Children as a backdrop, this course examines the interrelationships between biological, ecological, social, economic, political, and legal factors that influence the Human Rights of children in Asia.
FYW 1259 – Reconsidering James Baldwin in an Era of #BlackLivesMatter
- This writing-intensive seminar provides students rich content to spur original essays based on content drawn from the non-fiction and public talks/debates of James Baldwin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and diverse contemporary writers.
FYW 1128 – Turing: Machines, Codes & Other Enigmas
- Explores the enigmatic life and prodigious work of Alan Turing (1912-1954) including his pioneering work in the fields of artificial intelligence, the limitations of computing power, and code-breaking during World War II.
FYW 1156 – Who Speaks Bad English?: Language and Ideology
- Is “ain’t” a word? Are people who speak with Southern accents “uneducated” or people who speak with Northern accents “rude”? Students will be introduced to basic linguistics and use their knowledge to discuss issues from language identity to educational policy.
FYW 1292 – Chemistry, Discovery, and the Nobel Prize
- The development of modern chemistry involves real people wrestling with explaining their observations and defending those explanations against opposing claims, and in this course, students will be introduced to the underlying chemistry and challenged to investigate what constitutes discovery and how these discoveries are valued.
FYW 1280 – A Funny Business: Humor and Politics
- This course is about the intersection of politics and humor—what makes politics funny, how that may vary depending on the audience or messenger, the purposes humor serves in political communication, the forms it takes, and its effects.
FYW 1318 – Grassroots Movements
- This First-Year Writing Seminar will analyze the different methods of communication and rhetorical strategies that grassroots organizations and social groups employ to organize a collective public in working toward a common goal.
FYW 1141 – Homer and History
- Follow the history of Homer’s great war-poem the Iliad from the Bronze Age and the invention of writing, through the tyranny and democracy of Athens, the library of Alexandria, to its rescue from the ruins of Constantinople in the 1400s.
FYW 1320 – Leadership, Leaders, and Writing
- This course examines the goals and actions of a diverse set of leaders in government, businesses, and non-profits and the ways communication strategies and practices help advance their causes.
FYW 1242 – World of the Founding Fathers
- Students will focus on improving their writing skills in multiple genres including historical fiction and argumentative research-based essays drawing on the events of the American Revolution for sources and for inspiration while considering the political, diplomatic, racial, and gender aspects of this crucial historical period.