Incoming Furman students should consult the resources on this page for help with choosing a First-Year Writing Seminar.
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 2024 and Spring 2025, 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 2024 and Spring 2025 FYW Seminars
FYW 1279 – Ethics of Photography
- In this seminar, students will examine visuals through the history of photography, current day practices, and methods of critiquing photographs as objects of art while writing about topics such as exploitation, plagiarism, manipulation, reportage, and truth in photography.
FYW 1324 – Ghosts of Greenville
- Students will investigate how the ghosts of our pasts linger into our present by studying and practicing writing and research principles through the lens of ghost stories, specifically those highlighting ghosts and haunted locations in Greenville, SC. [Note that there will be two sections of this course offered. One section is designed for students who wish to gain more confidence as writers and/or who feel they would benefit from additional writing practice. This section will be paired with a Pathways cohort. On the FYW preference survey, you will be asked to indicate which section you are interested in.]
FYW 1266 – Inside the White Cube: Exhibition Practice and History
- Students will be introduced to basic theory and practice of museum exhibition, studying historical exhibitions to determine best practices and using writing to move through the process of planning, designing, and executing an exhibition.
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 1296 – Picturing Slavery: Writing Slave Lives
- This seminar takes up the work of uncovering the story of America’s enslaved past.
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 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 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 1239 – Pseudoscience and Skepticism
- Using examples in pseudoscience and the paranormal–including ESP, alien abductions, astrology, homeopathic medicine, conspiracy theories, and recovered memories–students will learn how to critically evaluate extraordinary claims and how to construct an effective argument.
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 1322 – From Frankenstein to WandaVision
- Students will explore what it means to be human and what constitutes effective writing by engaging with a text-set anchored in literary or pop culture versions of the Frankenstein myth, covering dramatizations of reanimating humans, cyborgs and androids, and artificial intelligence.
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 1227 – Quest for Meanings and Values through Theatre
- This course examines musicals, stage plays, and works of performance art that challenge core beliefs while driving social change within their communities.
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 1272 – Biodiversity: The Other Earthlings
- While focusing on broader patterns, ecological relationships, and specific ‘biographies’ of interesting species, students will learn about the breadth and importance of life’s diversity and will meet some of the unique and ‘alien’ species that share our world.
FYW 1234 – Bird by Bird
- In this seminar, we read and discuss how our ideas about birds reflect changing ideas about nature and society.
FYW 1185 – Crossing Borders/Rights of Passage
- Through a series of readings on young people and their journeys into foreign territory, we will study border crossing as a metaphor for the rites of passage such as beginning college that we all experience.
FYW 1110 – Global Water Issues
- The course will be focused on fostering discussion and telling stories about water resources.
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 1264 – Can Humans Fly?
- In this course, students will engage in experimentation with (a wind tunnel!) and analysis of the characteristics of flight historically, evolutionarily, and technologically, which will ground discussion on the meaning of scientific discovery, including its implications and consequences.
FYW 1133 – Can We Make Sense of the 60s?
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An introduction to college writing that focuses on American history in the 1960s and early 1970s.
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 1323 – What Is a Cult?
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We will explore the question “what is a cult?” and will examine historical and current use of this word–and the movements it is used to describe–in art, politics, business and pop culture, all while learning effective writing strategies and skills that will prepare you to write well in future academic and professional endeavors.
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 1321- African American Agency in the Civil War Era
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Students will explore African American agency in the mid-nineteenth century in order to develop and refine their college-level writing, critical thinking, and organizational skills through research and expository argumentative writing.
FYW 1168 – The First World War
- An exploration of World War I – the war itself as well as its impact on society and culture in Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world.
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 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 1254 – Winning the White House
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Examining the mechanics of U.S. presidential elections, students will explore how candidates, key societal issues, and campaign tactics sustain and challenge American democracy.
FYW 1221 – God and Justice
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This course will explore the complicated relationship of religion and politics in a democratic context, including religious approaches to political activism and how such activism affects American public policy.
FYW 1325 – Hispanic Masculinities
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Students will explore the construction of masculinity in the Hispanic world by examining concepts such as honor, shame, sexual identity, and machismo in sports, dance, and popular media across Spanish-speaking cultures.
FYW 1232 – Inferno: Tales of Hell and Justice
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In this seminar we read and reflect on a range of stories about justice and the afterlife, from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, as a way of opening up space to think about freedom, justice, and what we owe one another.
FYW 1195 – Psychic Disorder and the Social Order
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By reading fiction in dialogue with both contemporary scientific accounts of mental function and its broader cultural context and by connecting modern health debates to their historical origins students examine the tension between freedom and restraint that characterizes debates about psychic disorder.
FYW 1206 – Spain in the U.S. Imagination
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Using a variety of texts and media, the course will consider causes and motivations for the varying and often contrasting impressions of Spain which have persistently dominated U.S. thought throughout its history.
FYW 1312 – Technofeminism
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From the abundance of female digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, or robots like Sophia, our technologies seem to take on a very feminine mystique—that is until we examine who actually designs them, as we will do in this course, learning genres of writing to write with a purpose in order to investigate feminist critiques of science, technology, and design.