WRIT 100: Courses Current Offerings
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Fall 2025▲
See complete information about these courses in the course offerings database. For more information about a specific course, including course type, schedule and location, click on its title.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Buckley, Emmett
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: (Un)Reliability Many of us have encountered “unreliable” narrators in fiction, but what would it mean for a narrator to be reliable? And how can we come to understand the world through literature when our own perception is limited, shifting, and occasionally unreliable itself? This seminar will explore themes of (un)reliability and uncertainty in various poems, short stories, and essays by writers like Brian Blanchfield, Robert Browning, John Keats, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Zadie Smith, and others. We will engage with texts that prompt us to question the relationships among voice, style, and fact. This course will emphasize active reading, argumentation, and the development of effective academic writing. Rooted in our classroom discussions, we will work to develop our own voices while positioning ourselves in ongoing conversations without misrepresenting the truth or the opinions of others.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - King, Emily
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Family Horror Ghostly visitors. Cursed places. Generational trauma. Really bad parents. This course explores the challenges of family through the lens of horror. Taking a transhistorical approach, the course engages a variety of films, essays, novels, plays, and poetry that include the work of Octavia Butler, William Shakespeare, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Shifting from an analysis of sensationalized depictions of violence in the family unit, we’ll examine how systemic inequities harm families but do not permit that violence to be registered as such. We’ll look at the impossible expectations of care demanded of certain groups and how their “failure” is made monstrous within the cultural imaginary. We will also move beyond the domestic sphere as we consider how the family is made into a placeholder for the nation’s stability. Concluding on a less ghastly note, we end with an exploration of alternative modes of kinship, care, and recuperation. Fundamentally, this course aims to develop students’ proficiency in the skills fundamental to a liberal arts education: the ability to reason, to think critically, to communicate effectively, and to appreciate excellent writing and thinking. In this class, you will learn how to translate your ideas onto paper (or the computer screen). All writers, regardless of their abilities, can improve their skills, and a class specifically designed to foster those skills will serve you well, regardless of your academic interests.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Smout, Kary
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Healing Power of NatureIn this section students will read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, an account of vital factors that helped concentration camp inmates survive, then study three key works that deal with major personal struggles healed through outdoor activities and adventures. The works are Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We’ll connect these works to extreme sports, the outdoor recreation industry, environmental issues, mindfulness, and scientific studies of healing. Our goal is to study and discuss hope and healing in this and other troubled times.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Fuentes, Freddy
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Magic, Realism and Alternative FactsIn our class we will study works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende and others, who responded to government sponsored atrocities in Latin America through the literary form of Magical Realism. When confronted by political machines insistent on minimizing, denying and ultimately erasing brutal events, these authors paradoxically embraced the fantastical in order to accurately portray reality. With this as our starting point, we will continue on to consider other authors and different forms of media, including the contemporary and popular, to examine the role of fact in both showing, and shaping, reality.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Berlin, Michael
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Civil War As recent regional events have brought into startling focus, the legacy of the American Civil War has retained its urgency. The primary focus of this course will be to unearth the causes of this conflict along with the immense, though often obscured, impact it has had on American cultural memory. At the same time, we will examine larger questions surrounding the history of civil conflict and what it means for a polity to declare war on itself. These questions open up onto related issues such as the relationship between civil war and conflicting definitions of civilization and its others. In answering these questions, we will read texts that range from the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics to the poetry of the English Civil War (1642-51), and texts from more recent conflicts such as the American wars on drugs (1971-?) and “terror” (2001-?).
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Gray, K. Avvirin
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Playwrights and Personhood With Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark as a central critical text, this course will hone your writing composition and critical reading skills. Our conversations and shared writing practice will unfold around the related themes of performance and personhood. Through texts that range from Adrienne Kennedy’s experimental one-act The Owl Answers to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, we will explore the myriad ways that playwrights infuse their work with biographical and psychic aspects of their lives and in turn become shaped as individuals through the writing process. Recognizing that both academic and dramatic writing takes place in social contexts that are often fraught, we will foreground an array of social worlds from 17th century England to late 20th century Native America.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Oliver, Bill
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Misfits, Rebels, and Outcasts The title of the course leaves out a lot. If extended, it might include strangers, visionaries, fanatics, prophets, artists, lovers, criminals, transients, deviants, freaks, and monsters. We read stories and plays, as well as view films, about individuals challenging the status quo, either directly or indirectly, deliberately or inadvertently. We consider, among other things, what happens to the individual in the process, and what happens to the status quo.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Ramirez, Alexander
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Confrontations with PowerStudents will study the writings of twentieth and twenty-first century scholars and cultural critics and endeavor to confront contemporary sociopolitical forces in their own writing.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Cano, Mayra
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Spectral HauntingsThis course enlists you as an accomplice to the spirits; together, we will inquire into ghostly matters and demand revenge. We will investigate how systems of violence such as settler colonialism, enslavement, and genocide turn marginalized populations into ghosts. Taking a decolonial approach to hauntings, this course centers ghostly desires as a means of caring for the undead and challenging the oppressive systems that create ghosts. We will examine the literary and artistic movements the undead use to visibilize their truths, such as the Latin American literary genre of testimonio and Afrosurrealism. These themes will inform our analysis and exploration into writing, revision, and research as we explore a variety of literary and visual texts. Throughout the semester, spirits will guide us as we expand our writing abilities beyond the corporeal realm.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Gavaler, Chris
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First Year’s: Superhero ComicsStudents will analyze the evolution of the character type from Superman’s first appearance in 1938 Action Comics to contemporary superheroes in 21st century media.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Green, Leah Naomi
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Nature of Nature This seminar is an exploration of the human relationship to nature. How do writers and environmental thinkers understand their relationships to "the natural world"? How can we understand our own? We read widely within environmental literature. Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, among others, provide scaffolding for our discussion of "nature", "truth", "individuality", "community", "life", "death", "knowledge", and "mystery". We explore the implications of these ideas for an individual life as well as for a globalized world in which ecological concern is a matter of daily news and attention.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Dewey, Ady
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Fast Fashion, Slow Solutions New styles, cheap prices—click. Instant cool. What’s wrong with that, especially given inflation and limited budgets? The United Nations, along with many nonprofit organizations, warns about the long-term impact of fast fashion and its various environmental and social issues, including pollution, waste, and worker exploitation. For example, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a truckload of abandoned textiles is dumped in a landfill or incinerated every second—and largely not in the U.S. Concerns about fast fashion are not new; the issue overlaps three of the Sustainable Development Goals that were adopted by all UN Member States in 2015. We will analyze what’s being written and spoken about the topic, as well as consider appeals for changes in policies, commerce, and regulations. Through personal response papers to formal academic essays, you will develop a written argument, whether from a fashion, environmental, human rights or business angle, relying on critical analysis and reasoning to clearly convey your position on what, if anything, might be done about this issue.
Spring 2025▲
We do not offer any courses this term.
Winter 2025▲
See complete information about these courses in the course offerings database. For more information about a specific course, including course type, schedule and location, click on its title.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Buckley, Emmett
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: (Un)Reliability Many of us have encountered “unreliable” narrators in fiction, but what would it mean for a narrator to be reliable? And how can we come to understand the world through literature when our own perception is limited, shifting, and occasionally unreliable itself? This seminar will explore themes of (un)reliability and uncertainty in various poems, short stories, and essays by writers like Brian Blanchfield, Robert Browning, John Keats, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Zadie Smith, and others. We will engage with texts that prompt us to question the relationships among voice, style, and fact. This course will emphasize active reading, argumentation, and the development of effective academic writing. Rooted in our classroom discussions, we will work to develop our own voices while positioning ourselves in ongoing conversations without misrepresenting the truth or the opinions of others.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - King, Emily
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Family Horror (3).Ghostly visitors. Cursed places. Generational trauma. Really bad parents. This course explores the challenges of family through the lens of horror. Taking a transhistorical approach, the course engages a variety of films, essays, novels, plays, and poetry that include the work of Edward Albee, Octavia Butler, Shakespeare, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Shifting from an analysis of sensationalized depictions of violence in the family unit, we’ll examine how systemic inequities harm families but do not permit their violence to be registered as such. We’ll look at the impossible expectations of care demanded of certain groups and how their “failure” is made monstrous within the cultural imaginary. We will also move beyond the domestic sphere as we consider how the family is made into a placeholder for the nation’s stability. Concluding on a less ghastly note, we end with an exploration of alternative modes of kinship, care, and recuperation.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - King, Emily
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Family Horror Ghostly visitors. Cursed places. Generational trauma. Really bad parents. This course explores the challenges of family through the lens of horror. Taking a transhistorical approach, the course engages a variety of films, essays, novels, plays, and poetry that include the work of Edward Albee, Octavia Butler, Shakespeare, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Shifting from an analysis of sensationalized depictions of violence in the family unit, we’ll examine how systemic inequities harm families but do not permit their violence to be registered as such. We’ll look at the impossible expectations of care demanded of certain groups and how their “failure” is made monstrous within the cultural imaginary. We will also move beyond the domestic sphere as we consider how the family is made into a placeholder for the nation’s stability. Concluding on a less ghastly note, we end with an exploration of alternative modes of kinship, care, and recuperation.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Dewey, Ady
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First Year’s: Fast Fashion, Slow Solutions New styles, cheap prices—click. Instant cool. What’s wrong with that especially given inflation and limited budgets? The United Nations, along with many nonprofit organizations, warn about the long-term impact of fast fashion and its various environmental and social issues, including pollution, waste, and worker exploitation. For example, according to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, a truckload of abandoned textiles is dumped in a landfill or incinerated every second—and largely not in the U.S. Concerns about fast fashion are not new; the issue overlaps three of the Sustainable Development Goals that were adopted by all UN Member States in 2015. We will analyze what’s being written and spoken about the topic, as well as consider appeals for changes in policies, commerce, and regulations. This semester, through personal response papers to formal academic essays, you will develop written positions, whether from a fashion, environmental, human rights or business angle, relying on critical analysis and reasoning to clearly convey your position on what, if anything, might be done about this issue.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Smout, Kary
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Healing Power of Nature In this section students will read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, an account of vital factors that helped concentration camp inmates survive, then study three key works that deal with major personal struggles healed through outdoor activities and adventures. The works are Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We’ll connect these works to extreme sports, the outdoor recreation industry, environmental issues, mindfulness, and scientific studies of healing. Our goal is to study and discuss hope and healing in this and other troubled times.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Oliver, Bill
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Misfits, Rebels, and OutcastsThe title of the course leaves out a lot. If extended, it might include strangers, visionaries, fanatics, prophets, artists, lovers, criminals, transients, deviants, freaks, and monsters. We read stories and plays, as well as view films, about individuals challenging the status quo, either directly or indirectly, deliberately or inadvertently. We consider, among other things, what happens to the individual in the process, and what happens to the status quo.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Ramirez, Alexander
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Confrontations with Power Students will analyze the writings of twentieth and twenty-first century cultural critics and endeavor to confront contemporary sociopolitical forces in their own writing.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Berlin, Michael
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Civil War As recent regional events have brought into startling focus, the legacy of the American Civil War has retained its urgency. The primary focus of this course will be to unearth the causes of this conflict along with the immense, though often obscured, impact it has had on American cultural memory. At the same time, we will examine larger questions surrounding the history of civil conflict and what it means for a polity to declare war on itself. These questions open up onto related issues such as the relationship between civil war and conflicting definitions of civilization and its others. In answering these questions, we will read texts that range from the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics to the poetry of the English Civil War (1642-51), and texts from more recent conflicts such as the American wars on drugs (1971-?) and “terror” (2001-?).
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Fuentes, Freddy
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First-Years: Magic, Realism and Alternative Facts In our class we will study works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende and others, who responded to government sponsored atrocities in Latin America through the literary form of Magical Realism. When confronted by political machines insistent on minimizing, denying and ultimately erasing brutal events, these authors paradoxically embraced the fantastical in order to accurately portray reality. With this as our starting point, we will continue on to consider other authors and different forms of media, including the contemporary and popular, to examine the role of fact in both showing, and shaping, reality.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Brodie, Laura
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style.Topic - Writing Seminar for First Year’s: Wicked Women This section begins with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with recent essays on Hillary Clinton. In between, we examine witches, femme fatales and fallen women, using representations of difficult women in literature, journalism, and film, as essay prompts. The course is not for women only—for instance, our discussion of witchcraft runs from Conde's I, Tituba through excerpts from Harry Potter.
Writing Seminar for First-Years
WRIT 100 - Clark, Jawanza
Concentrated work in composition with readings ranging across modes, forms, and genres in the humanities, social sciences, or sciences. The sections vary in thematic focus across disciplines, but all students write at least three revised essays in addition to completing several exercises emphasizing writing as a process. All sections stress active reading, argumentation, reflection, the appropriate presentation of evidence, various methods of critical analysis, and clarity of style. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Righteous Indignation: Writing as Resistance This course explores the relationship between anger, passion, and spirituality as the inspiration to write as a form of resistance to oppression. We examine different types of writers and different genres as a medium to transgress social boundaries including those defined by religion, race, gender, class and sexuality. Those works include literary works, novels, essays, epistles, speeches, sermons, and sociological and theological works. How does righteous indignation provide the energy to write as an exercise in resistance?
Peer Tutoring
WRIT 200 - Oliver, Bill
This course serves as an introduction to the theory and practice of tutoring writing. Students read and discuss articles designed to familiarize them with theories of writing and tutoring and stimulate thinking about the issues these theories raise. In addition to challenging students to think critically about writing and teaching, the course helps develop tutoring skills through taking part in mock conferences, observing tutors at work in the college's Writing Center, and finally conducting tutoring sessions. As this is a WRIT course, students are expected to reflect (in the form of journal entries) on the reading and their experiences tutoring.