WRIT 100: Courses Current Offerings

Fall 2026▲

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: Fast Fashion, Slow Solutions

WRIT 1000 - Dewey, Ady

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. 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. 

Writing Seminar for First-Years: Memoir in Empire's Shadow

WRIT 1000 - Chowdhury, Lubabah

Is memoir fact, fiction or both? How does memoir challenge commonly held conceptions about literature and its relation to the truth? And how do memoirs expose structures of oppression, such as racism, sexism and empire? In this class, we will read recent memoirs by established writers such as Jesmyn Ward and Sarah Aziza and memoir by incarcerated and detained people around the world. Students will draft and redraft a personal essay and a literary analysis during the course of the term; the class culminates in a 2,500-3,000 word research paper on a topic of students’ choosing from our time together.

Writing Seminar for First-Years: The Healing Power of Nature

WRIT 1000 - Smout, Kary

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: Crime Novels & Film

WRIT 1000 - Adams, Edward

Crime or detective fiction emerged as one of modern culture's most popular narrative forms with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.  This course focuses upon teaching analytical writing and argumentation through an investigation of this genre's key conventions and evolution from Doyle's Holmes and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown through such subgenres as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers's English amateur detective novels featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey; Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler's American hardboiled detective fictions starring Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe; and, finally, the police procedural developed by several Scandinavian novelists.  This course further explores this literary phenomenon and expands the opportunities for students to hone their skills by highlighting how many of its most important stories and novels have been adapted into major films.  

Writing Seminar for First-Years: Misfits, Rebels, and Outcasts

WRIT 1000 - Oliver, Bill

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: Marvel Comics and Civil Rights

WRIT 1000 - Gavaler, Chris

Marvel Comics published its first issue, Fantastic Four #1, in 1961, roughly the center of the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement. The third incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan grew in opposition to civil rights during the same period. Responding to that political context, Marvel created two villains  inspired by the KKK, the Hate-Monger and the Sons of the Serpent. The course follows the evolution of these characters and a range of Marvel superheroes from the 1960s and into the early 21st century. 

Writing Seminar for First-Years: Family Horror

WRIT 1000 - King, Emily

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, Nadine Gordimer, Shirley Jackson, Claire Keegan, and William Shakespeare. 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: Civil War

WRIT 1000 - Berlin, Michael

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 andconflicting 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: Magic, Realism and Alternative Facts

WRIT 1000 - Fuentes, Freddy

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: (Un)Reliability

WRIT 1000 - Buckley, Emmett

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: Homeward Bound

WRIT 1000 - Millan, Diego

“Home” is an enduring topic in literature, in part, because of its broad appeal and applicability. It can refer to a literal structure, to the emotional bonds that hold us together, and to the practices that generate and safeguard both. Building on these meanings, homes become symbols for broader social configurations—the unit whose protection represents the security of the nation, for instance. Moreover, imaginings of home, literary or otherwise, offer us a window through which to consider how normative and so called “non-normative” families take shape. In this course, we explore varying, often contradicting, expressions of home and the domestic. We will explore how “home” intersects with markers of identity, such as race, class, and gender. Possible topics include kinship, sexuality, alienation, homelessness, and memory/nostalgia.  

Writing Seminar for First-Years: Playwrights and Personhood

WRIT 1000 - Gray, K. Avvirin

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 1000 - Ramirez, Alexander

Students will analyze the writings of twentieth and twenty-first century cultural critics and endeavor to confront contemporary sociopolitical forces in their own writing. 

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Spring 2026▲

We do not offer any courses this term.

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Winter 2026▲

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 - Chowdhury, Lubabah

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 - Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial ComplexWhat is the prison-industrial complex? How does it affect American society? And how is the prison-industrial complex related to race and gender? In this class, we will explore these questions and more through close reading of memoir and scholarship, asking critical questions about our sources and practicing communicating our ideas through the written word. We will learn about the origins of the prison-industrial complex and its roots in racism, sexism and capitalism. We will also learn about the writing process by writing and revising multiple drafts of essays, practicing the essential skills of paragraph and essay organization, and developing techniques for critical analysis and research. Assignments move from personal response papers to formal academic essays, culminating in a 3,000-3,500 word research paper. We will read Jesmyn Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped, Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? and a variety of academic articles.

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 - 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 - 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. 

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 - 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 - Adams, Edward

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 - The Decline and Fall of Rome & Epic Science Friction: Foundation, Dune, & Star WarsThis courses centers on Frank Herbert’s modern science fiction classic Dune along with its film and television adaptations. Dune was deeply influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which in 1966 earned the title of greatest scifi/fantasy series of all time, particularly by its depiction of the decline of the Galactic Empire. In turn, Asimov and Herbert’s epic narratives shaped George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise, which commences with the fall of the Galactic Republic. All these narratives are modern genre fiction retellings of the Matter of Rome.  They look back, finally, to its most significant version—Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Thus, in addition to its focus on Dune, this course includes two Foundation novels and two Star Wars films along with selections from the Decline and Fall. Since Gibbon’s history was carefully read by the framers of the American constitution, who feared that their new republic might one day descend into imperial decadence, this course explores how the Founding Fathers’ fears eventually found popular expression in Asimov, Herbert, and Lucas asking, “Are We Rome?”

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 - 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 - 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. No credit for students who have completed FW through exemption.Topic - Wicked WomenThis 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 - Bouchard, Jean-Luc

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 - Literature at WorkWork—in one form or another—is a guaranteed presence in all of our lives. As a result, work is a ubiquitous (though often contentious) topic of art and literature. This course explores reflections, reactions, and reinterpretations of work, economic anxiety, and socioeconomic pressure and ambition through a variety of texts, including novels, stories, and films by Hiroko Oyamada, George Saunders, Hayao Miyazaki, and more. We’ll examine how the relationship between work identity and personal identity manifests itself in art and literature as well as in surrounding debates and social commentary, and reflect on our own relationships to work in the past, present, and future.

Writing Seminar for First-Years

WRIT 100 - Hill, 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 - Shut Up and Play: Black Athletes and ActivismColin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest reinforced the complicated relationship between black athletes and American democracy. Raising questions linked to patriotism, free speech, and labor relations, this situation shows—among other things—why the interdisciplinary analysis advocated by Africana Studies provides a full understanding of contemporary social realities. In this seminar, we will pursue three goals tied to such enhanced comprehension. First, we will learn to write clear, organized, and well-supported prose through assignments demanding skill in different types of verbal expression. Second, we will strive to read multimedia materials and to use these sources in public discussions about citizenship. Finally, we will try to place current debates about black athletic activism within the broader context of civil disobedience and post-Brown v. Board pursuits of racial equality. Our class will be anchored by the exploration of four case studies: Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the army, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute at the Olympics, Serena Williams’s boycott of Indian Wells, and Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem.  

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