Freshman Seminars
These small, seminar-style courses are open only to first-year students and offer narrowly-focused topics to introduce you to the inner workings of a field of interest or an area of potential major. Through significant interaction with a dedicated faculty member and a group of like-minded students, you will gain a rewarding academic experience by digging deeply into a topic with some of the Mount’s best professors, while forming a lasting bond with students of similar academic interests that will serve you well in the years to come!
The Freshman Seminar will fulfill a Core Curriculum or major requirement in either the humanities or social sciences.
FSEM 114 – REEL CITIES: CINEMATIC URBAN EXPERIENCE
The real city and the reel city mirrored each other in mutual representation. Can cinema help us understand urban issues and problems? Modernity links urban studies and cinema. The boundary between reel and real is blurred through different cities in film such as Blade Runner, Taxi Driver, The Truman Show, City of God, and City of Ghosts, among many others.
FSEM 117 – SERVICE LEARNING AND SOCIETY
This course is designed to connect students to the University of Mount Saint Vincent community, as well as to service opportunities throughout the Bronx and Greater New York City area. Poverty and related issues, such as homelessness, hunger, and inequality, are explored in depth through both classroom activities and hands-on, community-based, and service-learning opportunities in NYC, including Habitat for Humanity, the Midnight Run, and many others.
FSEM 119 – COMEDY, ROMANCE, HEARTBREAK, AND CHANGE (HONORS)
This course will examine comedy in different countries and different times, from ancient to modern. It will ask some of these questions about the texts: How does comedy “work?” What is the social and psychological functions of comedy? How does comedy grow out of heartbreak, embarrassment, or trauma and produce change? What is the relationship between comedy, romance, and community? Why is the Romantic Comedy such a sturdy genre? How do different forms (plays, novels, movies, TV, essays) change comedy requirements? We will read lots of funny material, but we will also try to discern how it is built, which as we’ll see, is no laughing matter! Materials to review include short pieces by Woody Allen and Steve Martin, modern movies and television shows, and, finally, the classic comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces.
FSEM 123 – A WHOLE NEW BALLGAME: BUSINESS OF SPORTS
Students will be introduced to the wide-ranging applications of sports business. Topics include the ever-increasing career opportunities in sport, understanding the sports fan, planning major sports events, and the rapid globalization of sport. We’ll also look at how a stadium/arena is financed, the professional and ethical responsibilities of the sports agent, the sport economy, and how sport and the media have a mutual need for cooperation.
FSEM 150 – ALL THE WORLD’S A (DIVERSE) STAGE
Theatre artists have always been called to hold up a mirror to society, yet if most of the canon is from only one perspective, that mirror is distorted. We will focus on writers and characters from underrepresented groups, with central attention to voice and monologue: What happens when a character is given the stage, uninterrupted, to speak? And, equally importantly, what happens when YOU are given that stage? In response to the study of the course texts, students will develop their own voices, through writing and performing a monologue of your own.
FSEM 151 – LET FREEDOM RING: THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN AMERICAN LIFE
Few movements in American history have shaped our current events as has the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. This mass movement, organized by grassroots activists throughout the entire country, challenged America’s racial inequalities in ways that few events in our country’s history have. In this course, we’ll look at the roots of that movement, in the Jim Crow south and the racially segregated north; how the movement changed and responded to national events; how the movement expanded into a larger organized force in the 1950s and 1960s; how the Black Power movement rose out of Civil Rights; and how the movement collapsed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
FSEM 153 – ART, POLITICS AND THE 2024 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS FOR BEST FILM
In this course, we will be watching movies nominated in the Best Film category at the 2024 Academy Awards–for example, Barbie, Oppenheimer, American Fiction. We will be examining critically-acclaimed movies closely to understand what makes them not only entertainment but also art. What are the different choices that directors and cinematographers make? What effects do these choices have? We aim to develop a visual literacy; that is, we will be reading the films. Our approach will be framed by the cultural, political, and historical contexts of our time as we aim to understand how art and politics merge in films. What do the films suggest or reveal about the U.S. and the world in 2023/2024? In the cases of films set in the past, we will also consider what role the past plays in the present. Finally, how do films both reflect and shape society?
FSEM 154 – WRITERS AND POLITICS IN EASTERN EUROPE
Eastern European literature is often invisible due to language, geography, economics, and decades of Soviet suppression. Poland is called a land of poetry, nevertheless, and, among Czechs, poets are known as a “privileged caste,” yet their names may not be recognized, despite the many Nobel Prizes they have won. From Albania to Belarus, from Ukraine to Lithuania and beyond (all of the countries embroiled in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), this class will help to encounter many of the most pressing issues Eastern Europe presents us with: authoritarianism, war, human rights, nuclear disaster, mass conformity, and the concentration camp. The fiction, drama, and poetry considered are profoundly human, powerful, and brave, whether the style is realistic, tragic, comic, or Kafkaesque. Authors include: Bertolt Brecht, Václav Havel, Eugène Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz, Tom Stoppard, and Wisława Szymborska.
FSEM156 – FILM NOIR IN BOOKS AND MOVIES
This course will examine the great Film Noir movies of the 1940s-1950s that have come from good and great books. We’ll watch great films like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), The Third Man (1949), and Double Indemnity (1944), among others. We will discuss what makes up the genre known as “Film Noir” and explore its historical and social roots. We’ll consider how the film at least equals the book in reputation. We’ll read the books because the difference between the film and the book is the main analytical object of the course. We’ll explore the emerging field of “adaptation studies” which attempts to interrogate the “book is better than the movie” bias which informed much film adaptation criticism ever since film versions of books hit the big screen.
FSEM159 – TALES OF SURVIVAL IN THE SOUTHERN CORE
This course focuses on testimonials from survivors of the dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay or the “southern cone,” or southmost parts of South America. These texts are examined within their historical, social, and political context. Students learn about the personal experiences of the writers after they were released and examine the circumstances of their incarceration.
FSEM160 – WOMEN AND FEMINISM IN THEATRE
In this course, students will work to examine the social and political relation of feminism to the art and practice of theatre. Focusing on performance texts that address salient concerns of the various waves of feminism, students will critically engage with the work of current and past groundbreaking female and feminine-identified playwrights to help define feminism and its importance in our developing society. We will focus on the intersectionalities of gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual identity in the production of feminist-driven theatrical practices. Students will be expected to read multiple plays, discuss performance, playwriting and production strategies and ask how the pieces fit into a feminist canon. Students will write, develop and perform their own feminist pieces in groups that speak to the values and issues discussed over the semester.
FSEM161 – BLACK ITALY
Migrants and their children from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America have over the past fifty years created a diverse multicultural Italy as a nation historically associated with emigration is becoming a nation of immigrants. This course focuses on the Black Italian experience through the study of literature, film, music, the arts, and digital media all of which are historically contextualized by readings on Italian colonialism, migration, race and racism, and national identity. Black Italian American identities in the United States as well as the transnational impact of African American and Afro-European culture in Italy will also be explored.
FSEM162 – ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING ON EARTH
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau went into the woods, near Walden Pond, to follow the “bent of [his] genius.” He built a cabin, planted and harvested his own food, and lived in what we’d call a sustainable manner. He was not alone; others were also documenting nature: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roosevelt. Still more followed describing what they saw, often urgently: Rachel Carson, John Steinbeck, Edward Abbey, Al Gore, Ursula Le Guin, Cormac McCarthy. Recent times have brought climate change and extreme weather, waste and emissions from modern society, the destruction of the rain forests and polluted waterways and oceans. Who could afford not to have an opinion? Environmental Writing on Earth will examine problems not yet solved, and seek answers in discourse, writing, participation–and genius.