Freshman Seminars

These small, seminar-style courses are open only to first-year students (like you!), 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 College 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 142 – LISTENING TO WOMEN FROM THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN AND AFRICA
What do women writers from sub-Saharan Africa and from the Caribbean have to say about their cultures, the traditions of their country, the impact of colonization on the local society, and, most importantly, on their family? What do women have to say about being a woman in postcolonial societies in French speaking Africa (Senegal and Cameroon) and the French Caribbean (Haiti and Guadeloupe)? Their relationships with men, with older generations, or with their former colonizer? One has to listen to their voices and messages through their novels in order to understand the realities and the dilemmas of their existence.

FSEM 150 – STAGING VOICES: ON THEATRICAL MONOLOGUES
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 AND POLITICS IN AMERICAN CINEMA
In this course, we will watch Hollywood and independent films from the middle of the twentieth century to the present. We will be examining films closely to understand what makes them “art.” What are the different choices that directors and cinematographers make? What effects do these choices have on us, the audience? Our approaches will be framed by each film’s historical contexts. How does each film engage with the social and political issues of its particular historical moment? How do art and politics merge in films? What do the films suggest or reveal about American society? What do films from the past communicate to us today? How do films not only reflect but also 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.

FSEM157 – THE WOR(L)DS OF JAMES JOYCE: IMPERIALISM AND FICTION
One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce composed his short stories and novels at a crucial time in the history of Ireland and the British Empire. This seminar closely studies Joyce’s early works, concentrating on the short story collection Dubliners and Joyce’s oblique autobiography, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to investigate the ways that fiction can dialogue with imperialism. As we also explore brief extracts from Joyce’s later, challenging experimental works, we will discuss how Joyce uses language in unique ways to build worlds that reflect on and challenge empire.

FSEM158 – LET’S SOCIAL (& MEDIA) DANCE 2.0
The course will provide an overview of some of the popular social and ballroom dances of today as well as an analysis of why certain dance movements go viral on social media platforms such as TikTok. Students will be encouraged to physically experience basic steps of a few selected social and ballroom dances, learn more about their history, and develop skills such as creativity, expression, and individuality. The course will also analyze concepts behind what make certain movements and dances viral, and encourage students to test these concepts during the creation of their own movement material. We will examine the concept of “popular” looking at the similarities between the popular social dances and the viral social media dances—drawing conclusions about why viewers want to copy it, and be a part of it.