Seminars

Seminar Offerings Link

Fall 2023 - Spring 2024 Seminars

First-Year Seminars for 2023-2024


First-Year Seminars are offered under the general supervision of the Standing Committee on First-Year Seminars. They are designed to intensify the intellectual experience of incoming undergraduates by allowing them to work closely with faculty members on topics of mutual interest.

First-Year seminars are graded SAT/UNS and may not be audited. Only students in their first-year in the College may take a seminar in either or both of the terms. Each seminar is worth 4 units of credit. Enrollment is limited to 12-15 students.

Seminars Offerings

A Brief History of Surgery

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Frederick H. Millham  (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 24G       4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 15

The history of surgery begins with the Hippocratic physicians whose principles were based, at least partly, on observation and measurement.  However, surgical thinking for first three quarters of the “modern era” was dominated by Galen of Pergamum...

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All of Physics in 13 Days

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

John M. Doyle (Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 23Y 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 8

Some claim that there are 13 ideas or principles that can form the bedrock for a pretty good understanding of our physical and technological world. These are: 1) Boltzmann factor and thermal equilibrium, 2) Turbulence, 3) Reaction rates, 4) Indistinguishable particles, 5) Quantum waves, 6) Linearity, 7) Entropy and information, 8) Discharges, ionization, 9)...

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Americans at Work in the Age of Robots and Artificial Intelligence

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Benjamin M. Friedman (Department of Economics)
First-Year Seminar 71G  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Where will the coming generation of Americans (say, today's 18-year-olds) find jobs? And will the jobs be worth having? People have worried about losing their jobs to technology at least since the Luddites 200 years ago. In the aggregate, they have been wrong....

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Ancient East Asia: Contested Archaeologies of China, Korea and Japan in the Media

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Rowan Flad (Department of Anthropology)
First-Year Seminar 73E     4 credits (Fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 1
2

Note: There will be required trips to museums during the course of the term.

How is our understanding of the past, and of scientific discovery in general, determined or framed by the concerns of the present?  How does popular media cover...

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Appraising and Reimagining Middle and High School Math Education

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Robin Gottlieb (Department of Mathematics)    
First-Year Seminar 40P    4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note: This seminar has no prerequisites. An invitation is extended to all students whether or not they are thinking about studying mathematics.

What are the goals of mathematics education at the middle and high school level, and how do these goals impact our evaluation of the success or failure of math education in...

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Back to the Future: The Cities of Tomorrow Throughout History

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Bruno M. Carvalho (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 62Y     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

What will the cities of tomorrow be like? How did people in the past imagine our cities would be like? Our ability to foretell the future has a mixed record at best. Urban transformations often elude expectations, and the history of cities shows that the unforeseen happens frequently. And yet, predictions and expectations can teach us a lot about how...

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Beautiful Physics

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Howard Georgi (Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 26E 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12

We are fortunate to live in a world with beauty all around us (and we need to do a much better job of preserving it). Physics describes the underlying laws that both produce much of the beauty in the world and also enable us to experience it.  My hope in this seminar is to help students heighten their appreciation of our beautiful world by deepening their...

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Black Holes, String Theory and the Fundamental Laws of Nature

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Andrew E. Strominger (Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 21V     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

The quest to understand the fundamental laws of nature has been ongoing for centuries. This seminar will assess the current status of this quest. In the first five weeks we will cover the basic pillars of our understanding: Einstein’s theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics and the Standard Model of particle...

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Borges, García Márquez, Bolaño and Other Classics of Modern Latin American Fiction and Poetry

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Mariano Siskind (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 33C  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note: All readings and discussion will be in English.

This seminar introduces students to some of the most important Latin American literary works produced during the twentieth century. We will explore the ways in which these novels, short- stories and poems interrogate the...

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Complexity in Works of Art: Ulysses and Hamlet

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Philip J. Fisher (Department of English)
First-Year Seminar 33X 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Is the complexity, the imperfection, the difficulty of interpretation, the unresolved meaning found in certain great and lasting works of literary art a result of technical experimentation? Or is the source of this extreme complexity psychological, metaphysical, or spiritual?  Does it...

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Death and Immortality

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2022

Cheryl K. Chen (Department of Philosophy)
First-Year Seminar 30Q  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment: Limited to 12

In this seminar, we will discuss philosophical questions about death and immortality. What is death? Is there a moral difference between "brain death" and the irreversible loss of consciousness? Is the classification of a person as dead a moral judgment, or is it an entirely scientific matter? Is death a misfortune to the person who dies? How can death be a...

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Digging Egypt’s Past: Harvard and Egyptian Archaeology

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Peter Der Manuelian (Department of Anthropology and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations)
First-Year Seminar 30G  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment: Limited to 12

Note: Circumstances permitting, field trips to the Peabody Museum, the MFA, Harvard’s Visualization Center (Giza Pyramids in 3D), and the Harvard Museum of the...

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Earth Science Goes to the Movies: Math and Physics of Natural (?) Disasters

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Miaki Ishii (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences)
First-Year Seminar 23I 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note: Students are expected to attend Tuesday evening movie viewing sessions (time TBD).  This seminar is highly participatory and collaborative, and students should be ready to engage not only with the material, but also with one another.

Prerequisites: Students must be comfortable with high-school level math and...

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Economists on Building a Better Society

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Jason Furman (Harvard Kennedy School)
First-Year Seminar 71K  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

This seminar will provide you with a broad perspective on the views that economists and economic thinkers have had on how to build a better society. We will discuss foundational questions including: (i) the role of individual freedom to make choices vs. the...

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Finding Connections: Perspectives on Psychological Development and Mental Illness

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Nancy Rappaport (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 25N       4 credits (fall term)       Enrollment:  Limited to 12

The seminar's challenge will be to deepen our understanding of human development and how individuals cope with serious emotional or social...

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Is Privacy Dead? Privacy, Surveillance, and Freedom in the Digital Age

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Lowry Pressly (Committee on Degrees in Social Studies)
First-Year Seminar 72W 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12

Suppose that someone is listening to your phone calls and reading your emails, but you never find out and your life is never affected. What reason do you have to complain? Does it make a difference if it’s a neighbor, a lover, the state, or an algorithm listening in? What if you are the one posting the information on Facebook? Do we have a right not to be tracked, photographed, or surveilled in...

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Knots, Braids and Colorings

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Peter B. Kronheimer (Department of Mathematics)
First-Year Seminar 52K credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Prerequisites: No background in mathematics is expected or required, and enrollees who are not intending to concentrate in mathematics will be particularly welcome.

Beyond their practical use in fastening ropes, knots have appeared frequently in the decorative arts and (somewhat less frequently) in the physical and...

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Medicine in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust—Anatomy as Example for Changes in Medical Science from Routine to Murder

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Sabine Hildebrandt (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 23H       4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

This seminar introduces students to the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as an extreme example of antisemitism and racism, and of crimes against humanity and genocide. These included medical crimes, which, thus far, are the most thoroughly...

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Memory Wars: Cultural Trauma and the Power of Literature

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Nicole A. Suetterlin (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 63L 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note: This seminar includes a movie night and a visit to the Harvard Art Museums.

How do we respond to a traumatic event? Denial, acceptance, blame, reconciliation… there are many stances we can take toward a harmful act we have experienced or committed in the past. When entire populations have suffered or...

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Microbial Symbioses: From the Deep-Sea to the Human Microbiome

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Colleen Cavanaugh (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology)
First-Year Seminar 24Q     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 11

This seminar examines the remarkable diversity of microbial symbioses, ranging from giant tubeworms and lichens to the human microbiome, exploring their ecology, evolution, and roles in human health and disease, agriculture, and biotechnology. Microbial...

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Morality, Leadership, and Gray-Area Decisions

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Joseph L. Badaracco (Harvard Business School)
First-Year Seminar 70K     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Everyone with serious responsibilities, at work and throughout their lives, faces gray area decisions. In organizations, these highly uncertain, high-stakes decisions are delegated upward, to men and women in...

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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Myths, Media and Meaning

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Anne Arnett (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 52Z  4 credits

This first-year seminar will dive into the science and fiction of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) through engagement with multiple sources, including research articles and reports, social media, news media, psychology guidelines, and clinical cases. We will...

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Changing Perspectives: The Science of Optics in the Visual Arts

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Aravinthan D. T. Samuel (Department of Physics)   
First-Year Seminar 51X     4 credits (spring term)  

Renaissance artists began to create stunningly realistic representations of their world. Paintings started to resemble photographs, suggesting that artists had solved technical problems that escaped their forebears. Our brains effortlessly deduce three-dimensional scenes from two-dimensional images. But faithfully...

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Everyday I’m Hustlin’: Pop Culture, Youth, and the African City

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Daniel E. Agbiboa  (Department of African and African American Studies)
First-Year Seminar 72I  4 credits (spring term)

Cities today face broad challenges ranging from public health emergencies (e.g. Covid-19), to anti-police brutality protests (e.g. #ICan’tBreathe), and unemployment. Stuck in a frustrating period of “waithood” or waiting for adulthood, urban youths in Africa are increasingly devising enterprising ways to...

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Faith and Fiction in American History

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

David F. Holland (Harvard Divinity School) 
First-Year Seminar 60H        4 credits (spring term) 

This seminar uses key literary works to explore some of the most difficult and demanding questions in the religious history of the United States: Does God have a special relationship with the United States? Is sin an individual responsibility or a social flaw? Why...

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Fashion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Irene Soto Marín (Department of the Classics)
First-Year Seminar 65N 4 credits (spring term)

The aim of this seminar is to explore the manufacture, trade, and social function of objects of fashion in the Ancient Mediterranean World. More than a tool for aesthetic purposes, clothing, cosmetics, and hair performed significant functions as markers of status and class, as well as social identity. Furthermore, the manufacture of jewelry, perfumes,...

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Fun With Writing… or, Writing for Weirdos

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Phillip Howze (Department of Theater, Dance, and Media)
First-Year Seminar 64Q 4 credits (spring term)

Writing can be fun. Writing can be weird. By “writing”, we don’t only mean the act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to computer keys to type. Writing is the conscious act of choosing words or texts or images and composing them in such a way to create an intended effect. Yes, writing is a deliberate and emotional process… but not one which has to be necessarily...

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Islands and Experiments

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Usha Rungoo (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 73J  4 credits (spring term)

Writers like Shakespeare and Daniel Defoe and philosophers like Denis Diderot imagined alternatives to their society via social experiments on islands. Science...

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Learning How to Think Like a Scientist: An Introduction to Scientific Research

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Sien Verschave (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology) and
Daniel Kahne (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology)

First-Year Seminar 52T     4 credits (spring term)

Prerequisites: Student must have had fall term enrollment in LS1A, LPSA, or LS50.

Science courses are...

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Machine Muse: The Intersection of AI and Human Creation

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Philippe Cluzel (Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology & Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
First-Year Seminar 52U     4 credits

How might AI be used in the future to enable creative work in the arts and sciences? Our goal will be to evaluate the power and the limitation of AI in creating what we call “original” work. During the first weeks, each student will identify and propose a creative...

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Misinformation, Disinformation, and BS in Science Communication

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Daniel L. Hartl (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (FAS) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
First-Year Seminar 52N     4 credits 

It’s a jungle out there. The world is awash in hucksters, tricksters, frauds, scammers, grifters, and thieves. And there’s no shortage of easy marks, suckers, dupes, and fools. Classic cons like the pigeon drop and three-card monte aimed to heist a bundle from a few. The internet and cable TV have changed the game. Now the...

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Museums in the Aftermath of Covid

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

James Hanken (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology)
First-Year Seminar 41U       4 credits

The recent Covid‐19 pandemic extracted a huge toll on museums, on the one hand causing great harm and on the other hand forcing long‐overdue changes that capitalize on new opportunities. This seminar will trace the history of museums from their beginnings centuries ago as personal collections maintained by private (wealthy) individuals...

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Muslim Voices in Contemporary World Literatures

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

THIS SEMINAR HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Ali S. Asani (Committee on the Study of Religion)
First-Year Seminar 37Y      4 credits 

This seminar will explore the range of issues that face contemporary Muslim societies through the perspective of short stories, novels, and poems written by Muslim authors from different parts of the world. Issues...

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On Anarchism and Prison Abolition

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Walter Johnson (Department of History and Department of African and African American Studies)
First-Year Seminar 73I      4 credits 

This seminar will introduce students to some classic texts in the history of anarchist political philosophy (Garrison, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Bakunin) and then follow those threads of thought forward to the history of the prison abolition movement in the United States....

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Science and Technology Primer for Future Leaders

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Hongkun Park (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 52E 4 credits (spring term)

We live in a world that is shaped by science and technology. As modern citizens who will lead the U.S. and the world in the coming generation, we should be aware of the rapidly changing landscape of science and technology and be ready to participate in the decision-making processes for...

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Serious Illness, Death and Dying

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Susan D. Block (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 71O 4 credits (spring term)

Note: If circumstances permit, additional field learning opportunities (e.g., participation in hospital-based teaching rounds) will also be available outside of class.

Sickness and death are universal human experiences.  Although the COVID-19 pandemic has brought this reality home, in many difficult ways, to all of us over the past 2 years, thinking about our own losses and vulnerability and that of people...

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The Beginnings of Business

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Gojko Barjamovic (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations)
First-Year Seminar 60R  4 credits (spring term)

Business as a way of life has existed for thousands of years. In The Beginnings of Business we explore where many of the practices that we tend to take for granted today come from. What are the origins of money? What causes trade to occur...

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The Chinese Language, Present and Past

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

C.-T. James Huang (Department of Linguistics)
First-Year Seminar 33R  4 credits (spring term)

Prerequisite: Some experience of the Chinese language is required as a pre-requisite for taking the seminar (e.g., a minimum of one semester of prior formal instruction, or as a heritage speaker of Mandarin or any Chinese dialect). To fully satisfy this seminar, you must (a) complete each reading assignment...

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The Emotions—How do they arise? How can (and should) we manage them?

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Susanna Rinard (Department of Philosophy)
First-Year Seminar 73G       4 credits 

Emotions are central to our lives as human beings. Strong emotions (both our own, and other people’s) are often involved in both the best and the worst times of our lives. In this seminar we will ask questions like the following: Where do emotions come from? How do they arise, and to what extent is it possible for us to exercise agency over the existence and...

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The Quantum Revolution: from Computing to Time Crystals

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Norman Yao (Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 52R    4 credits

Quantum mechanics is one of the most precisely tested theories in the history of science. Advances in the laboratory are ushering in a so-called “second quantum revolution”, making it possible to assemble complex, quantum systems from individual atoms, ions, molecules and photons. But what are such systems actually good for? ...

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located in the Bank of America building next to the Coop
(use HUID to access the elevator)
Email: firstyearseminarprogram@fas.harvard.edu
Tel: 617-495-1523