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

My Genes and Cancer

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Giovanni Parmigiani (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
First-Year Seminar 22H     4 credits (fall term)           Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Recommended Preparation: There are no strict prerequisites, though some familiarity with the basic concepts of probability and genetics will be very helpful.

...

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Narrative Negotiations: How do Readers and Writers Decide on What are the Most Important Voices and Values Represented in a Narrative?

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Homi K. Bhabha (Department of English and Department of Comparative Literature)
First-Year Seminar 63N    4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Narrative Negotiations explores narrative “voice” in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Narrative voice is a lively dialogue between the author and the reader as they engage in the experience of determining the value and veracity of the narrative: whose story is it anyway? The...

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Nietzsche

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Mathias Risse (Harvard Kennedy School)
First-Year Seminar 31D       4 credits (fall term)       Enrollment:  Limited to 12 

Friedrich Nietzsche addresses some of the big questions of human existence in a profoundly searching but often disturbing manner that continues to resonate...

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Nuclear Dilemmas

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Benjamin T. Wilson (Department of the History of Science)
First-Year Seminar 52G 4 credits (spring term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

This first-year seminar explores major issues in nuclear weapons history and policy. Did the use of atomic bombs by the United States against Japan end the Second World War? Have nuclear arsenals prevented a direct conflict between nuclear powers since 1945? Why have some countries pursued nuclear...

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Oil and Empire

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Rosie Bsheer (Department of History)
First-Year Seminar 72Z    4 credits (fall term)   Enrollment:  Limited to 12

What is the relationship between oil and empire? How has control over oil—the single most important commodity in the world—shaped the nature of power, politics, and environmental and social life in the twentieth century? How have different disciplines contributed to...

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Phases of Matter: Remarkable Changes of Properties By Varying Temperature and Pressure

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Isaac Silvera (Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 52Y  4 credits (fall term)   Enrollment:  Limited to 12

A gas of atoms or molecules will usually condense into a liquid phase, followed by a solid phase as temperature is lowered. Consider water: vapor, liquid, solid! The solid phase will generally have a crystalline structure (liquid is amorphous or has no long-range order).  It can be an insulator, semiconductor, or metal; it can be...

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Political Violence and Power

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

William P. Whitham (Committee on the Social Studies)
First-Year Seminar 72O 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

You were likely born after September 11th, 2001, the day of one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in world history. Since then, publics have often perceived terrorists as shadowy jihadis striking across state borders,...

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Quantum Entanglement and the Second Quantum Revolution

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Ashvin Vishwanath (Department of Physics)
First-Year Seminar 52D      4 credits    Enrollment:  Limited to 12

In his final attack on quantum physics, Albert Einstein identified a property of the theory that he found so strange that he termed it "spooky." Decades later, numerous experiments have shown that nature behaves in exactly the strange way predicted by quantum mechanics, and the essential ingredient for this astonishing behavior is mainly...

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Race Science: A History

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Alejandro de la Fuente (Department of African and African American Studies)
First-Year Seminar 73C    4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

“Race,” most social scientists and well-informed people agree, is a social construction with no basis in biology. It is an invention, a political instrument of power and subordination, deployed to...

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Reading the Book of Nature

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Benton Taylor (Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology)
First-Year Seminar 52S      4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Nature is made up of a dizzying variety of organisms, environments, and their interactions, but amidst this chaos, patterns exist that provide the viewer knowledge of their surroundings…if they know how to see the patterns staring them in the face. In this seminar, students...

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Recent Experimental Architecture From AutoCAD to Ziggurat

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Andrew J. Holder (Harvard Graduate School of Design)
First-Year Seminar 64Z 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12

There is a paradox in contemporary architecture. It is designed using tools of astounding digital sophistication by architects grappling with a world of social inequities and impending environmental catastrophe. And yet, surveying the work of these architects, you would be...

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Regulating Online Conduct: Speech, Privacy, and the Use and Sharing of Content

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Christopher T. Bavitz (Harvard Law School)
First-Year Seminar 70Z     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

In the course of a few short decades, the Internet has become integral to significant swaths of human experience. It has radically altered modes of interpersonal engagement,...

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Research at the Harvard Forest—Global Change Ecology: Forests, Ecosystem Function, and the Future

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

David Orwig (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology)
First-Year Seminar 21W 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note: Due to the course format of 3 weekends and a final symposium, students must be able to attend all class dates: Weekend Dates: Sept. 15 -17, Oct. 13-15, Nov. 3-5, Dec. 10-11.  All transportation, accommodations, and meals at the Harvard Forest will be provided at no cost to the student.
 

The seminar...

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Science in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Brendan J. Meade (Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences)
First-Year Seminar 51C  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 15

Science is focused on discovering and explaining the world around and within us. This has been its goal for hundreds of years and has produced astonishing breakthroughs from population genetics, to general relativity, to plate tectonics. Artificial intelligence is touted as a tool for learning about a complex system in ways that humans can't and has...

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Skepticism and Knowledge

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Catherine Z. Elgin (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
First-Year Seminar 31J   4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Descartes wrote his Meditations because he realized that, although he had received the best education in the world, much of what he had learned was false or unfounded.  This led...

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Skin, Our Largest, Hottest, and Coolest Organ: From Cancer to Cosmetics

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

David E. Fisher (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 51M 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Skin provides a protective barrier that is vital to survival of all multicellular organisms. Its physical properties have been exploited for centuries, from clothing to footballs, and yet skin is a vibrant and dynamic organ that responds to environmental signals in myriad ways. Skin protects humans from toxic exposures, but can also be an...

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Socialism

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Stephen A. Marglin (Department of Economics)
First-Year Seminar 73F 4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Does socialism have a future?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the embrace of the market by China, and the definitive turn of the Western European Left towards accommodation with the existing capitalist order, socialism was consigned to the dustbin of history....

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The Art and Craft of Acting

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Remo F. Airaldi (Committee on Theater, Dance, and Media)
First-Year Seminar 35N   4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note:  Students will be required to attend or watch theater performances during the course of the term. There will be no charge to the student.

We’ve all watched a great performance and wondered, “How did...

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The Creative Work of Translating

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Stephanie Sandler (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures)
First-Year Seminar 36G   4 credits (fall term)   Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Translation makes culture possible. Individual writers and thinkers draw sustenance and stimulation from works created outside their own cultures, and artists working in one format get ideas from those working in entirely different media. Translation between languages and...

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The Economist’s View of the World

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

N. Gregory Mankiw (Department of Economics)
First-Year Seminar 43J     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Prerequisites: Students are expected to have had some background in economics, such as an AP economics course in high school or simultaneous enrollment in Economics 10a.

This seminar's goal is to probe how economists of various perspectives view human behavior and the proper role of...

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The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: The Ethics of Art

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

P. Quinn White (Department of Philosophy)
First-Year Seminar 65F           4 credits (fall term)       Enrollment:  Limited to 12

What, if anything, is the relationship between art and morality? Can art be immoral? Or is it a mistake to evaluate a work of art in such terms? Can the moral of a content of a work bear on its...

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The Greatest Love Story of All Time? Heloise and Abelard

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Jan Ziolkowski (Department of the Classics)
First-Year Seminar 65H   4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Ever yearn to travel back in time? Heloise and Peter Abelard, woman and man, student and teacher, nun and monk, embody much that is fascinating about the twelfth century and what subsequent ones, including ours, have made of it. The seminar adventures into letters written by the two, together with adaptations of their lives,...

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The Modern City and its People: South Asia and Beyond

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Vishal Khandelwal (Department of History of Art and Architecture)
First-Year Seminar 65I credits (fall term) Enrollment:  Limited to 12

A city is a strange organism in which many kinds of realities exist alongside each other. In addition to containing the buildings and infrastructures of everyday life, a city suggests numerous meanings to the people who comprise and navigate it. This seminar will consider some of these meanings by analyzing architecture and urban development; artworks that...

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The Science of Sailing

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2023

Jeremy Bloxham (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences)
First-Year Seminar 22I   4 Credits (fall term)   Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Prerequisites: Participants in this seminar should have a good high school physics background and have some knowledge of sailing.

In this seminar we explore how to use simple physics to understand a range of natural phenomena associated with sailing.  Beginning with a discussion of hydrostatics and stability, the seminar moves...

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The Role of Government

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Oliver D. Hart (Department of Economics)
First-Year Seminar 42C  4 credits (spring term)

Economists have a very positive view of the role of markets. The intellectual foundations of this are the first and second theorems of welfare economics. The purpose of the seminar is to introduce the students to these results but also to their limitations. Most economists think that market outcomes will fail to be efficient in the...

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The Seven Sins of Memory

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Daniel L. Schacter (Department of Psychology)
First-Year Seminar 23S 4 credits (spring term)

How do we remember and why do we forget? Can we trust our memories? How is memory affected by misinformation such as “fake news”? Do smartphones and the Internet help our memories or hurt them? Are traumatic experiences especially well remembered or are they poorly remembered? What are the best ways to study for exams?... Read more about The Seven Sins of Memory

The Symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Anne C. Shreffler (Department of Music)
First-Year Seminar 63C    4 credits

The symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) are just as relevant and controversial today as they were during the composer's lifetime. Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies span his entire creative life; starting with his First Symphony, which made the 19-year old composer famous overnight, and ending with his Fifteenth, completed four years before his death. As a public genre,...

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Vegetal Humanities: Paying Attention to Plants in Contemporary Art and Culture

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Carrie Lambert-Beatty (Department of History of Art and Architecture and Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies)
First-Year Seminar 63W   4 credits (spring term)

This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones. Suddenly, we have plant protagonists, gardens in galleries, and...

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Wood(s): An Ecology of Asian Art

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Rachel Saunders (Harvard Art Museums)
First-Year Seminar 65L      4 credits     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

What good is art history in the face of environmental destruction and climate change? How can the close investigation of works of art, produced in times and places far removed from our own, address the vast “failure of collective imagination” that...

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Zen and the Art of Living: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

James Robson (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
First-Year Seminar 71D   4 credits

This seminar explores the rich history, philosophy and practices of Zen Buddhism as it developed in China, Korea, and Japan. We will first consider the emergence of the Zen tradition out of the Buddhist tradition and then explore the full range of its most distinctive features (Zen monastic meditation), cultural practices (painting, calligraphy, and poetry), and...

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1414 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor,
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