Nancy E. Hill (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
First-Year Seminar 72U       4 credits    Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Debates about when adolescence ends and adulthood begins often lead to judgements about how long youth today are taking to reach...

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...

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)...

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....

Rowan Flad (Department of Anthropology)
First-Year Seminar 73E     4 credits (Fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Ryuichi Abe (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
First-Year Seminar 62Z     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Note: There will be two required visits to the Harvard Art Museums related to the final student project.

How do you get enlightened?  Is the Buddha a god or...

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...

Tyler Giannini (Harvard Law School)
First-Year Seminar 72P  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12

How do the seemingly most marginalized take on the most powerful corporations in the world and win? In this...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Sanjay Saini (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 27I        4 credits (fall term)      Enrollment:  Limited to 15

This interactive seminar will allow students to obtain greater understanding of challenges faced by US healthcare system through critical comparative...

Susan H. Farbstein (Harvard Law School)
First-Year Seminar 41K  4 credits (fall term)  Enrollment:  Limited to 12                                       

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...

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...

Javier Ortega- Hernández (Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology)
First-Year Seminar 52L         4 credits (fall term)         Enrollment:  Limited to 12

The fossil record offers a unique perspective on the history of Life on Earth. Although palaeontology might remind us of grotesque bones...

Gordon Teskey (Department of English)
First-Year Seminar 64P     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

An introductory seminar on lyric poetry, with close reading of poems from four continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Poetry not in English will be translated but students with competence in foreign...

Lauren Williams (Department of Mathematics)
First-Year Seminar 52P     4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

Prerequisite: While some exposure to proofs may be helpful, this seminar aims to be accessible to students without a sophisticated math background.

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos...

Marla Eby (Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 49N       4 credits (fall term)     Enrollment:  Limited to 12

For well over a century, psychologists have worked with schools, corporations, immigration officers, the military, and psychiatrists to sort the...

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...

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...

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...

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...