[First-year seminars] Every Amherst student is required to take a first-year seminar—a small, often interdisciplinary course that serves as an introduction to critical thinking. The college encourages students, in choosing their seminars, to “venture into the unfamiliar” instead of favoring their current interests. Here are some of the 29 first-year seminars offered this fall.
In “Death and Dying in Islam,” sudents explore symbolic meanings of funerary rites, attitudes toward the veneration of the dead, relationships between the living and dead, and ideas about salvation. They also conduct their own ethnographic work.
Instructor: Assistant Professor of Religion Tariq Jaffer
“Friendship” explores, among other things, the relations between friendship and love, and the ways in which men’s and women’s conceptions of friendship differ. Readings include The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Instructor: Class of 1959 Professor Emeritus of English Kim Townsend
TRUTHINESS
“Secrets and Lies” investigates how politics is informed by the keeping and telling of secrets, and by the telling and exposing of lies. Readings include Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Instructor: Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science
“Growing Up in America” examines how race, ethnicity, social class and gender shape the experience of childhood. Readings include Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Instructor: Elizabeth Aries, Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in Social Sciences (Psychology)
“Genes, Genomes and Society” considers human gene therapy, GMOs, the use (and potential misuse) of DNA fingerprinting by governmental agencies and the ability of parents to screen potential offspring for diseases.
Instructor: David Ratner, Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Farley Ames Lee Professor of Biology
“Drugs in History” looks at the drug war, prescription drugs and drug use in popular culture. Students watch Drugstore Cowboy.
Instructors: Francis Couvares, E. Dwight Salmon Professor of History and American Studies, and Jerome Himmelstein, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Sociology
Illustrations by Oliver Munday