Sophomore seminars are courses designed primarily for sophomores that address a variety of themes and contexts around the central topics of race and anti-racism. These courses build on foundational points covered in first-year seminars by elucidating how specific disciplines or fields conceive of this pressing subject matter. Faculty and students delve further into topics of race and anti-racism, in conversation with other important subjects such as the nation, religion, geography, gender, and age, so as to explain how race informs and is informed by them. The seminars also help foster intellectual and social community among sophomores.
Examples of seminar topics include rethinking race and class in rural America; understanding the soul of a nation, China and the developing world; pluralist economics; race and otherness in the Middle Ages; race and migration in German cinema; acceptable prejudice: age, aging, ageism; death of American democracy; intergroup dialogue on race; and manhood and masculinity. To see a full list of sophomore seminars, please log into Workday and search “find Amherst course sections to register.” Sophomore seminars have the keyword “informational: sophomore seminar."
Sophomore seminars are not required. Preference in registration is given to sophomores, but other students may register and enroll if a seminar is significantly under-enrolled. The seminars can count for department credit and are typically capped at fifteen to twenty students.
Sophomore seminars for Spring 2024 are listed below: