First-Year Seminar

Woman at a Window, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1822.

First-Year Seminar is a two-semester course taken by all first-years at Bard. Its goal is to create a basis for shared conversation among the first-year class and build foundational skills for success in college – attentive close reading of challenging texts; respectful and inclusive dialogue with others; the ability to ask profound and interesting questions about what you read; and developing your academic voice through writing. During First-Year Seminar, students develop a clearer sense of their own intellectual goals and priorities, which will inform their work during the rest of their time at Bard. A shared reading list addresses a specific theme for the year; recent themes include “What Is Freedom? Dialogues Ancient and Modern” and “What Is Enlightenment? The Science, Culture, and Politics of Reason."

Dear Class of 2025,

Welcome to Bard! We the faculty and staff of FYSEM are very much looking forward to meeting you and working together in First-Year Seminar. This group of incoming students is truly a remarkable class. You graduated high school on Zoom and started college during a global pandemic. You are coming of age during – and, in many cases, passionately contributing to – a long-overdue second civil rights movement in this country. We are excited to meet each one of you and, as faculty members, to help you learn how to apply your unique skills and talents to this community and to a world that sorely needs them.

First-Year Seminar is a two-semester course taken by all first-years at Bard. Its goal is to create a basis for shared intellectual conversation among the first-year class and build foundational skills for success in college – attentive close reading of challenging texts; respectful and inclusive dialogue with others; the ability to ask profound and interesting questions about what you read; and developing your academic voice through writing.

The current theme of First-Year Seminar, The Self in the World, is a topic that touches us all in ways both shared and uniquely distinctive, both personal and political. Traditionally at Bard, First-Year Seminar is historically focused. That is, it asks you to listen to the voices of the past and think critically and creatively about how they might speak to the present. The writers and thinkers whose words we read in First-Year Seminar could not have known the specific, urgent issues that endanger our fellow citizens and community members and threaten our social contract – notably, the horrors of police brutality against Black Lives in the contemporary USA and the global tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the seeds of the present lie in the past, and each of our authors was selected because of the visible influence they have had on the ideas, events, and belief systems that surround us, and that we make daily choices about how to grapple with. Recognizing the influence of their ideas does not mean accepting them. In fact, a primary aim of First-Year Seminar is to cultivate the ability to critique ideas from a position of well-informed and cogent analysis.

The course’s main historical touchstones revolve around encounters between the “self” and the “world” in multiple domains. In the personal domain, writers like Virginia Woolf and Sappho articulate the complex ways in which individual consciousness is interlinked with others and with the wider world. In the political domain, authors such as Virgil, Derek Walcott and Frederick Douglass challenge us to learn about the violent historical roots of imperialism, racism, and oppression. At the intersection of colonialism and religious thought, Dante's medieval Catholic vision, sometimes shocking to contemporary readers, prepares us for a profound appreciation of the indigenous voices from Mexico collected in Léon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears who documented the human and cultural price of European settler colonialism in the Western hemisphere. Conversely, these texts, and others on the reading list, also inspire us to consider how language can create beauty, generate empathy, and elevate the human imagination.

In addition to your work in your individual section, First-Year Seminar will organize several course-wide conversations this Fall with some of the remarkable writers, thinkers, and artists who are part of the Bard College community. Each panelist will share with us what “the self in the world” means in their own professional work and intellectual life, while also helping us think through one of the texts on the First-Year Seminar reading list. While your main point of contact will be your individual professor, the First-Year Seminar faculty co-directors would also love to meet as many members of the first-year class as possible – please visit the directors’ regular open student hours to share your questions, ideas, and experiences of the course, or simply to meet and say hello.

Welcome again! We look forward to working together to make First-Year Seminar a meaningful shared experience for the Class of 2025.

Daniel Mendelsohn
Director, First-Year Seminar

2021-22 Seminar Theme

The Self in the World

As you embark upon your life as college students and grow into your roles as citizens of the wider world, questions about your place in that world become more urgent. First Year Seminar invites you to reflect on a question that is fundamental to the humanities, the social sciences, and indeed to our own lives: how does each of us understand and articulate who we are? How does our individual “self” relate to other people and to the wider community? The year-long course, taken by all Bard first-years, asks how writers and thinkers over the centuries have grappled with this question. The Fall and Spring reading lists are underpinned by two narratives of discovery and (self-) exploration: Homer’s ancient Greek epic, the Odyssey, and its latter-day adaptation, the Afro-Caribbean epic poem Omeros by Derek Walcott (1990). Along the way, we will read — slowly and carefully — a series of touchstone works that grapple with this central question of the self in the world from a wide range of perspectives: from the fragments of Sappho to the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and from Dante’s Inferno to Rabindranath Tagore’s classic Bengali novel, The Home and the World. The readings in these core works will be illuminated by companion texts from Genesis to Marx, from Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison. Seminar-style discussion and writing-intensive assignments will provide you with a foundation for your work at the College and for life beyond Bard. In addition to your work in the classroom, the whole first-year class will also participate in regular forums to engage creatively and critically with the ideas of the course.

Photo by Chris Kayden

First-Year Seminar

Acquiring a shared basis for conversation.

First-Year Experience Resources

Contact Us

Program Director

Daniel Mendelsohn

The program director holds regular office hours throughout the semester.
I welcome the chance to meet with you about the course and your experiences.

Fall Semester Office Hours: TBT
Instructions for joining: please email mendelso@bard.edu) for a Zoom link in advance. If you are unable to meet at this time (for example, if you are working remotely, in a different time zone), please reach out by email and we can arrange a different time to meet.

Please note that this is in addition to your own FYSEM instructor's office hours, which you should attend with specific questions / concerns about your own FYSEM section and your own personal progress in the course.

For further information, contact Program Assistant Julie Cerulli
fysem@bard.edu | 845-758-7514