First-Year Seminar Events

This performance, featuring the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, is presented as part of the second-semester program for the First-Year Seminar.
This semester, the course invites students to engage with the complexities of democratic life—its challenges, responsibilities, and possibilities. Through foundational texts in literature, philosophy, history, and political theory, students explore enduring questions of citizenship, belonging, and the meaning of community.
Culture—including music—plays a vital role in shaping how we imagine and inhabit our shared world. This performance expands on that conversation, offering a powerful artistic lens through which to reflect on the human dimensions of civic life.

This event will be the continuation of the "Why of What We Do" speaker series, featuring Roosevelt Montás as our speaker.

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University and the former director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum (2008-2018).  He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager, where he attended public schools in Queens before entering Columbia College in 1991 through its Opportunity Programs. In 2003, he completed a Ph.D. in English, also at Columbia; his dissertation, Rethinking America, won Columbia University’s 2004 Bancroft Award. In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student and in 2008, he received the Dominican Republic’s National Youth Prize.  He regularly teaches moral and political philosophy in the Columbia Core Curriculum as well as seminars in American Studies. 
 
Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation details the experiences of Montás as a student and teacher, telling the story of how the Great Books transformed his life and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds (watch his introduction to the book here).
 

Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

Margaret Cavendish—natural philosopher and fashionista, creatoress and courtier—was for a time in the 17th century one of the most famous women in the world. But for centuries her materialist philosophy, her prodigious literary production, and her colorful life have been rarely taught, much less read or discussed. Some four hundred years after her birth, Cavendish is finally again in vogue, thanks in large part to our two panelists. In this conversation, Alison Peterman, author of a fascinating forthcoming introduction to Cavendish’s philosophy, and Francesca Peacock, author of Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, which has been covered by the BBC, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, will shed light on her, her life, her philosophy, and why she matters now as much as ever.

FYSEM is a course that focuses on language. It asks us to read texts closely, to write about them, and to talk about them. It seeks to deepen and widen our understanding of what words can and cannot do. Although most of our exchanges with ourselves and with others assume a linguistic character, at the same time we appear also to be a musical species. In Europe and North America, the use of sounds, notes, rhythms, and the combination of all the elements of music making developed into an elaborate world of communication and expression with its own distinct system of notation, making it possible to reach an audience well out of earshot. This tradition of music has migrated across continents and cultures, notably to Asia and Latin America. Music in this incarnation is not a language. Yet it seems to be a shortcut to one's emotions. Perhaps it is a mystical means of communication clearer and more powerful than language and therefore a link to the divine? 

First-Year Seminar takes us on journeys real, spiritual, and metaphorical—from Odysseus’s voyage home to Ithaka to Frederick Douglass’s quest for freedom and Derek Walcott’s imaginative roaming over space and time. Yet many of us have spent the past year in unprecedented physical confinement. This final FYSEM forum discussion considered how our experiences of isolation have inflected our ideas about reading and writing, and asks whether journeys and adventures are possible when movement is not.