First-Year Seminar Required Texts

Required texts are available from the College Bookstore. Rely on the ISBN to be sure you are getting the correct edition.

 
Campus Bookstore

Fall 2021 Texts
Photo by Karl Rabe

Fall 2021 Texts

  • Walcott, Derek, Omeros, 1992 ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374523503.
  • Carson, Anne, If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Vintage. ISBN 978-0375724510.
  • Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Alle Mandelbaum. Random House. ISBN 978-0553210415.
  • Alighieri, Dante, The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse, trans. Robert Pinsky. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374524524.
  • Leon-Portilla, Miguel, Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp, Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0807055007.
  • Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. Peter Holland, Stephen Orgel, and A.R. Braunmuller. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0143128632.
Students should also purchase from the Bard Bookstore a copy of the custom First-Year Seminar Course Reader. This includes additional readings for both Fall and Spring semesters including Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Primo Levi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
 

Spring 2022 Texts

  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein:  The 1818 Text. Penguin. ISBN 978-0143131847.
  • Frederick Douglass, The Portable Frederick Douglas, ed. J. Stauffer & H.L. Gates, Jr. Penguin. ISBN 978-0143106814.
  • Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto,  ed. D. McLellan. Oxford. ISBN 978-0199535712.
  • Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1st ed. Mariner Books. ISBN 978-0156628709.
  • Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. S. Tagore, ed. W. Radice. Penguin . ISBN: 978-01400449860.
  • Homer, The Odyssey, trans. R. Fitzgerald. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374525743.
In addition to the above texts, readings from the First-Year Seminar: The Self in the World 2021-2022 course reader will also be used.

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