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

Spring 2020 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 2019-2020 course reader will also be used.

Photo by Karl Rabe

Fall 2020 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.
Euripides, Ion, Helen, Orestes, trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien, & Matthew Wright. Hackett. ISBN 978-1624664809.
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.
Shakespeare, William, The Tempest, ed. Peter Holland, Stephen Orgel, and A.R. Braunmuller. Penguin. ISBN: 978-0143128632.

Contact Us

Program Directors
Omar Cheta
Lauren Curtis
Daniel Mendelsohn

The program directors hold regular office hours throughout the semester.
We welcome the chance to meet with the first-year class and talk with you about the course.

Spring Semester directors' office hours: Wednesdays, 3-4pm, Student side of Kline Dining Room

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