AS.001 (AS First Year Writing Seminars)

What is “the common good”? How do individuals consider this idea, this question, and how are societies led, or misled, by its pursuit? Together, we will explore sources from a range of perspectives: What does Aristotle’s theory of the common good teach us? Or the Federalist Papers, the design of Baltimore’s public transportation system, meritocracy in higher education, the perniciousness of pandemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons, restorative justice, or intimate love? Drawing from film, journal articles, literature, and other sources—authors/creators include Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Bong Joon-ho, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Sandel, and more—this First-Year Seminar is as much about how we ask and interrogate challenging, timeless questions as it is about the answers themselves. Engaging our material and each other, we will work together to hone the habits of scholarly inquiry essential to this practice: reading, writing, talking. The seminar will culminate in a final, collaborative research project that seeks to map, and manifest, versions of the common good.

Hospitals: Virtually all of us were born in one, most of us will eventually die in one, and in between all of us will spend at least some time in one. Lots of you likely aspire to spend your careers in one. Along the way we, or some third-party payer, will spend a considerable amount of our health care benefits there. Our focus will be on the history of the hospital from its origins in early modern Europe and the Islamic world, through the early modern period, to the rise of the modern urban mega hospital. The Johns Hopkins Hospital has been ranked as one of the nation’s best by US News and World Report since its annual survey began, and spent nineteen straight years at number one. So we will devote some time to its history, and the history of its affiliated programs—The School of Medicine, The Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the School of Nursing. For your major project, you will serve as advisors to the university’s Planning and Architecture committee. Drawing on your extensive knowledge of the history hospitals and medicine, you will re-envision the medical campus of the 21st century

How have fish and other aquatic animals contributed to the understanding of nature, the environment, and life itself? What features of aquatic organisms and the medium of water facilitated these investigations and why did certain research take place at certain times and places? This First-Year Seminar guides students to address these questions through the perspectives of the history of science and technology. Readings are composed of primary literature in biological studies of aquatic animals and related secondary literature in history of the life sciences. Through readings, lectures, discussions, field trips to local laboratories and aquarium, and an original research project, students will gain experience for future research in the life sciences or in historical studies of science. Topics include “fish” in natural history, taxonomy, physiology, embryology, genetics, neuroscience, fisheries /aquaculture, environmental testing, and molecular biology.

Join us for a road trip through American history, from the horseless carriage to the latest EVs. In this First-Year Seminar, we'll explore the evolving automotive industry, car culture in film, novels, and music, auto racing, the great American highway, labor relations, environmental issues, and more. You'll be writing an 'autobiography' of a car driven by someone in your family, visit a classic car museum in Hershey, PA, and build a Visible V-8 engine, just like the one in my own 1964 Buick Riviera. We'll screen some classic car films--'Grand Prix', 'Bullit', 'Gone in 60 Seconds', 'American Graffiti''--and unpack some class car tunes like 'Little Deuce Coupe', 'Route 66' and 'Hot Rod Lincoln'. Should be a fun ride!

This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce students to the fundamental physical and chemical origins of color and how we perceive them - from the vivid palette provided by the natural world to the brightly colored clothing we wear. Beginning with the basic principles of light and color, we will embark on an interdisciplinary investigation of color, including, but not limited to: color chemistry; color in biology; the physiology of the eye; how color affects human psychology; the history of color and light; and the use of color in art. Discover the physical and chemical explanations behind several noteworthy phenomena such as sunsets, color-blindness, rainbows, fireworks, chameleons and the Aurora Borealis.

In this First-Year Seminar, we will seek to answer questions including: could you forge Beskar? What would it take to make a light saber? Is "Image, enhance" really possible? What is possible today? What might be possible in the future? And, what may never be possible, as it violates the laws of nature as we know them? We will take an empiricist approach, gathering data on the needed properties via screenings and related research, and then applying physical principles to reveal feasibility.

As interactions with virtual companions, chatbots, and emotionally responsive AI become increasingly common, this First-Year Seminar asks a set of urgent questions: What does it mean for a machine to simulate empathy? Who defines “care,” agency, and trust in human–machine relationships? Why do these technologies feel so persuasive? What new forms of bias, manipulation, dependency, or surveillance might these technologies enable?To address these questions, our course emphasizes not only ethical critique but also historical and technical understanding. We will examine how the concept and practice of emulated empathy was imagined, built, and justified, tracing key moments in the history of artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. Core sources include Alan Turing’s writings on machine intelligence; ELIZA (1966), the first computer therapist; contemporary AI ethics frameworks such as the IEEE standard on emulated empathy in autonomous systems; popular media, including the film Her; and global case studies such as Japanese advertising for avatar girlfriends. The seminar discussion will be based on hands-on encounters with AI systems and sustained scrutiny of historical sources. Screenings and in-class demonstrations will anchor the discussion, while comparative analysis of archival materials and contemporary standards will enable students to learn how the history of technology informs ethical debates. Throughout the course, students will actively evaluate the promises and limitations of emulated empathy by contrasting what these technologies were designed to do with our expectations for human empathy, understanding, and companionship.

This First-Year Seminar offers an introduction to the history of the Bible's composition, reception, and its use, with a focus on the different people who wrote, edited, and preserved it. Students will read biblical passages, and learn about the ancient scribal communities and the different people who created and preserved the texts that we today call the Bible (priests, prophets, and scholars). Students will also learn about and research the very different religious communities who valued  and transmitted these texts, forming their own bodies of authoritative scripture. As part of this work, students will gain experience developing research questions and critical thinking as they work towards a final project on a facet of biblical text. Together, we will also go on field trips and examine ancient and modern objects and art inspired by the history of the Bible, and the people involved in its creation and transmission.

This First-Year Seminar will explore the neuroscience of choice. In addition to exploring the neurobiology of choice, we will dabble with philosophical ideas of free will and determinism. We will also touch on questions related to culpability. For example, are people who break the law but suffer from brain damage responsible for their actions? Sound interesting? Well, why stop there? Let’s sit back, eat some popcorn and take a look at how popular culture depicts the neuroscience of choice in the movies. Yes, with your help, we can do it all – but will you choose to???

How does reading work as a cognitive process? How do acts of reading differ across cultures, technologies, and time? Why are reading practices and proficiencies a cultural obsession? How are we conditioned to read "a life" in auto/biographical accounts? This First-Year Seminar considers these questions through texts, museum visits, and hands-on engagement with book cultures.

Why do we listen to music? What use is it? Can it help us learn more, run faster, feel happier? Can it improve our lives? Can it cure disease? WMD is for musician and non-musician alike. It is designed for students with all sorts of musical tastes and academic interests. It also challenges the usual “top down” approach of most courses, where the professor decides most of what will be studied before the class begins and delivers most of the class content. By contrast, in this course students are invited to relate their majors or other interests to the power of music and then share these ideas with the rest of the class. For example, neuroscience majors might study how music benefits memory in Alzheimer’s patients. Or political science majors, the power of music in diplomatic missions. Students research topics like these and then assign related texts as homework to the rest of the class, including the professor. They’re given broad freedom of choice for these texts both in content and form. The goal is not to create a “great books” class so much as a “great questions” class, since great questions can be inspired by terrible or trivial sources, just as awful or insignificant situations can spark epiphany. But whatever the text, I, as the professor, must be willing not to profess. In fact, in this classroom I’m no longer a professor but a professional student, sharing with my fellow students an interest in music and its many possibilities. And yet, even more important than pursuing these shared interests, this course ultimately aims to help students create community by practicing better communication. Even if you forget everything you learned in this class, I hope you will remember your classmates.

Every playlist is a self-portrait: an increasingly intimate aggregation of works that affirm our musical values. Beneath those values lie unexamined assumptions about how music is made, for whom it is made, and why it should be appreciated. Some myths, understood as cultural narratives or inherited beliefs, can be tested directly. Is anyone truly tone deaf? Other myths require us to look outward, toward the vast literature on music's evolving means of production and its shifting audiences. The most revealing myths concern what music intends and communicates. These are the myths that ultimately challenge us to consider what our favorite music says about us as individuals. This First-Year seminar will complicate the recommendation algorithm of your streaming service.

In a moment when social fragmentation and the easy dissemination of “alternative facts” make deliberation and popular consensus elusive, objectivity seems like a relic of a different era. However, truth and the proper means of determining it have always been contested. This course asks whether our moment is unique. Is truth merely a noble dream – an unreachable ideal – or something real that can be grasped? If the latter, how do we attain it?In this First-Year Seminar, students will learn how scholars theorized concepts such as science, society, identity, and modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries by making them into objects of study and creating “disciplines” around them. As they learn about the foundations of our modern academic enterprise, students will survey a variety of the humanistic and social scientific fields that they can study at Johns Hopkins, learning how different disciplines pose questions about the world while trying out the intellectual tools they employ. Students will read and discuss important theoretical and methodological texts for the fields surveyed as well as research in which they are applied to concrete questions, providing an opportunity to investigate the connection between theory and the production of knowledge. Finally, students will consider and debate the nature of “expertise,” discussing the function and position of “experts” within contemporary society."

Most people think the strongest kind of evidence in a criminal case is a confident eyewitness. Most students think re-reading textbook materials or class notes is the best way to prepare for an exam. And all too many people think that measles vaccines cause autism. All three of these ideas are wrong. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what modern psychology has uncovered about how our intuitions concerning human nature deceive us, and lead to incorrect ideas such as the ones just mentioned. We will discuss a wide variety of topics including “the attention economy,” groupthink, and subliminal perception.

This First-Year Seminar focuses on the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin and the depictions of their lives in film during the 20th century. The seminar provides both an introduction to film analysis and music history biography. In the last module, we will examine the canon of Western art music composers and consider historiographical issues along lines of gender, race, and other American demographics within this inherited tradition--all toward a collaborative final project. Excursions to concerts and other events will be offered.

Are you curious about the natural world? How well do we understand nature? What remains to be understood? Are there common principles that can explain everything about it? Do we understand our past well enough to predict our future? In this seminar we are going to emulate the Greeks, who without the benefit of the technological and mathematical armamentarium at our disposal today, driven simply by curiosity and imagination, identified fundamental questions about the natural world that still puzzle us today. They laid the foundation for modern science, and many of their insights have stood the test of time. In this FYS we’ll examine the nature of nature by discussing deep questions about the world around us and by examining phenomena we experience in our daily lives. This FYS does not require a background in science or math! We’ll focus on big ideas. Our seminar will be organized around weekly conversations informed by all manner of sources: popular science writing, newspaper articles, fiction, poetry, and film. We might even do simple experiments (no lab or science experience necessary) that examine the logic of life. We’ll try to identify continuity and connectivity between aspects of nature that are usually treated separately. Perhaps you’ll discover that science and religion, and scientific and humanistic inquiry, have more in common than you might think.

Which ideas, movements, problems, and conflicts define the contemporary United States—and where did they come from? In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll study the history of this country since the turn of the 21st century to try to answer those questions. Using a range of texts and visual media, we’ll investigate the history behind concepts like "the War on Terror," “the free market,” “identity politics,” “culture wars,” and "populism," and discuss the causes and consequences of the debates they provoked in this period. We’ll also assess what’s appealing and challenging about studying the very recent past and using it to interpret our present.

This First-Year Seminar will focus on the figure of Socrates. Socrates wrote nothing, so we depend on others for our knowledge of him. We will examine the ways he is portrayed by several different authors, including Plato. We will also examine some other ideas around in his time - some of which were pretty radical - and consider how he may have reacted to them. Finally, we will examine his influence on later thought.

This First-Year Seminar introduces students to the intellectual life of the university by considering some of the riches of contemporary global cinema. After a brief introduction each week, you will watch the assigned film and read some texts to deepen your sense of how to analyze it and think about broader matters the director has taken on. During in-class discussion, we will consider what makes a particular film noteworthy, what the director seems to think about his/her national context, and how local issues intersect with broader questions about the human condition. How does the past shape us? What is justice? What is political action? Who are we responsible to? We will also consider aesthetics. What is a good director? How do we know we are watching good acting (especially when reading subtitles?) What impact do cinematography and editing have on our perception of a film? How do film makers speak to and quote one another?

Stories give shape to human lives. Although AI now seems capable of generating plots that appear life-like, only humans can be affected by stories and carry this knowledge into the real world.Short stories are central to this seminar, which explores how modern fiction does not so much “copy” the world as offer new perspectives born from nothing more than signs inscribed on a page. Materials drawn from studies in narratology and research on the reading brain will support this argument.This course invites you to actively engage in class activities that combine writing and discussion. As part of the experiential learning that is a feature of FYS seminars, you will have a chance to discuss the art of storytelling with one or two local authors or with writers at Hopkins. Our classwork will depend on attentive, in-depth readings of a selection of short stories chosen because they can lead to productive encounters that reveal the wealth of meanings and wisdom that inhabit literary works. As studies in narrative have shown, fiction can introduce us to the views, memories, and feelings of other human beings, even though these entities are born from nothing more than words cast on a page.For a broader perspective, we will also explore recent scientific studies that offer models for the reading brain and argue that our existence as humans depends on our capacity to elaborate and transmit stories across time as part of apprehending the world we inhabit. We will read selections from Stanislas Dehaenne, Maryanne Wolf, Roy Schafer, and Fritz Breithaupt.Our initial sampling of short works includes stories written over the last twenty years by authors such as Alison Baker, Tessa Hadley, Junot Díaz, Xuan Juliana Wang, Joy Ladin, and Sidik Fofana. As readers yourselves, you may suggest additional stories to present, or even choose to cap the course with a story of your own inspired by the approaches to storytelling we will explore together.

How do economists measure GDP from outer space? How do we uncover latent variables in machine learning and AI? What if you were never free to make your own choices? Drawing on both lived experience and academic research, this seminar examines the relationship between data, ideology, human behavior, and unobservable truth—with the U.S. and China as comparative anchors. Students will explore contrasts between education systems; the economic, social, and historical consequences of the Cultural Revolution and One-Child Policy; the meaning of human rights and individual freedom; and the challenges of interpreting information where data may be incomplete, manipulated, or hidden.Along the way, students will learn modern technologies and econometric methods used to uncover "latent" information—from satellite imagery and nighttime lights measuring economic activity, to identifying hidden information in human decision-making, to understanding how latent-variable methods power machine learning, AI, robotics, and self-driving systems. No prior background in statistics is required.Ultimately, the course invites students to reflect on their own unobservable truth—their values, ambitions, and sense of purpose. Rather than offering definitive answers, it models an enduring pursuit of truth in a world where much of what matters remains hidden, uncertain, or imperfectly measured.

How do we measure inequalities in income and wealth? What do the historical and comparative trends look like and how do economists explain them? Is economic inequality a significant problem in the United States today? If not, why not? If so, why? And what tools do we have in the policy arsenal to deal with it? In sharing our different perspectives we will have to wrestle with concepts you may be curious about, such as “supply-side economics” “technological change” “free trade” “the top 1%” and “the k-shaped economy,” concepts that will hopefully prove useful in your understanding of other current economic issues. As an added twist, we will pair short vignettes from literature with economics readings to provide a historical and philosophical perspective, and to motivate our weekly discussions. You will have the opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow classmates in presenting group research and leading class discussions. Your final, individual presentation will explore some aspect of economic inequality, broadly defined, inspired by your own selection from literature, poetry, art, music, or film.

As a public good, public schooling is often the focus of attempts at purposeful change. Politicians, for example, make policies for fixing schools (public) that never would be entertained for fixing families (private). Parents also make demands of schools, as do a host of other interested parties. Together these stakeholders make up part of the external environment to which schools adapt. But the institutional agents of schooling have interests too—e.g., teachers’ unions, associations of school administrators, the faculty of schools of education—and they too often try to shape the direction of school reform. This First-Year Seminar examines timely, often controversial, issues of education policy and practice through a sociological lens. We will address these topics with discussions of a documentary film on the history of American public schools, readings in contemporary social science, and our own research into specific policy debates.

What if we have it all wrong about our relationships? What if we have misunderstood the fundamental mechanics of how all our different social connections work? This first-year seminar posits that relationships are not fundamentally about trust, dependability, reciprocity, having common interests, and the other usual suspects. Rather, the active ingredient of our social connections are the stories that we tell ourselves: stories about us, about others, and about the connective tissue between the two.Drawing from psychological science (social psychologists like Nicholas Epley and Eli Finkel), literature (Shakespeare), the popular press (ranging from The Daily podcast to Atlantic and New Yorker articles), and even a dash of story science (yes, it’s a real thing), the course hypothesizes that relationships, at their core, are stories. We develop these narratives by making and organizing numerous inferences about other people. But because our biases afflict our inferences, we often misread people; consequently, our relationships suffer. The latter part of the course explores how we might improve the accuracy of our inferences, thereby enhancing our relationships at the personal, group, and societal levels.

Freedom of speech, and the related freedom of the press, are core values for democracies -- and for universities, in which the freedom to challenge accepted beliefs is assumed to be essential to advancing knowledge. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, as do the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the European Convention on Human Rights among other statements. But like other rights, my right to freedom of speech may conflict with yours, or it may infringe on other important rights or societal objectives. As a result, freedom of speech cannot be (and in practice is not) unlimited. In this seminar, we will be asking why freedom of speech has been accorded such importance, and how and why it might legitimately be limited, in politics, in business, in everyday life, and in universities, looking both at the United States and at other liberal democracies. Reading will include opinions (both majority and dissenting) of courts in the United States, Canada, and Europe, with discussion informed by Justice Robert Jackson’s quip about the US Supreme Court (but equally applicable to other top-level courts): “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”

Cults, communes, and conspiracies are unusual social and ideological organizations. How should we understand their origins, structure, and functioning? In our First-Year Seminar, we will assess the value of alternative explanatory concepts from the social sciences, such as charismatic leadership, organizational ecology, network structure, status competition, social influence, and belief propagation. We will then interpret cases in comparative perspective, asking, for example, how cults differ from religious sects, how communes differ from political movements, and how organized crime groups differ from legal businesses.

What don’t we do with words? Even silence makes manifest the power of speech. This First-Year Seminar will introduce you to some of the ways that power has been described and thought about. In addition to studying arguments that connect the power of speech to what it means to be human, we will explore various attempts both to protect and limit speech, taking into consideration not only how we do things with words but how words affect us. Topics that will be covered include freedom of speech, censorship, hate speech, talking back, silence, and storytelling. We will read texts in philosophy, political science, law, and literature, and we will watch at least one film or play.While we discuss the power of speech, we will also reflect on the ways in which discussion fosters a community. In other words, the experience of our discussion is a topic for our conversation. First-Year Seminars are designed to encourage “meaningful civil exchange among students across disciplinary interests and backgrounds” as well as to “foster early, sustained faculty-student interaction and mentorship.” We will talk about how such seminars are supposed to work and how they may (or may not) realize their goals. Reading, analyzing, and discussing the texts assigned in this course will help us develop foundational critical thinking skills; how might these activities also establish a sense of (group) identity?

This First-Year Seminar explores the intersection between medicine and film, looking at how medicine, medical providers, and narratives of illness and health are depicted in cinematic works. Some of the questions that the seminar pursues are: What are some of the medical issues that filmmakers focus on? How did the cinematic portrayal of medicine change over time? What role do these films play in shaping public perceptions of medicine, medical providers, and medical institutions? By watching a number of films throughout the semester and reading some accompanying texts, students will develop deeper knowledge both of the history of medicine in cinema and the tools that cinema offers to the telling medical stories.

This First-Year Seminar explores the art and ideology of films that remix previous cultural products to produce new works, sometimes called Found Footage Films or Collage Films. Through screenings, readings and discussions students will have fun and gain a strong foundational understanding of this fascinating genre that remixes films of the past to create new effects, meanings, and messages. Dealing with history, art theory, and the practical act of editing, it serves to ground students in both the method and the theory of motion picture art. For the final project, each student will make their own film, drawing materials from the Academic Film Archive of North America, a newly acquired collection of 7,600 16mm films housed right here at Johns Hopkins.

Mathematics is so much more that simply the language of science, or a set of techniques for solving quantitative-based problems. In fact, it is not a science at all, but an art, a construct of the imagination that not only provides structure to the reality of the world, but also gives form to anything and everything we can possibly imagine. Many of its fundamental principles and methods of employment are shared by artists of all types, from musicians to painters, sculptors, and poets. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these principles and methods shared by mathematicians and artists, like the notions of abstraction, metaphor, and pattern, the aesthetic quality both mathematicians and artists give to their work, the geometry of representation and visualization, the imagination as a tool of discovery and structure, and the use of mathematics in art, as well as the use of art in mathematics. Along the way, we will talk to artists and mathematicians, and hopefully visit the studios and galleries of each.

This First-Year Seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of trees. We will consider them ecologically, studying tree biology and how they interact with each other and neighboring species; aesthetically, studying what makes them beautiful and how artists and writers represent them; and socially, studying the various choices humans make that affect trees. To do so, we will interact with a variety of media and genres, reading poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction), looking at art, and watching film. Authors, artists, and directors will range widely, and may include Basho, Ross Gay, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Peter Wohlleben, Richard Powers, Vincent Van Gogh, Hayao Miyazaki, and Víctor Erice. The course will also include several walking tours (on and off campus), during which we will learn about trees in our home city of Baltimore. Field trips may include the Cylburn Arboretum and a local urban orchard. The main project will be a handwritten attention log, in which students will write about a particular tree they “adopt” on campus.

In this First-Year Seminar we will explore the long and mostly untold story behind the most revolutionary discoveries of modern physics—quantum mechanics and relativity—a story written, astonishingly, in the languages of poetry, fiction, and philosophy. Shuttling between twentieth-century Germany and Argentina by way of eighteenth-century Prussia, with stopovers in Plato’s Greece and Dante’s Italy, we will pursue the age-old riddle of how the human mind interacts with the physical world; tangle with theologians as they ponder the nature of free will; interrogate cosmologists as they attempt to grasp the shape the universe; and, finally, explores the implications of these profound problems for our understanding of reality today.

What does it mean to live and to write in more than one language? This is a particularly charged question in today’s globalized world. In this course, we will explore texts and films produced by multilingual writers and directors, who reflect on the experiences of the multilingual subject; their concerns range from the turmoil of living between identities and cultures, to the playful experience of daily life and existence opened up through thinking and working in multiple languages. Main questions will include: In what ways do languages influence how writers write? How does the presence of multiple languages in a text structure a reading experience and for whom? How do texts by multilingual writers destabilize conceptions of national literature? While some texts we will read were originally composed in English, the majority were written by multilingual writers in other languages. Finally, therefore, we will address what it means to read translated into English texts that were, in some sense, already produced “in translation.”

Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world.

This First-Year Seminar will investigate the American democratic experiment from multiple angles, including by exploring the differences between democratic and alternative forms of governance; the founders' democratic ideals and blindspots; their debates about design; historical shifts in conceptions of democracy and citizenship; and the ever-present social and cultural challenges (and joys!) of practicing democracy and forging a common life across our religious, economic and other differences.

The Middle East is home to some of the world’s earliest and most important literature. In this First-Year Seminar, students will read in translation a selection of texts from different traditions that flourished in the pre-Islamic Middle East. Sample readings include the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld, and the battle between David and Goliath from the Hebrew Bible. As we read, we will consider why ancient Middle Eastern literature may be more relevant to our own present moment than ever before.

J.S. Bach is one of the most important composers Europe ever produced. How did he fit into the musical world he inherited, as a performer, as a composer, and as a teacher? In his own day he worked for churches, princes, and cities; after his death his music was profoundly influential to generations of composers. The world has changed much since the 18th century yet somehow Bach’s music continues to delight and inspire in a way unique even considered against other ‘greats’ of history. What did his music have that allowed this to happen? To address these questions, this First-Year Seminar will explore Bach’s life, music, and legacy. Experiences will include listening, attending concerts, and field trips to visit instruments such as harpsichord and organ. Musical expertise is not required, but willingness to listen and reflect is.

Social science is the scholarly study of society and social behavior. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the social sciences by studying poverty in America through the lens of economics and other social sciences, including sociology and anthropology. The quantitative approach taken by economics will be compared and contrasted with qualitative approaches. Illustrations of how the lives of the poor are led as depicted in ethnographic studies, movies, and literature will be studied to learn how integrated perspectives can be formed. Students will learn how to read scholarly articles with a critical eye, to speak about their interpretations of the material, and to write short critical essays. Students will also be introduced to quantitative analysis using graphs and tables. Group projects will be required. Guest lecturers bringing non-economics perspectives will visit the class.

In this First-Year Seminar, we will investigate planetary sciences and the principles of understanding how planets work using scientific models. The focus will be on planetary oceans, atmospheres, and climates. For example: Why do the Earth and the Moon have vastly different surface temperatures? Why do Earth, Venus, and Mars have vastly different atmospheres? What are extra-terrestrial oceans like? What is known about the atmospheres and climates of planets in other solar systems? Why do we think that Earth’s climate was so different billions of years ago? How can we talk about global warming decades in the future when we can’t predict the weather in two weeks? Together we will learn how Earth & Planetary Scientists apply the scientific method to build and apply conceptual models of planetary oceans, atmospheres, and climates. Students in the class will explore hands-on computer model case studies to investigate how physical, chemical, and biological processes shape planetary environments in our Solar system and beyond.

The past is littered with discoveries that have altered the course of civilization. In this First-Year Seminar, we will take a deep dive into chemical discoveries that changed history, discussing how they work as well as their impact on society. Topics will range from dirt warfare, to the link between gun powder and workers’ rights, to how cats biochemically domesticated humans.

We often think of bacteria in the context of dangerous or annoying infections. However, bacteria themselves can be infected by even smaller and more abundant entities: viruses called bacteriophages. This First-Year Seminar will combine readings and discussion of the fundamental biology of phages and their role in controlling populations of bacteria, with lab work to discover new phages from the Johns Hopkins campus. Phages identified in this class will be added to the Science Education Alliance’s archive which is comprised of phages from over 100 academic institutions worldwide and is a resource for phage biologists and physicians directly involved in developing phages as a treatment for disease.

Corporations are all around us. They interact with us every day in ways minute and profound. We work with them and for them. They have rights and freedoms, for instance, to speech and religious expression. They seem to have intentions, desires, voices, and goals. Yet, they can’t take a walk or feel the wind or smell the earth. If they do harm, they are notoriously hard to punish. When they come to an end, no one writes an obituary. This First-Year Seminar will query whether a corporation is a person across a range of sources and perspectives, including from law, politics, philosophy, literature, and popular culture. Can a corporation be a person? Who should decide and on what basis? What are the implications for our understanding of rights, agency, and morality and for pressing global issues such as climate change? And what are the implications for our own understanding of ourselves as “a person”?

40 years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt began his famous essay “On Bullsh*t” by writing “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullsh*t”, and the situation has arguably only gotten worse. We are inundated with bullsh*t—in person, on the news, in politics, and on social media. We’re up to our eyeballs in it.But what is bullsh*t anyway? Frankfurt argued that bullsh*tting is different from lying. While liars aim to mislead us about what’s true, bullsh*tters don’t care whether what they say is true or false at all. They’re playing a different game entirely, using language to aggrandize themselves or, often, to sell you something. This indifference to truth, Frankfurt argued, may make bullsh*t even more corrosive to public discourse than outright lies.This First-Year Seminar will draw on philosophy, cognitive science, and social theory to investigate why bullsh*t is so pervasive and why we fall for it. We will ask whether the human mind is naturally susceptible to bullsh*t, what makes bullsh*t useful, and whose interests it serves. Along the way, we’ll consider the scope of the concept: Is ChatGPT bullsh*t? Are some jobs bullsh*t? Are grades bullsh*t? Hell, is this seminar bullsh*t? By the end, you’ll be in a position to decide. No bullsh*t.

How do we remember, and what do we forget? This interdisciplinary course explores acts of memory and forgetting across individual, collective, and cultural contexts. We will investigate questions such as: What gets remembered in official narratives and personal life stories, and what is forgotten or suppressed? How do communities selectively construct collective memories through monuments, museums, and commemorative practices? How do individuals negotiate memory and forgetting in their own lives? How do literature and film represent forgetting, erasure, and amnesia at both personal and collective levels? What role does nostalgia play in shaping how we remember the past? Drawing on memory studies, cultural theory, political thought, and neuroscience, we will examine how memory and forgetting define our present. Students will engage with sites of memory firsthand through a museum visit and exploration of commemorative spaces across Baltimore. Texts include Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter, Anne Berest's The Postcard, short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Oliver Sacks's essays on memory and neurology, and the films Goodbye Lenin and Ararat.

In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the roles of love, fear, anger, and hope in our lives. We’ll ask questions about their value, danger, and appropriateness or inappropriateness in our lives at both the individual level and the level of political life. Some examples of questions we’ll consider are these: Should we love those who have wronged us? Is enjoying a horror movie morally problematic? How is fear used in political rhetoric and how should we respond to it? Is anger acceptable, or perhaps even necessary, in protest? Is love necessary for meaningful social change? When and how is hope justifiable and useful? We’ll also draw connections between these emotions and engage with related concepts such as forgiveness and trust. While our engagement with these concepts will be primarily through philosophy, we will also consider works of art and think about the value of portraying and evoking these emotions through various forms of art. Students can expect to read philosophical texts, journalism, occasional fiction and poetry, and to watch at least one horror film, among the sources for the course. Possible authors include Berit Brogaard, Noël Carroll, Myisha Cherry, Raja Halwani, Stephen King, Adrienne Martin, Martha Nussbaum, Edgar Allan Poe, Jason Stanley, and Desmond Tutu. We will take at least one field trip to a location in Baltimore during the semester. Students will emerge from this course with a more nuanced understanding of these powerful and often controversial emotions, and the ability to talk about them in an academic and public context.

In this First-Year Seminar, students will examine news stories, features, profiles, documentary films, and works of photojournalism with an eye toward understanding how the Earth Crisis (the complex combination of ecological problems facing the planet and its inhabitants) is communicated to audiences around the globe. How is climate change reported in European newspapers? How do Chinese media outlets write about air pollution? How do local news sources report on ecological issues here in Baltimore? Do nature documentaries advance or detract from our understanding of ecological threats? Is an ecologically themed short story more or less powerful than a photo essay examining the great Pacific garbage patch? We’ll ask these questions and more as we seek to understand how the story of the Earth Crisis is communicated to audiences around the world and how Baltimore's media landscape addresses local and regional environmental concerns. We'll visit a newsroom, a local environmental nonprofit, and local sites of ecological interest, including Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

This First-Year Seminar introduces you to the vibrant world of theater in Baltimore. In class, we will read and discuss several plays before attending live performances of them. We will also study their various contexts (historical, theatrical, etc.), meet people involved in staging them now in Baltimore, and compare the experience of reading plays to seeing them performed. No prior experience with the theater is expected. Through this seminar, you will not only learn about theater; you will get to know a culture and community that make Baltimore special. *Please note: This course meets in the evening because our theatergoing will happen during class-time. On days when this is happening, class may start and end later, depending on the start time and length of the performance we are seeing. Those scheduling details will be settled before the semester begins and shared with all enrolled students.

As an undergraduate student at Hopkins, you’ve likely given much thought about which university to attend and which major to choose. But why does the institution to which you’ve pledged to spend four years of your life exist? Where did universities come from? Why are they currently organized in departments, and why weren’t they organized that way for most of their past? Why was Johns Hopkins founded, and how do its aims and structures differ from those of other American institutions of higher education as well as from other universities around the world?This course aims to give students insight into the history of the university as an institution that structures the quest for knowledge. Concentrating on the period from the founding of the first university in Bologna, Italy to the present moment, we will seek to understand how the human quest to know has informed the structure of academic institutions in different ways over the course of that history. We will explore ways that the quest to know has at times challenged and changed institutional structures. And we will conclude by thinking about how efforts to know that sit uneasily within the contemporary university are challenging its structures today. This course will require students both to engage sympathetically in the close reading of texts that are emblematic of different ways of knowing, and to think in institutional terms about how those different quests to know inspired and challenged academic structures over time. We hope that this manner of studying the history of the university will both expand and discipline our imagination of what is possible and good for its future.

This First-Year Seminar is designed around what is on stage in Baltimore and DC this fall. We will attend several plays, both professional productions and student productions at JHU. We will pay attention to the interpretation of plays on the page, and to the ways that scripts materialize as performances on the stage. We will place these performances in the context of larger theatre histories, studying great plays from the age of Shakespeare to contemporary American theatre. No acting experience is required – just the desire to explore the theatre of today. A great way to find out about the lively theatre scene on campus, and a great way to get to know your new city.

This First-Year Seminar will use the tools of the historical and literary archive to etch a social history of African American life in Baltimore between roughly 1790 and 1860, focusing on the historical figure William Levington. The founder of the first black Episcopalian church in the slaveholding South, Levington was also the third seminary-trained black priest in America. Students will explore classic narratives revealing the lives of the enslaved in American cities and in the Chesapeake. The course will also consider the role of the black church as the principle independent institution and mass movement for antebellum African Americans. We will make a class visit to St. James in Lafayette Square, the church Levington founded, and also visit the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Consciousness is maybe the most mysterious thing in the universe. Why would any hunk of matter—particularly the three pounds of squishy stuff between your ears—feel any particular way? It’s hard even to imagine a satisfying explanation. Recent advances in artificial intelligence are raising this old question in new ways. Machines are smarter than they’ve ever been. If you thought there was a connection between intelligence and consciousness, then would a smart enough machine be conscious? Or is there something special about a biological brain? This First-Year Seminar will investigate human and artificial minds. What is consciousness, and could there be artificial consciousness? Do large language models like ChatGPT have beliefs or desires? What is it about minds that make them the sorts of things we have to care about morally? In exploring these questions, we will draw on philosophy and cognitive science, and learn about how large language models like ChatGPT actually work. We will also consider explorations of these themes in science fiction, and maybe even administer a Turing Test of our own.

This First-Year Seminar will explore seminal ideas in macroevolutionary theory through both classic and cutting-edge studies. Topics will include the relationship between evolution and development, how fossils shape our understanding of biological systems, and the logical basis of evolutionary inference. Students will also gain an appreciation for the historical development of these ideas and their application in modern science and beyond. This course will explore these topics using foundational texts in biology, such as The Origin of Species and writings by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It will feature guest lectures from curators from natural history museums across the country as well as offer students their own opportunity to go into the field to collect fossils here in Maryland.

Music, Art, Theater, Novels, Autobiographies, and Material Culture all expanded dramatically in Britain in the long eighteenth century (c. 1714-1830), creating a culture celebrating ‘happiness’, 'beauty', and the 'pleasures of the imagination'. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to themselves experiencing and discussing these exciting cultural forms, with students attending and watching plays and movies from plays, discussing Jane Austen novels as read and as filmed, reading and discussing an Afro-British autobiography, listening to performances of different kinds of music, and discussing works of art and architecture both in the classroom and in the museum.

Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus and its surroundings is a wonderful green space in the middle of Baltimore City. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to both the visible and cryptic organisms living above- and belowground. A combination of observational and sampling techniques will be used to demonstrate how ecologists collect data about plants, insects, and other organisms. In the classroom, these field observations, combined with reading material will be used to discuss global environmental issues including climate change on biodiversity, invasive species, and human impacts on the landscape. By the end of the course students will be able to generate research questions based upon field observations and appreciate the diverse life forms both in Earth and in our backyard. Students should be prepared to spend many hours outside.

This First-Year Seminar looks at the deeper psychological motivations of the American electorate. We begin by discussing the meaning of democracy and establishing a common understanding of American democracy specifically, placing the current moment into historical and international context. We then gradually dismantle the "folk theory" of democracy that assumes all voters are rational and economically-minded. Instead, we apply theories from social psychology to understand some essential questions about voter behavior. Why do people vote? How do they understand politics? How are their feelings and judgments affected by their own identities, biases, information sources, and by the messages they hear from leaders? Why have Americans grown so polarized? What role do racial and gender-based prejudice play? Is American politics headed toward a more violent future? We use evidence-based research from political science, sociology, and psychology to answer these questions.

This interdisciplinary FYS explores the history and politics of Baltimore by introducing students to episodes, neighborhoods, and political movements in the city’s history. Students will analyze primary source documents, television and films, fiction, and music about Baltimore. We’ll also take field trips to iconic—and unfamiliar—city locations. We’ll learn about the different methods and questions used by scholars in different disciplines, including history, literature, and popular culture. This course will require students to engage in class discussions. Each student will complete a final project, either individually or in a group, that interprets some aspect of Baltimore’s history and culture.

What do French views on culture, society, and politics tell us about ourselves? France is frequently misunderstood and criticized in US media, yet books and articles touting various aspects of a “French” lifestyle are bestsellers. French media, for its part, commonly engages in US-bashing, yet the popularity and influence of American culture there are undeniable. Why have many prominent Black American writers sought refuge in France, while many French intellectuals have chosen to bring their academic work to American universities, including The Johns Hopkins University? A cross-cultural examination will allow this First-Year Seminar to bring to light many aspects of the complex relationship between these two countries that are historical allies yet ofttimes rivals. We will explore and discuss food, language, cinema, diplomacy, and health, as well as conceptions of friendship, family, identity, and social justice. Course includes a meal at a French restaurant, a museum visit, film screening, and guest speakers.

Baltimore Harbor is a vital resource to Baltimore and surrounding regions. When temperatures drop in the fall, the surface waters become dense and sink, bringing bottom waters to the surface. This type of turnover is common in many water bodies. However, due to anthropogenic changes, these turnover events can cause phytoplankton blooms that color the water in dramatic green or mahogany hues and lead to fish kills and bad odors. In Fall of 2025, the turnover brought sulfide-filled waters fueled a bloom of green sulfur oxidizing bacteria and emitted a rotten-egg smell even documented by influencers on social media. Other years do not see these types of blooms. In this class, students will visit the Harbor to make water quality measurements and collect samples to document this year’s turnover event. Students will experience some of the uncertainties involved in natural science research – sometimes these blooms happen and sometimes they do not. Regardless of if a bloom happens in Fall 2026, students will use their observations along with other sources including publicly available water quality, hydrological, and weather data, news stories, and peer-reviewed papers to ask: 1) Why do these blooms happen in some years and not others?, 2) What role does land-use change play in the blooms?, and 3) How might these blooms be prevented in the future? Through the course, students will gain knowledge in how Earth and Planetary Scientists study coastal ecosystems and how interdisciplinary knowledge and approaches can address environmental challenges that impact urban waterways and the communities that surround them.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans report taking at least one prescription medication daily, and twenty-six percent say they’re taking at least four prescriptions per day. What are the ecological effects of the production and consumption of pharmaceuticals? Where do drugs go when they leave the body–and how are organisms and ecosystems affected? How are nonhumans implicated in drug testing and other exposures? What knowledge regimes undergird understandings of the human body as (1) treatable by medications and (2) dissociated from the natural world? What ecological knowledge has contributed to the biomedical pharmacopeia? In this seminar, we will learn about dolphins on LSD, the botanical links between the mafia and scurvy, cocaine-addicted animals, yams and the contraceptive pill, plants and the war on drugs, and more. Students will engage with historical, anthropological, cultural studies, and environmental health texts and media to examine these questions. Students will visit a clinical herbalist’s medicinal plant cultivation site, an open source insulin production lab, and a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioner. We will also conduct water quality testing in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to determine the presence of pharmaceuticals. Using planetary health and cross-cultural lenses, we will ask after the relationship between drugs, bodies, and the environment, and consider nonbiomedical healing regimes that posit different relationships between them.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing for TV. So would Jane Austen. With the advent of cable networks, DVDs, the internet, and live streaming, TV—once considered a “vast wasteland”—has become the most dynamic and creative medium for storytelling, attracting a host of talented writers, directors, and actors. This First-Year Seminar explores the innovative narrative strategies, structures, and character studies that transformed that wasteland into extraordinarily fertile terrain and ushered in a new Golden Age of TV.

From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China

The plays of William Shakespeare contain many musical cues. In Hamlet, Ophelia expresses herself through song when she is unable to through speech. In The Tempest, the spirit Ariel lures the shipwrecked Ferdinand to the shore by singing a song. In this course, we will think through the role of music in Shakespeare’s plays, reading The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, with attention to the sonic worlds they create. In addition, we will explore the various musical pieces that these plays have inspired, from film to stage, opera to musical theater, delving into the methods by which they have been adapted to meet the needs of diverse audiences. In addition to the recorded audio-visual materials we will view together, we will seek out opportunities to view a Shakespearean adaptation with a musical component performed live.

This First-Year-Seminar covers concepts of biology taught through the lens of microbes and antibiotic resistance. Using environmental samples, students actively engage in the hunt for novel antimicrobials. Broader concepts include the meaning of disease, how that meaning has changed over time, and the implications of widespread antibiotic resistance for society. This is a research-based project lab course in which students participate as part of an international consortium of undergraduates at other colleges. Students will isolate and characterize antibiotic-producing bacteria from the environment using modern molecular biological techniques. This seminar is open to all students, regardless of major. No prior lab experience necessary.

How did the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient Mediterranean peoples understand human difference and diversity? How did they form their senses of self in relation to others and articulate kinship and commonalities across ethnic lines? Did skin color, birthplace, language, and lineage matter in constructing social hierarchies? How did their concepts of class and citizenship, beauty and belonging, differ from ours? Did they have anything akin to modern constructions of race and racism, blackness and whiteness, the ‘west’ and the ‘rest’? If not, when and why were such ideas invented, and how was Greco-Roman culture conscripted in their support? Finally and crucially, what can we do to make “classics” today more equitable, inclusive, and accurate to the multicultural reality of the ancient Mediterranean? This First-Year Seminar examines these questions, and many more, through the literature, art, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, with forays into Egypt, Persia, Judea, and northern Europe. It will introduce you to the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean world, hone your ability to critically interpret and discuss art, literature, and scholarship, and explore how systems of categorizing human difference have historically served power. This course will give you a wider historical lens through which to understand race, racecraft, the “classics,” and “Western civilization,” revealing all to be dynamic and historically situated discourses that have been used to exert authority, to include or exclude, and to build communities. It will also build student community and comfort discussing sensitive subjects through a combination of field trips, guest lectures, movie nights, and communal meals.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.040.212 are not eligible to take AS.001.179.

This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce you to the human side of medicine by exploring ways in which patients and medical practitioners describe their personal experience. It has been structured to allow you to engage that material by reading it, viewing it in film, discussing it, writing about it and meeting with a practicing physician. Its a course not only about content, but also about process, the process of thoughtfully and openly engaging work about the lives of others. It is a seminar style course that emphasizes a friendly, protected setting in which to explore these issues. The course is facilitated by an experienced member of the Hopkins Medical Faculty, and has been designed to open a window through which you can begin to study the human concerns of patients and practitioners. The course is most likely to appeal to premedical and pre-health related students who are interested in exploring the human side of medicine, but also to students interested in biography, memoir and life-writing. At the end of this course, you will have gained an appreciation for some of the ways in which people express themselves about the illness experience or about working with the sick. You will have had a chance to develop longer, more personal relationship to such accounts than you are likely to have in clinical encounters in medical schools, training programs or even in clinical rotations. It takes time to listen. The course draws a small sample from a very wide range of such accounts that number in the thousands, so there is no attempt to generalize; rather, every effort is made to immerse ourselves into one account at a time and to understand one person’s experience at a time. Through this kind of immersion, you will develop a sense of how illness can affect a life, and the way in which practitioners become involved to find themselves in their own work.

This First-Year Seminar will explore diverse aspects of how we see and fail to see the world. We’ll discuss questions such as: What can we learn about vision from illusions and hallucinations? What explains why we sometimes miss things even though we’re looking right at them? Does what we believe and desire affect what we see? What happens to our visual experience when the brain is damaged, for example in conditions such as “blindsight,” “neglect” and “visual form agnosia”? And: Is there such a thing as subliminal or unconscious perception? Though primarily psychological, the course will draw on other disciplines, especially the philosophy of perception. We’ll also think about some of the ways visual artists and magicians exploit the workings of our visual systems to achieve their aims. This will likely involve at least one outing to a local art gallery to look for examples of what we’ve learned, an in-class screening, and hopefully a guest speaker or two.

This First-Year Seminar is designed for students of all backgrounds to provide a mathematical introduction to social choice theory, weighted voting systems, apportionment methods, and gerrymandering. In the search for ideal ways to make certain kinds of political decisions, a lot of wasted effort could be averted if mathematics could determine that finding such an ideal were actually possible in the first place. The seminar will analyze data from recent US elections as well as provide historical context to modern discussions in politics, culminating in a mathematical analysis of the US Electoral College. Case studies, future implications, and comparisons to other governing bodies outside the US will be used to apply the theory of the course. Students will use Microsoft Excel to analyze data sets. There are no mathematical prerequisites for this course.

This First-Year Seminar will explore how some important results in physics and astronomy are discovered, their transformative implications to the basic understanding of nature and their impact on the progress of society. Students will explore how simple rules obtained from the lab or in idealized settings imply the complex behaviors and dynamics observed in the natural world, and how they back-reaction on society. The seminar will explore the motivations for doing scientific research in various context, and how they relate to the application of scientific discoveries. An example of topic that will be explored is General Relativity, a subject that emerged purely from theoretical considerations by Einstein which have revolutionized our basic understanding of the physical world and have reshaped the fields of physics and astronomy. On the other hand, General Relativity is necessary for satellite timing which revolutionized communication in human society. Another example is the basic physics experiments and research that lead to the invention of the transistor and the ensuing revolution of the information age. The students will explore the value of scientific thinking and its necessity in building a more robust society that can effectively serve its citizens. We will have regular visits and talks from leading researchers throughout the Hopkins ecosphere. This will help guide the in-class discussions.

In the age of Molecular Biology, DNA sequencing allows the identification of genes. Biochemical assays allow the measurement of gene expression. Reverse transcriptase and PCR are used to determine the RNA made by activated genes. These tools allow the study of disease organisms on the molecular level with emphasis on particular genes, known as virulence genes, which enable the disease organisms to attack the human body. This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to the disease tuberculosis, to human innate and adaptive immune systems and to the molecular biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, an intracellular pathogen which infects humans and manipulates the human immune response to escape detection and elimination. We will even grow cultures of Mycobacterium smegmatum, M. tb’s harmless relative. In addition, millions worldwide have tuberculosis, and this disease is a case study in the measures that are being used to control the spread of an epidemic disease. Students will learn through by readings from books such as The White Plague by Rene’ and Jean Dubos, The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif, The Aetiology of Tuberculosis by Robert Koch and Fever by John Fuller, videos, class interactions and discussions, and after the introductory portion of the course, by presentations of research papers about M. tuberculosis pathogenesis and treatment. Finally, we will explore recent genomic research that has yielded specific Mtb peptides that give evidence of being the basis of first effective vaccine for tuberculosis.

Exile -- metaphysical, political, inner -- persists throughout human history as a concept, an experience, and its artistic representation. In Abrahamic traditions, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden, barred from returning by angels with fiery swords. Socrates choses death over exile. Odysseus returns to Ithaca but neither he nor Ithaca are the same. The concept of exile relies on the existence of differentiated space and of borders. It also presupposes affective attachment: to be exiled is to be removed from – or, sometimes, to leave -- the space of belonging. How does exile differ from other forms of displacement? What are literary and artistic reactions to exile? Can one be an exile in one's own country/city? We will look for answers from thinkers, writers, and artists, such as Ovid, Dante, Baudelaire, Hannah Arendt, Nahid Rachlin, and André Aciman. Paradoxically, for many of them the only true homecoming is through writing about exile. Outings may include: The Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Museum in Fells Point, Bakst Theater at the Evergreen Museum, Library of Congress, National Gallery, and, possibly, the Tenement Museum in NYC.

This First Year Seminar examines the relationships between science, politics, and democracy in the U.S., from World War II to the present. We will start with Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier, sometimes considered the blueprint for postwar science policy, and trace the evolution of science policy, universities, and the U.S. innovation system since. Through a mix of primary readings and scholarly analyses from a range of fields---including economics, history, meta-science, and the science of science and innovation--- students will engage and analyze perennial debates on government funding of science, priority setting, peer review, basic and applied research, the geography of funding, patent policy, the politics of expertise, and the roles of science in a democracy, and connect to current policy debates and controversies.

This First Year Seminar examines the relationships between science, politics, and democracy in the U.S., from World War II to the present. We will start with Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier, sometimes considered the blueprint for postwar science policy, and trace the evolution of science policy, universities, and the U.S. innovation system since. Through a mix of primary readings and scholarly analyses from a range of fields---including economics, history, meta-science, and the science of science and innovation--- students will engage and analyze perennial debates on government funding of science, priority setting, peer review, basic and applied research, the geography of funding, patent policy, the politics of expertise, and the roles of science in a democracy, and connect to current policy debates and controversies.

Poisons aren't what they seem. Sometimes they look like food. Sometimes they look like drugs. From cinnabar to cinnamon, from dragon blood to goat bezoars, poisons result from careful human construction, collection, and creation. They are objects of early chemistry. Far from killing us, poisons have been central to the history of medicine. Physicians in the past and present monitor dosage, drug combination, and drug preparation to mitigate poison toxicity while still maintaining drugs' therapeutic potencies. Knowledge about poisons, in other words, quietly undergirds most of human civilization. Poisons are what keep us alive. Or not.This First-Year Seminar comes to understand poisons in three ways. First, it takes on individual poisons (mercury, opium, among others) to introduce major themes in the history of science and science studies. Second, it engages with global perspectives in the history of medicine to understand how poisons were deployed, refined, and neutralized around the world. Third, it introduces frameworks in the philosophy of chemistry to analyze the social, conceptual, and practical demands on empiricism. Together, these three perspectives will shift students’ perspectives on poisons from objects that kill to critiquing them as objects that are intimately tied to ideas of cure.

How do we decide what it means to “live well”? Who defines virtue, success, health, power, or goodness? The Italian Renaissance had answers—sometimes practical, sometimes poetic, sometimes strange. This First-Year Seminar explores a large sampling of advice from famed thinkers such as Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci, alongside a book of manners, a cookbook, a manual on sword fighting, magic potions, longevity diets, feminist call-to-arms, and more.Through close reading and discussion, students examine how these historic examples of self-help work: What values do they promote? What fears do they reveal? What kind of person do they imagine we should become? We will consider how Renaissance advice compares to the guidance that surrounds us today.Through visits to museums and workshops on calligraphy, fencing, book-binding, writing letters of appreciation, oratory, and more, students will learn about the Italian Renaissance while also unpacking the persuasive devices that shape advice across time. By studying what authors from the past thought would help us “be better,” students develop critical tools to examine what is at stake whenever someone offers help—or whenever we seek it.

What is poetry? And why don't we like it? Can poetry save the world? Can it save us? This seminar will explore what makes poetry turn ordinary language into something extraordinary, something necessary to our world. Assignments will include attending to details small and large in poems, doing a recitation, becoming an expert about a single poet, exploring banned poems, attending poetry events (JHU poetry readings, attending the Baltimore International Poe Festival, visiting the Poe sites, going to bookstores), keeping a poetry journal that you will submit three times over the course of the term, and creating an anthology of poems (group or individual) for a final project. The class is a seminar, and requires you to talk and think aloud: requirements are attendance, class participation, a poetry recitation (weeks 4-6), a presentation of your chosen poet (Weeks 9-11), and a group final project presentation (last day of class).

This First-Year Semianr offers an introduction to the changing paradigms of diplomacy and conflict in the pre-modern Middle East (ca. 3100-323 BC). From Hammurabi of Babylon (and earlier!) to Alexander the Great, students will be introduced to the history and culture of the pre-modern Middle East and will study in translation primary sources such as royal inscriptions, law collections, treaties, and diplomatic correspondence. We will consider issues such as how diplomacy and conflict both reflect and constrain political structures; what aspects of diplomatic life are found throughout the early Middle East and what are particular to various cultures; similarly, what aspects of diplomatic life change over the millennia and what aspects endure; and even how we can talk about international relations in a pre-modern world without “nations.”

This First-year Seminar will study the direction of time, pointing from past to future. It will primarily be based on the physics of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, covering aspects of statistical mechanics, probability, and cosmology. But it will also touch on how time's arrow manifests itself in the macroscopic world, including questions of memory, prediction, aging, and causality.

This First-Year Seminar will delve into the surprising ways that chemistry weaves its way through our day-to-day living. We will discuss topics that cover a variety of useful applications from "Chemistry in Medicine" to "Chemistry in Cooking & Baking". We will explore the material covered in our weekly discussions by carrying out a few experiments to enhance our learning. No prior knowledge of chemistry in required.

"Love is mad, love is obsessive, love can be a painful or tragic, or on the contrary an experience to be treasured forever. That's what books have taught us, by giving poetic souls a chance to imagine and develop romantic ideas -- on paper. These books have in turn inspired films, or in earlier days, great operas. This course is offered to those of you who might miss the experience of getting lost in a book or story!As a historian of ideas and a specialist of narrative with a keen interest in bodies, minds and feelings, and in gender, I will explore with you in this seminar a few favorite love stories. Each is chosen because it helps us uncover a universe of romantic feelings, often in conflict with social conventions (as is Romeo and Juliet for example).Our course will also involve the study of a film (Jane Campion's Bright Star) and possibly of the opera, La Traviata -- as well as a class trip to the movies to see, if available, a recent presentation of our theme. Among the readings for this class: The Legend of Tristan and Isolde, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther; a selection of contemporary short stories.

A famous, very experienced clinician used the phrase "The Soul of Care," signaling that medicine is not merely about fixing bodies. He wants to remind us that scientific knowledge involves mastery as well as empathy. "Narrative medicine" as this domain is called, assumes that the close study of stories can play a decisive role in preparing doctors for the challenging humanistic aspects of their profession. We focus in this First-Year Seminar on stories connected to medical cases, stories that can take us beyond medical questions to deeper issues connected to the human condition. Our seminar will be centered on discussions, often prepared in teams, based on your attentive close reading and research. The aim is to exercise your observational skills and imagination. What is at stake, medically and humanly speaking, is our capacity to uncover problems, dilemmas, ethical questions woven into texts that take us into the worlds of doctors and patients. Readings will involve a combination of modern and contemporary short stories, some of them more obviously fictional than others, some of them geographically or culturally more remote. Part of our study will also involve one longer text, namely When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, and a small "anthology" of documents of a preparatory kind. We'll have at least one guest speaker, and also see a film together.

In this course, we will examine the concealment of scientific knowledge from the Scientific Revolution to present day. Although science is regularly described as a public good, it has often been a private affair. Why have various scientists, institutions, governments, and media outlets chosen to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge? How have their efforts fared in practice, and what factors explain their successes or failures? More generally, how does our picture of modern science change if we highlight work done behind closed doors? This First-Year Seminar will explore these questions through case studies on alchemy, trade secrecy, nuclear physics, and climate change denial. Students will work with formerly classified sources during several weeks of the term.

In times of pandemic, trade war, and restrictions on the export of strategic technologies, it has become common to predict the ‘death of globalization.’ Such predictions are hardly new, however, and neither are the protectionist technology policies that are currently in vogue. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how technology historically has both helped connect people in different parts of the world and contributed to division and inequality at national and global levels. Focusing on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, we will pay special attention to the impact of transportation and ICT technologies ranging from the telegraph and container ship to the airplane and the internet. But we will also consider the consequences of globalization and technological change in areas such as mining and agriculture, taking into account the perspectives of a variety of actors including multinational enterprises, governments, standard-setting scientists and engineers, and the anti-globalization movement. The local effects of globalization will be discussed on a class trip to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, and students will have the opportunity to develop a research project on a topic of special interest to them in consultation with the instructor. Course readings will be made available on Canvas; they include both original historical sources and studies by historians and social scientists.

Animals have evolved a vast array of sensory systems that support a rich repertoire of natural behaviors. Some animals live in dark environments and use tactile, chemical, electrical and auditory sensors that allow them to operate in the absence of light. Other animals rely heavily on vision and take advantage of colors that humans cannot see. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore extraordinary adaptations of sensory systems in animals that live on land and under water. Our focus will be on sensory systems that guide navigation and foraging behaviors in species as diverse as star-nosed moles, weakly electric fish, honeybees, and echolocating bats. As we delve into understanding the extraordinary sensory systems of selected species, we will also consider how these animals have inspired literary and visual artists. We aim to introduce students to a rich interdisciplinary experience that opens their eyes to new areas of inquiry as they take advantage of local resources, such as the National Aquarium, Baltimore Zoo, Wyman Park, Peabody School of Art, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

This First-Year Seminar combines current state of the art issues in Cosmology, Astrophysics and Biology around the Scientific American level. Discusses the history of thought on these issues ranging from Aristotle, Lucretius, Galileo, Newton, Einstein…to the Hubble and JWST era. For the last part of the seminar, we will consider existential issues for humanity in our Universe. Excellent books to read to start thinking about this are by Toby Ord: Precipice and Martin Rees: (1) The Future of Humanity and (2) If Science is to Save us. Our discussions and investigations will likely lead us toward many interesting and innovative paths.

The current paradigm for understanding addiction is a brain disease of compulsion, investigated in large part through animal models. Yet addiction in humans has dimensions of meaning and suffering alike that cannot be captured by neuroscience or modelled in animals. This First-Year Seminar explores addiction by combining what we know from addiction science with what we know from philosophy and the humanities, as well as therapy, journalism, film, and autobiographical narratives. We will work to understand the puzzle of why people use drugs in ways that can come to destroy their lives through these various lenses and without recourse to stigma, dogma, or dehumanization. This interdisciplinary course will develop students' skills in reading, analytic thinking, and writing; we will also visit an animal lab.

When thinking of Italy, food is one of the first things that come to mind. But what is beyond a lavishly decked table? What are the questions that can be explored through food and its practices in Italy, but also in Italian communities around the world? This First-Year Seminar explores the relationship between food and the formation of identity through the lenses of migration, gender, race, ideology, nationalism, and diaspora. The seminar will analyze literature on food studies at the crossroads with anthropological, sociopolitical questions. We’ll discuss the relationship with memory, as well as with cultural reproduction in immigrant communities and the tension with a critical discourse around political propaganda on the notion of authenticity in contemporary Italy. Other topics include the formation of taste in conjunction with sociopolitical modes of exclusion and social class, through history, but also exemplified in films. For instance, the class will be presented with movies and readings on Roman-Jewish culinary traditions, its diasporic experience, and the contemporary cultural appropriation. The screening of the movie Big Night, on the other hand, will provide an opportunity to approach a reading through a phenomenological apparatus, and analyze the impact of Italian cinema on American and Italian American culture. A guest speaker will be invited to present their scholarship, followed by a discussion.

How should a just society come to terms with persistent inequalities? France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, that offered sanctuary from US racism to such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Miles Davis and legalized same-sex marriages two years before the US did, is now deeply divided. This First-Year Seminar explores the tensions and contradictions between the universalist and color-blind ideals of the French republic and the realities of discrimination in contemporary French society. Topics studied include the status of the concept of race in political discourse; the law forbidding signs of religious belief in the public schools and responses to it; how American initiatives like Black Lives Matter, #metoo and critical gender studies have both sparked French activism and political movements and generated a powerful backlash; and what Americans can learn about how to fight injustice—and how not to—from the French. We will look at a wide variety of texts, including writings by activists, historians, and journalists, along with sociologies of the police and young adult novels, and will listen to popular French music and watch a number of contemporary French films.

From game theory to gamification, games have become a central part of everyday life. More and more, in fields as diverse as economics, entertainment, and education, the game has become the principal model for interpreting and interacting with the social world, and with ourselves. This First-Year Seminar will look at the history of games in the modern world, with an eye to understanding their increasing prominence in the 20th and 21st centuries. What social and technological changes brought about this shift? And yes -- we will play, and seek to analyze, some games as well (both analog and digital).

Where is wisdom to be found? And where is the place of understanding? These probing questions from the Hebrew bible's Book of Job arose from a wisdom tradition that was rooted in a particular time, place, and group identity. Yet versions of these same questions can be found the world over. Is true wisdom the exclusive power of a divine being in heaven, or can it found on earth, in human intelligence, learning, and virtue? Who is rightly considered a sage—the enlightened monk, the Stoic teacher, the ruler who dispenses justice, the hermit-saint communing with God? Is the perfection of wisdom an attainable goal or only an impossible ideal? Why do some cultures personify Wisdom as a female goddess, attributing to her voice, agency, and cosmic creative powers? This First-Year Seminar places these questions under a cross-cultural lens by visiting the wisdom traditions of ancient Israel, Greek and Roman philosophy, early Christianity, medieval mysticism, and Buddhism. Course materials are drawn from the Old and New Testaments, ancient dialogues, Buddhist sutras and Zen koans, and other sources. We will also look at a variety of visual images, from holy portraits and devotional icons to mystical diagrams and Tibetan mandalas. When existence is hard enough as it is, why do we seek wisdom? Can today's culture of fortune-cookie philosophy, meditation apps, and self-help accessories really help us attain it? We'll engage in a series of practical experiments in the "art of living," testing for ourselves the possibilities, challenges, and joys of living with wisdom.

The loom is the ancestor of the modern computer: we owe our digital existence to an analog woven structure. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the digital screens that surround us, the faces and images projected upon them, and how we can understand them better through fiber art processes. Through discussions of traditional and modern artists as well as hands-on fiber experiments and techniques, we will explore the relationship between the tactile and the digital. With visiting artists and museum trips, we’ll discover new ways to engage with the screens, textiles, and pixels that surround us.

"Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning." (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now). These iconic words, uttered in an iconic film inspired by an iconic novel, invite us to think of the smell of war as a pleasurable experience, indeed, a joy. But what about the mere joy of watching a film, listening to music, viewing a painting or reading a poem about war? In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask ourselves what is the place of war in our cultural imagination? What attracts us to the “heart of darkness” and how and why does popular culture make this violent experience aesthetically pleasurable? We will cover various media, such as films, television shows, visual art, music and literature from various countries in an attempt to answer these questions and others. The seminar eschews a chronological approach organized around major historical wars in favor of a conceptual framework. As we will see, the creative impulse extends far beyond the representation of historical and particular events reaching deep into the realms of memory and trauma, hate and love, heroism and fear, cruelty and empathy. We will discuss the author/ filmmaker/ artist’s perspectives and methods and will engage in questions of ethics and moral choices in relation to the cultural artifacts we examine. Our main focus will be modern representations of war, but we will also discuss earlier periods and cultures for the sake of comparison. For projects, students will have the option to choose their topics, works, media and format (analytical paper, creative writing, a short documentary, creative film or a short podcast).

What is feminism and what does it have to do with media culture? This question will be investigated in reference to such historical movements as the suffrage movement and current movements such as #metoo. We will also highlight the extent to which media technology might intrinsically help feminism, as could be argued with film animation and science fiction writing; or, rather, cases in which technologies hinder feminism, as when the pressures of social media negatively impact the social development of young women, particularly affecting the vulnerability of the female body.

This First-Year Seminar explores how political polarization reshapes democratic norms, institutions, and identities, with particular attention to young people as both products and agents of democratic erosion. The course examines how and why democracies weaken, and how leaders are using democracy to erode democracy.Students will explore questions like:What is democratic erosion, and how is it different from previous forms of authoritarianism? When does polarization cross the line from healthy conflict to democratic decay? How do identity, belonging, and moral certainty shape citizens’ willingness to accept democratic rules? Why do young people often distrust institutions while still believing in democratic ideals—and what does that mean for democracy’s future?Students will engage with a mix of accessible political science, journalism, and primary sources, including case studies from the United States and abroad; survey data on polarization, trust, and youth attitudes; media coverage and social-media content; and short philosophical and historical texts on democracy, legitimacy, and civic responsibilities.The seminar emphasizes active discussion and debate. Students will analyze real-world political controversies, participate in structured debates, and reflect on how polarization shapes their own political identities. Short writing assignments and a final project will ask students to assess whether democracies can be repaired—and what role their generation might play.

Every person has a life to live, but what is this thing, “a life”, that every person has? To begin with, it’s just the temporally extended existence of the person, the proverbial three score and ten. But a person’s life is more than that, because it follows a natural progression of life-stages, from childhood to adolescence to middle age to senescence. And it’s even more still, since it is partly the creation of the person living it, who can plan it, evaluate it, anticipate its future, and remember its past. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these and other aspects of a person’s life through works of literature and philosophy. What makes you the same person throughout the different stages of your life? How does the passage of time color your perception of life? What makes for a good life? A meaningful life? Should you be grateful for having been born or dismayed at having to die?

What would a just form of democracy look like in a highly diverse society? What policies and laws should the state adopt to counter long-standing injustices, and how do they fit--or conflict--with the univeralist ideals on which liberal democracy is founded? In this course, we will try to answer these questions by discussing different philosophical views on topics from equity to free speech, and from cultural appropriation to lived experience.

In this seminar we’ll explore the many ways that contemporary poets tell stories, make music, and create meaning. We’ll read a wide range of contemporary lyric poems, and every week you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in fun, low-pressure writing exercises. (No previous poetry-writing experience required!) Planned activities include classroom visits by contemporary poets as well as off-campus trips to poetry readings around town.

In this First-Year Seminar, we will ask why maps and mapping technologies have become useful – some would say central – to the pursuit of new knowledge. Do they clarify, simplify, amplify, organize, reveal unexpected connections, point the way forward, or severely complicate our thoughts and send us back to the drawing board? We will learn/review some ArcGIS mapping basics. Those of you with previous experience in mapping technologies will be welcome to contribute ideas and share skills (no previous experience is required), and we will visit various mapping hubs around Hopkins, such the history of world maps as well as Geospatial Data mapping at Milton S. Eisenhower and Peabody Libraries, brain mapping technologies behind current research in the department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), and genetic engineering at the Translational Tissue Engineering Center (TTEC). Across the semester we will also ground ourselves in the Humanities by reading The Odyssey of Homer (trans. James Lattimore, any edition). Each student will create an ArcGIS map website to locate and illustrate an assigned Odyssey episode. In this way, we will test out various mapping techniques on the intersecting adventures of “great hearted” Odysseus, “circumspect” Penelope and their son, “thoughtful” Telemachus. A series of short close reading assignments on selected passages from The Odyssey will help to refine analytical and writing skills, and at the end of the semester students will present to the group the completed GIS map of the adventures of these characters across the Mediterranean.

Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.

Using literature as our primary lens, in this First-Year Seminar we will explore our complex relationships with food, considering it as both material fact and literary symbol. We will read prose and poetry by writers such as Chang Rae Lee, Kevin Young, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gary Soto, and Joy Harjo, engaging issues of food and community, food labor and production, climate change, and more. As part of our explorations, we’ll spotlight aspects of Baltimore food culture and history, and students will be asked to examine and share their own personal and cultural relationships with food. Assignments will include creative writing exercises that draw on both research and personal experience.

Where do critical metals that we use every day for our technologically advanced society come from? We will discuss questions surrounding the exploration and ownership of metallic resources and their exploitation. We benefit, but at what cost to others? To address these questions, we look at individual critical metals and their exploitation in a variety of countries from Africa, to South America, and Southeast Asia including Australia. As an example, cobalt is currently crucial for electric car batteries: see the book by Siddharth Kara (2022) "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives". Should we alternatively get cobalt by the proposed mining of the deep ocean floor? Who has the right to do that? Weekly readings and discussions, and guest speakers lead to mini-research projects on such topics.

How do we use language to persuade each other of our views? How do people bring others to their side so that they can see matters from a different angle? At times, it seems like language is not (or is no longer?) doing its job—that somehow it is failing in its main function. One of the biggest disagreements these days seems to be about the reality and causes of climate change. This seminar focuses on learning about the basics of climate change and how these are communicated. We will analyze the ways in which law, science, politics, and the media use stories, metaphors, and analogies to convey ideas about climate change.

Why do extraordinary things happen in certain times and places—and almost nowhere else? This First-Year Seminar explores the origins of progress: why some societies break through while others stagnate, how cities like Silicon Valley or Renaissance Florence spark cascades of innovation, and whether progress requires liberty, science, or just the right incentives. We'll examine the Industrial Revolution that launched us out of millennia of poverty, debate whether great individuals or great institutions drive change, and ask hard questions about when progress moves too fast—or too slow (as it might be doing right now). Drawing on economics, history, philosophy, and sociology, you'll develop frameworks for understanding not just what happened in the past, but how transformative change actually works. Whether you're interested in technology, policy, social movements, entrepreneurship, or simply making something that matters during your lifetime, this course will help you see the modern world—and your place in shaping its future—differently. Experiential learning opportunities will include: visits to BMA and BMI; a visit to a factory in Baltimore; and guest speakers from the Institute for Progress in DC.

This First-Year Seminar course will explore how 21st century childbearing conditions have changed, and the relationship of politics to these changes. Among the topics to be discussed are the impact on male and female infertility of assisted reproductive technologies that promote birth, including in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection. But beyond how these technologies function, such topics as how decisions are/should be made about issues such as the acceptability of using genetic material from someone other than the hopeful parents to aid couples in having children will be addressed. Also to be discussed are how genetic technologies can be used to modify sperm, eggs and embryos, including risks, benefits, ethics and politics, and how, when and whether stem cells obtained from in vitro fertilization “leftovers” can be used. The ways in which these new approaches are perceived by the general public and by politicians, and how these perceptions affect the use of the new approaches, will be explored. Topics also will include whether abortions should be disallowed, allowed only under specific circumstances such as fetal anomalies observed during prenatal screening, or available as a women’s (or couple’s) right to choose. Contraception, both female and male, also will be explored. Thus, in addition to the science, this course will focus on when and how decisions are made regarding issues related to childbearing, including the roles of politics and social media.

Our class will explore how religious and spiritual communities have understood and practiced music as a healing and reparative force, with a particular focus on Sufi spirituality and the living South Asian musical tradition of khayal. Khayal is both a vocal practice and a system of spiritual self-development, and singers are trained to activate the healing that resides in sound. We will take this journey through essays, film, music, meditative listening, and conversations with musicians as well as practitioners of reparative and healing education in the arts. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in an ethnographic project on music and healing with artists and creators in Pakistan.

What does it mean to “create”? Who is the “creator” of a beloved comic book or a best-selling song and by what standard(s) is that determined? What rights, if any, does “creation” convey legally, or even morally? In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll take an in-depth, interactive, inside look under the hood of intellectual property rights and the battles that shape the multi-billion-dollar global entertainment industry. Reading sections of Supreme Court and lower Federal Court decisions, as well as relevant outside articles, we will explore (allegedly) stolen award-winning films and hit songs, understand why zombies eat copyright for breakfast, investigate why artists behind iconic Marvel and D.C. superheroes believe their rights—and staggering sums of profit—got zapped far across the multiverse, and much, much more. The seminar will involve weekly readings and/or screenings, and will culminate in a final project where you, the class, will serve as the (mock) jury on a real copyright infringement case involving three of the most popular, diverse and wealthiest entertainers of all time.

This First-Year Seminar asks students to bring in their own playlist of five songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In the course of the semester, we will use these lists as a springboard to study the Cold War background of the songs, and to compile a final playlist that reflects the values and lived realities of the class. Some of the questions that will guide our evaluation of the song-texts are: What is the relationship between our taste and what we find beautiful? Can we find something ugly and repellent beautiful? How do the songs that we promote impact our society's understanding of what is good and important?

Why are we drawn to female figures such as Medusa and Mystique? How do representations of women, especially in paintings, film and theater, mediate our understanding of who or what is desirable, dangerous and powerful? In this course we will practice reading visual cues from female figures, taken from history, pop culture, and visits to the BMA, in order to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and to ask questions about how art depicts women. Course texts include Kant, Kingston, Cass, Paglia and Friedan. Figures for study include Antigone, Medea, Salome, and Bong Joon-ho's Mother.

This course explores how science fiction functions as a literature of social and political critique just as much as it offers readers an imaginative escape to future or alien worlds. Students will read classic novels, novellas, short stories, and view films that confront such themes as artificial intelligence, posthumanism, ecological catastrophe and the role of technology in creating dystopias and utopias. The combination of reading, writing, discussion, and in-class presentations offers students a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in a particular genre as they journey “where no one has gone before.”

A picture is worth 1000 words, or so goes the old saying. This First-Year Seminar is a hands-on writing workshop and explores the often-overlooked importance of TEXT in award-winning graphic novels and children's picture books. Over the course of the semester, we will delve into a wide range of topics, from understanding the relationship between image and text and thinking cinematically, to effective techniques for storyboarding and creating forceful dialogue. And like all good writers, we will work on developing the kind of rich characters, strong dialogue, and compelling themes that captivate readers. To enrich our writing efforts, we will embark on various outings during the semester. These will include visits to an illustrator's studio and an independent bookstore specializing in graphic novels. We will also interact with an array of professional writers and editors both in class and at extra-curricular events. The central goal of this course is to build a community through writing. No prior experience in creative writing or visual art is necessary. All that is required is enthusiasm for the topic and a willingness to share your work with others.

All organs in the body are innervated by peripheral nerves, which deliver biological signals between the central nerves system and the rest of the body. This First-Year seminar will investigate how peripheral nerves interact with different organs, and how diseases and disorders of the peripheral nerves effect core bodily functions such as voluntary movement and temperature sensation. Following short lectures on each topic, students will analyze research papers and other material, discuss sources in small, rotating groups and present their findings to the rest of the class. We will also visit various research labs across campus, hear from leading researchers, and participate together in Grand Rounds at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

This course combines historical and ethnographic investigations of the wastefulness of modern medicine in ecological, economic, and bodily terms. Why, in the past half-century, has the production of medical waste skyrocketed? Who bears the environmental costs of the incineration of disposable medical technologies? What new sustainable solutions might be retrieved from past practices? At the intersection of medicine, science, and humanities, this course explores the human and planetary costs of our wasteful healthcare systems, and what can be done to envision a more sustainable future. Readings will be centered in historical and ethnographic investigation but will stretch across other humanities and social science disciplines, in conjunction with primary source readings from medical and public health journals, lawsuits and Congressional hearings, and new approaches to materials design for sustainable healthcare. Experiential partnerships with local, regional, and international advocacy groups will be important for this course as well, including the Planetary Health Alliance based in the Bloomberg Center in Washington DC, the Sustainability Leadership Council of Johns Hopkins University, and local environmental justice advocacy surrounding the Curtis Bay Energy medical incinerator, which was recently the subject of the largest environmental fine in Maryland history.

How should we, as individuals and a society, reduce wasted food and create a more resilient food system? This First-Year Seminar asks students to apply diverse perspectives to understand and address the complex problem of wasted food. Students will be exposed to a scope of up-to-date research from sociocultural, health, technological, environmental, economic, political, and justice-oriented lenses through guest speakers, multimedia resources, and community engagement on and off campus. By conducting their own examination of this real-world issue and proposing solutions, students in this course will develop critical thinking, research, and presentation skills valuable for future coursework and careers in any field.

The modern intensive care unit represents an incredible intersection of altruism and commerce, tradition and technologic innovation, humanism and challenges to agency and autonomy. Simple models of individual action scale poorly to explain aggregate behavior of complex institutions. Cynical models of profit-maximization cannot explain the daily willingness to go above and beyond. Deaths, an inevitable part of human existence, are increasingly contained within organizations designed to prolong life at all costs. We propose to introduce first year students simultaneously to: (1) the health, physiology, and technology of massively invasive contemporary “heroic” and life-sustaining therapies; (2) organizational social science to study the multi-billion dollar yet non-profit health sector and how it shapes bedside delivery of care to critically unstable patients (and how that shaping is resisted); (3) scholarship that provides tools for thinking deeply about professional action in the midst of competing values. Using a blend of intensive discussion, small group in-class projects, and introductory teaching, culminating in a brief design of a novel research project, it will prepare students to develop ways to improve our most intensive care of our most vulnerable patients and their families.

Over the past 250 years, Germany has produced some of the most influential currents of theory as well as drama. In this course, we will read and view plays and films that address developments in German thought and society from the Enlightenment to the present. We will ask: How effective are performances at transmitting ideas and values? How do they balance emotional involvement with intellectual understanding? These issues will be examined with respect to four themes: reason and enlightenment; capitalism; sexualities; and moral dilemmas raised by scientific discoveries.

How we become unique is one of the deepest questions that we can ask. The answers, where they exist, inform how we think about morality, public policy, faith, health care, education, and the law. Although investigating the origins of individuality is not just an endeavor for biologists, many of this topic’s most important aspects involve fundamental questions about the development, genetics, and plasticity of the nervous system. The good news is that recent scientific findings are illuminating this question in ways that are exciting and sometimes counterintuitive. The better news is that it doesn’t just boil down to the same tiresome nature-versus-nurture debate that has been impeding progress and boring people for years. Genes are built to be modified by experience. That experience is not just the obvious stuff, like how your parents raised you, but more complicated and fascinating things like the diseases you’ve had (or those that your mother had while she was carrying you in utero), the foods you’ve eaten, the bacteria that reside in your body, the weather during your early development, and the long reach of culture and technology.So, let’s dig into the science together. Our sources will be not only books and articles but also visits by guest scientists and artists as well as engagement with films and stories that explore human individuality. It can be controversial stuff. Questions about the origins of human individuality challenge our concepts of nation, gender, and race. They are inherently political and incite strong passions. Given this fraught backdrop, we’ll do our best to play it straight and synthesize the current scientific consensus (where it exists), examine the controversies, and point out where the sidewalk of our understanding simply ends.

Unlike Disney's talking teapots and candlesticks, ""real life"" objects can't tell their own stories. Through research and writing, however, we can ""animate"" and contextualize art and artifacts with our words, illuminating the people who made and used those objects, particularly those whose own voices have been historically marginalized. How can creative writing bring the past to life both imaginatively and responsibly? How do writers choose and use literary techniques to reckon with history? Poems we will examine and discuss include ""Ode on a Grecian Urn"" by John Keats, ""Voyage of the Sable Venus"" by Robin Coste Lewis, ""The Museum of Obsolescence"" by Tracy K. Smith, ""In the British Museum"" by Thomas Hardy, ""mulberry fields"" by Lucille Clifton, and ""How to Look at Pictures"" by Rebecca Morgan Frank. This course is an experiential collaboration between the Writing Seminars* and the Homewood Museum*, where students will explore the museum's collection and curate a public exhibition featuring their writing. *By way of introduction, The Writing Seminars is Johns Hopkins University’s creative writing department, offering both a major and a minor to undergraduate students, as well as a Master of Fine Arts graduate degree; Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Museum is an early nineteenth-century National Historic Landmark site focusing on the enslaved families who lived and labored on the land that would later become the university’s main campus. With a focus on early American decorative arts, Homewood’s collection provides students with the opportunity to have hands-on experience with museum objects and to consider the role of museums and antiques in a new and creative light.

Poets, novelists, and essayists have gravitated to painting and its powers as a way of testing the powers of their own medium; the visual arts have served them as stimulus and challenge. This course broadly concerns the relation of these two art forms; more narrowly, it concerns attempts by writers to respond adequately to paintings that moved them We are likely to read work by Virgil Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Ali Smith, W,H. Auden, Mark Doty, and Rainer Maria Rilke; and study paintings by Cezanne, Klee, Brueghel, Morisot, Turner, and Monet.

Humans are increasingly thinking about their relationship with nonhumans, ranging from AI to animals to corporations, including what it means to communicate with nonhumans or nonhuman systems. AI speech can now be mistaken for human speech but is commonly thought not to have meaning or intention in the same way. Many animals have complex verbal and nonverbal modes of communication; elephants, for instance, raise distinct sounds of alarm based on the kind of danger that is coming. Corporations in the United States have legal personhood, which includes the right to free speech, and are often talked about as if they have intentions, values, and desires. This class will query how we should interpret nonhuman communication across a range of sources and perspectives, including law, literature, philosophy, science, and popular culture. How do we know what such communication means, or if it has meaning, and according to what criteria? What is the relationship between communication and rights, including the right to personhood? And how does nonhuman communication change our understanding of how humans create meaning and connection with one another?

What do we call "home"? It seems that when we call (something) home, we are all reaching out toward different places or ideas. Is it a haven? a source of identity? the object of longing? a domain of hierarchy and oppression? This course offers a critical examination of the apparently self-evident notion of home. Through the lens of disciplines like anthropology, literature, or socio-legal studies, we will explore home in diverse cultural settings, as realms of care, intimacy, and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination, and gender/racial inequality. Our analysis will extend to a variety of media such as films, podcasts, music, museum exhibits, and personal experiences.

Traveling through Europe has been an enriching experience, with its apex in the 18th and 19th century. The Grand Tour of Italy is “the most interesting of all possible voyages” wrote Abbé Gabriel-Françoise Coyer in his travel journal (1763). It was a sort of “gap year” but represented much more. It was a formative journey, where the young elite would deepen their knowledge in classical literature and refine their taste for art and architecture. It was also an immersion in the leisure that traveling offered. The phenomenon of the Grand Tour produced an immense amount of travel literature, journals, and provided a backdrop and inspiration for countless novels. It also played and defining role in constructing identity, individual and national, setting a canonical cultural path. How can we retrace part of this path through Italy through a different point of view? Introducing a less normative dominated reading of the lived experience of the Grand Tour? In this course we will (re)discover Italy in the glory of the Grand Tour golden era through the writing of women writers, the American antislavery activist Fredrick Douglass and A range of queer and other rubbles and outcast visiting Italy. In class, we will look at excerpts of texts including some by Mary Shelley, Vernon Lee, Margaret Fuller, Madame De Stäel, J.A. Symonds, Goethe, Lord Byron. We will take advantage of the great collections of art like (Waters Museum and BMA) becoming grant tourists ourselves and discuss and analyze the styles and subjects of art and architecture of Italy (mostly in Venice, Florence and Rome). We will also take advantage of the Special Collections at the Sheridan Library that houses rare books and documents that we can look closely. Every week the material will be presented in different forms, book excerpts, articles, collections, but also movies, theater pieces and music.

The question of what makes Disney characters so popular will guide us through this First-Year Seminar as we examine the films and particular Disney figures, embedded in narratives, from an angle that is both celebratory and critical. We will curate the characters to be analyzed and place them in their social, cultural, literary and filmic contexts, while taking special note of the global, political, economic and technological issues that have shaped the animation enterprise. A special emphasis of the course will be on the question of audience, and our own responses to the aesthetic, ethical, and visceral aspects of select Disney characters -- including Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Maleficent, and Mother Gothel.

During the Renaissance, Christians frequently depicted the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the personifications of disease, famine, war, and conquest. Nearly half of all children died before the age of five and ten percent of women died of childbirth or of pregnancy related complications. Wars consumed the continent during the bloody sixteenth century, thanks to advances in military technology and religious violence. With no knowledge of the cause of disease and absent antibiotics, disease was as terrifying as mass murder. In this class, we explore death, dying, health, and hope in early modern Europe. How did death and the fear of death shape society? How did it affect politics and economics, gender and family? At the center of death – and life - was religion; in this chaotic world, disease was a punishment and God the only cure; as a result, we will explore how religion was the other side of the coin of death and disease. We will learn how to read primary sources of Renaissance people grappling with their mortality and examine Renaissance art. In the process, we will investigate one of the biggest questions human beings confront: What is the meaning of life in the face of death?

Is physics a noble science built on inspiration, ingenuity, and ideas? What does it mean to win a Nobel Prize? Why was the prize established? What ideas are awarded? Who gets credit? How long does it take? Has a prize ever been rescinded? How well do Nobel ideas stand the test of time? - Sources that we will explore include library archives, the speeches of Nobel Laureates, and released records of nominees, as well as some of the topics for which the prizes were awarded- We can explore JHU's influence on nobel-awarded physics research, and at the University's involvement in Nobel-based or Nobel-related physics and astronomy research- Experiential components of the semester may include looking at how Nobel prizes are depicted in the media and popular culture, documentaries and biopics of prize winners and research (e.g. the movie Particle Fever for the Higgs) and popular-level books; recreations of demonstrations or laboratory setups of Nobel-winning experiments; recordings of an awards ceremony; class discussion and activities related to the 2024 prizes that will be announced during October/November 2024; invitations to guest speakers; and possibly a museum or laboratory visit.

In this course you will learn about the life and legacy of Johns Hopkins – his ancestors, his family, his Quaker faith, his business career, his philanthropy and what we know about why he decided to found the university that you now attend. Along the way, we will examine rare artifacts, explore archival records, discuss current controversies, and visit some of the most important local landmarks associated with Johns Hopkins’ long and eventful life.

How has the discovery of diamond shaped human history? Due to its unique Chemical makeup, elegant Crystal structure, unusually low Compressibility, and outrageously high thermal Conductivity, diamond’s physical properties make it the most useful mineral on earth. Class discussions will also cover topics such as geologic formation, diamond mining, the gem industry, causes of color, and modern uses. Class materials will include scientific papers, textbook excerpts, movies, and a field trip to the Smithsonian Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals in DC.

It is difficult to think about the fact that you will die. It is confusing theoretically and it is confusing emotionally. We will be spending the course trying to think our way through the confusions. On the theoretical side, thinking about the fact that you will die raises a cluster of philosophical questions. What are you? Are you necessarily the sort of thing that ceases to exist when your biological life ends? What is it that connects you to your childish self and makes some person in the future you? And does the fact that you die diminish the value of your life? If it means the end of your existence, does it make life absurd, or meaningless, or only more precious? We will address these questions as well as whether death should be feared, whether death is bad, and whether immortality would be desirable.Being confronted with the fact of your death can also help focus questions about how you should live. It presses you to think about what makes life worth living? What makes a life meaningful? Are there objective answers to what makes a life meaningful, or is this a personal choice? If meaningfulness involves some kind of overarching project (e.g., achieving something, leaving something behind, participating in something larger than ourselves) is meaningfulness worth pursuing, or should we instead throw off the tyranny of purposes and just live?These are the things we will be talking about over the course of the semester.

More than 500 federally-recognized Native tribes and many more who are not federally recognized live within the borders of the United States. Each of these communities has its own history, identity, traditions, relationship to the land, and story of survivance. This First-Year Seminar examines the views of Indigenous communities on topics such as truth, knowledge, identity and the self, causation, and ethics. It also investigates contemporary American Indian thought as it relates to colonialism and anti-colonialism, land, futurity, sovereignty, and resistance. Students will hear from guest lecturers working at the forefront of the discipline and enrich their learning through a trip to the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.

What are the implications of Africa’s urban revolution? In the last century, Africa’s cities have boomed at a dizzying pace, witnessing the most rapid urbanization in human history. This trend is unstoppable; yet it comes with opportunities and challenges. This first-year seminar invites students to explore Africa’s cities, their evolution from precolonial times to the digital age, their quest for modernity, and the unique repertoires of urban life they have registered thanks to the creativity of their overwhelming young denizens

Language is at the heart of human interaction. What are the linguistic habits that unite or divide us? This First-Year Seminar introduces students to dialects of English speakers around the world. Students will explore the major properties that cross-cut different varieties of English, including regional or socially-driven accents of North America, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, as well as other World Englishes. Particular attention will be paid to pronunciation, so students will practice the International Phonetic Alphabet and learn acoustic analysis through hands-on activities, but discussion will also focus on dialectal differences in word choice, sentence structure, and linguistic meaning. We will engage with known and emerging varieties of English by drawing on academic sources, multimedia materials, and real-world experience. Who speaks with an accent? Everyone!

This First-Year Seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Baltimore’s queer and trans archives, expansively defined, engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on "the archive" within queer and trans studies. Beginning with a brief survey of U.S. LGBTQ history, students delve into archival research methods and hands-on explorations in JHU Special Collections. We then engage with queer theory, performance studies, and public humanities scholarship to ask what we can know of the recoverable past and what silences the archive might contain, approaching the queer archive as a complex record of activity that includes ephemera of events, shows, and collective affect; innuendo and gossip; residues of queer nightlife; performance and gesture. We ground these theoretical explorations by visiting Baltimore-based institutional and non-institutional archives, where we engage with 1970s LGBT newspapers and 1960s medical documents, oral histories recorded by local trans artists, street youth photography, and the embodied archives of vogue performance. Throughout the course, we underscore the transformative potential of engaging with the queer and trans past to forge solidarities in the present and map more just and gorgeous futures.

How can we move from our own interactions with ancient objects today to a sense of the richness and particularity of people’s lived experience in the distant past? This First-Year Seminar is based in the Archaeological Museum on campus, allowing for daily hands-on work with artifacts. We use the lens of bodies as we learn to interrogate ancient things for indications of how people cared for, ornamented, protected, altered, understood, and represented not only their physical but also their socio-cultural persons. The class pairs readings for discussion with analysis of objects. Weekly themes draw out certain types of bodily experience, working with objects that were, e.g., worn in battle; held/worn during birth; connected to healing; used to adorn or shape the body (such as jewelry, clothing, and magical amulets); utilized by craftspersons in their handwork; involved in rites of passage; or incorporated into contexts of bodily death. Our approach is deeply cross-disciplinary, integrating techniques and interests from the fields of classics, archaeology, history of art, the life sciences, and materials analysis. Outings will take us to other museums in the area to engage with their collections, as well.

In this First-Year Seminar, we will try to understand together the basic physics of energy and climate change. We'll try to derive estimates, from basic high-school physics, for how much energy it takes to drive a car across the country; fly across the country; to get ChatGPT to write an essay for us; to heat and light our homes; send a SpaceX Starship into space; etc. Should you be riding that electric scooter or e-bike when you could ride a (muscle-powered) bike? We'll figure out how much carbon is put into the atmosphere each time we do any of these things, and how that carbon affects the climate. We'll think about ways to save energy, reduce carbon emissions, and sequester carbon. We'll study various prospects for clean energy and what needs to be done to have them implemented. We'll try to figure out if we should be thinking about geo-engineering. We'll spend the first few weeks working together to identify specific questions we'd like to think about and then follow through the rest of the semester, relying on varied sources along the way.

From the rise of machine consciousness to the ethics of automation, artificial intelligence has captured the human imagination. This First-Year Seminar explores how playwrights and theater artists engage with AI as a dramatic subject, a creative tool, and a lens for examining the human condition. Through an interdisciplinary approach, and co-taught by faculty in Psychological and Brain Sciences and Theatre, students will analyze plays and performances that grapple with the hopes and anxieties surrounding AI. Works such as Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (which introduced the word “robot”), Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, and Nick Payne’s Constellations will serve as key texts alongside contemporary plays such as Julia Cho’s The Language, Rolin Jone’s The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, The Effect by Lucy Prebble, and Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler. We will also discuss experimental performances that integrate AI technologies.

This First-Year Seminar examines the significance of passions, or emotions, in contemporary political life. It aims to understand the risks and possibilities associated with emotion, and to reflect critically on how debates over political inclusion and exclusion, justice and injustice are informed by emotions—real and imagined. We will consider questions such as: How did “reason” become stripped of passion and elevated as a foundational ideal in modern, liberal societies? Why and when are emotional forms of political expression and conduct accepted, and when are they demonized? How and when do public expressions of fear inspire measures to protect national security? Under what conditions does anger fuel struggles for justice? What, if anything, is different about how passions operate within populist political parties and movements? And how are human experiences of emotion changing in algorithmically driven public spaces? Such questions will allow us to secure footholds in contemporary political environments often densely populated with impassioned rhetoric, backlash dynamics, and public fascination with political scandal, provocation, and conspiracy. We draw on some canonical texts in political thought before moving into multidisciplinary readings on moral psychology and the contemporary politics of emotion. Students will also have the opportunity to gather and assess emotional “artifacts” from contemporary political discourse. Topics for the seminar include: the politics of fear; anger and justice; populism and resentment; algorithms and attention; and the politics of paranoia and conspiracy.

This First-Year Seminar explores the scientific-technological, philosophical, social, and ethical dimensions of using animals for scientific research from the early nineteenth century to present. Why did scientists use animals and how did they choose “the right animal for the job”? How did philosophers define a “model organism”? What were the political economies formed within research communities sharing research animals? How did financial and material infrastructure take shape for large-scale, long-term maintenance of genetically standardized mice or zebrafish? How did the interpretations of animals reflect the social imaginaries of researchers and our society? And how did animals “speak” back? These are questions we are going to examine through reading scholarly publications, watching documentaries, visiting laboratories, and doing mini research projects together.

Sites like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and Angkor Wat conjure images that often have more to do with fantasy than fact. Modern monuments like Yasukuni Shrine and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial similarly evoke history, memory, and myth. Why (and how) were these monuments built? How have their meanings changed over time and why? What forces have transformed them into symbols of national identity and cultural otherness? This First-Year Seminar will explore the ritual, political, historical, and religious significance of monumental sites in Asia. We will also examine their more recent role as sites for political mobilization, as signifiers of cultural and national identities, and as commodities in global and local tourism.

In this First-Year Seminar, we will discuss the role of humans, computers, data-aggregators, and large language models in discovering or creating chemical principles - and in how such knowledge is distributed. We will start by discussing the nature of scientific research (e.g. Pasteur's quadrant), and its implications on the funding of science. The results of such work must be published in order for science to be advanced. Should access to it be free (open) to consumers? If not, how is the curation of knowledge to be subsidized? Such dissemination must go beyond scientists, and we will explore ways in which we can communicate science to the public effectively. This will lead us to explore how the information will be synthesized. Whoever can best do this task will undoubtedly make the discoveries of this century. Will it be humans, computers or A.I.? We will explore who might win the 2025 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, and whether an A.I. will eventually outperform them.

We are all born nude, but most of us wear clothes, at least when facing the public in our adult life. We are told nude is not the same as just “naked”: it is an art form. However, in grand museums, we see plenty of representation of nudes in the European wings. We gaze at a marble statue of a classical nude there, and when we go watch a film with nude scenes in a cinema with friends and strangers, we respond very differently in these two spaces. In this First-Year Seminar, we will go to museums, watch movies, and take a global, historical, and multimedia perspective to approach nude as art in the world. How is nude defined? What are the philosophical and scientific ideas that find nude as an ideal vehicle? What are the historical and cultural particularities of classical nude that have been taken for centuries as universal? How do other art traditions approach the representation of an unclothed nude body? How are nudes gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized? How do modern media transform nude? These are among the questions that this class explores. The Truth is naked, as the saying goes. Nude is therefore a mirror reflecting both the foundations and aspirations of humanity.

Remember the moon landing? Of course you don't, but no one who watched it on television would have guessed that the last moon walk would be in 1972. Now some of us are ready to 'Occupy Mars'. This First-Year Seminar will explore the Space Age from the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 to the International Space Station, including military and civilian programs, unmanned and manned missions, and new competitors in our current space race, such as China, India, and the European Space Agency. We will read contemporary and historical accounts (October Sky and The Right Stuff) and screen some classic space age feature films and documentaries. We will pay particular attention to Johns Hopkins University's contributions, notably the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes and the Applied Physics Laboratory's satellite program. We'll talk with experts at the Space Telescope Science Institute and APL, and tour the National Air and Space Museum collections with the curator of manned spaceflight. In groups, students will prepare future space mission proposals for NASA and SpaceX, and present them to a distinguished panel of Hopkins space scientists and engineers.

Museums are crucibles, places where public memory, identity, and cultural values are debated, hammered out and refined. This First-Year Seminar examines this premise through guided discussion, close looking at exhibitions past and present, written reflection, and visits that go behind the scenes of many of Baltimore's history, art, industry, and science museums. Just what is a museum and how does it compare to other sorts of cultural institutions? What responsibilities do museums have to their communities? to their collections? How do they balance the two? How are they adapting to broader social, economic, and cultural changes? And what is their future? Learn how to decode museums. Discover the varied roles they play in the life of a city like Baltimore.

"What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms" wrote the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. Aristotle quotes the musician Stratonicos as saying: while a meal “smells delicious”, a fragrant flower “smells beautiful.” Maurice Maeterlinck, in 1907, ascribes intelligence to flowers. Why do flowers cause positive emotions? What is their relationship to memories? In this First-Year Seminar, we'll consider flowers in an interdisciplinary perspective, including literature, art history, aesthetics, and even ethics, including Ovid's Narcissus, the rose of Sharon in the Song of Solomon, Emily Dickinson's gardens, Marcel Proust's hawthorn-blossoms, and Zuzanna Ginczanka’s “girls like pasqueflowers”. Topics will range from beauty to synesthesia, metaphor to metamorphosis. A foray into music (Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler) may be included. Additionally, visits to the Cylburn Arboretum, Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens, the Walters or the BMA will enrich our FYS. We'll drink passionflower and linden flower teas and we'll eat orchids!

How have we imagined utopic societies in the past and how do we do so now? What are the paradoxes and contradictions involved in imagining social alternatives? This First-Year Seminar examines modes of thought and imagination concerned with alternative, often future, worlds. We will consider classic and contemporary works of utopian (and dystopian) literature alongside instances of utopian thinking as manifested in philosophy, socioeconomic and political theory, art, architecture, and historical and current events. Through class discussions and brief writing assignments, collaborative projects, film screenings, and guest visits, we will engage a variety of themes including the relationship between technology and work, social hierarchy, the nature of history, and the character of social imagination. Texts may include works by Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Thomas More, Samuel Butler, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Le Corbusier, Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin, and W.E.B Du Bois, Samuel Delany, and Margaret Cavendish.

How do we understand and represent ourselves and others in the realm of digitally mediated love and intimacy? Through interdisciplinary readings and hands-on projects, this First-Year Seminar explores the intersection of technology, identity, and relationships, both before and after the advent of the computer age. Seemingly inescapable, computational systems shape the way we connect. However, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and search engines are not neutral—they are deeply entangled with questions of gender and sexuality. Amidst the promises of revolutionary changes brought by technological progress, we will critically examine how digital platforms both challenge and reinforce traditional norms around love, desire, and identity.

This First-Year Seminar will introduce students to Baltimore by investigating various populations and institutions in their adopted hometown. Students will explore questions like: How has immigration shaped the city over the past 300 years? Who is trying to change Baltimore and how are they doing it? Who has power in Baltimore and how do they use it? We will learn about and apply social science research methods, such as analyzing survey data, mining university archives and special collections, and walking the streets of Baltimore observing and interviewing locals. We’ll also investigate research on Baltimore undertaken by Hopkins faculty to help students identify possible courses or research to pursue in the future.

This First-Year Seminar examines how Buddhist traditions understand and navigate death, dying, and the afterlife. More specifically, drawing on case studies from South, East, and Southeast Asia, the course investigates historical practices and contemporary adaptations, offering insights into how Buddhist communities confront mortality, support the dying, and honor the dead. Engaging with sacred texts, ethnographic accounts, visual media, and field trips (Buddhist temples, museums, parks, and cemeteries) students will gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between ritual, mythology, material culture, and cultural context in shaping Buddhist responses to life's ultimate transition.

This First-Year Seminar will be devoted to reading a single work, often called the greatest English novel: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It's a love story, and story about loving one's work; one of its protagonists is a scientist, the other an idealistic and passionate young woman. It's a novel that readers remember through their lives, and return to reread as their life changes. It's beautiful and the questions it raises continue to matter: What happens when love and your career conflict? How much are you willing to compromise your commitments? How can you maintain your ideals when you also need to have an income? And how can stories help us understand, and perhaps change, a disappointing world? Our conversations will address these questions, try to understand why the novel is considered so highly, and reflect on how it speaks to our contemporary concerns. Students will be asked to read the novel with patience and energy and to write informal response papers.

In this First-Year Seminar, we explore the long history of humans thinking about what it means to be human. In myth, religion, science, art, literature, and philosophy, humans have never stopped posing the question of how we fit in, or fail to fit in, to the natural world; what our relation is to the cosmos, to gods, to animals, and even to other beings we may not yet have encountered. In our own quest we will read fascinating stories, poems, and philosophical texts; visit museums to view and discuss provocative works of art; and delve into the ramifications of our thinking they impact our relations with machines, with non-human animals, and with each other.

This First-Year Seminar explores how works of literature and philosophy respond to the question of the meaning of life. We will focus on the conditions of modern life – alienation, boredom, technology, modern warfare, the loss of tradition, the “death of God,” ecological crisis – that give rise to this perennial question in new and urgent ways. As meaninglessness looms, the capacity for revivifying and creative responses to this existential challenge emerge. Through close readings of literary texts such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Kafka’s A Report for an Academy, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James’s The Beast in the Jungle, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Chekhov’s The Bet, and Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals alongside philosophical texts by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, and others, we will seek to understand how thinkers and writers in the modern era pose key questions about whether life has meaning, and how we can discover or create it. Visits to the rare books collection in Sheridan Libraries, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Charles Theatre will enrich our discussions of these themes. Students will also engage in a series of in-class writing exercises throughout the semester, culminating in a hybrid creative/critical project that explores the philosophical ideas and literary forms they encounter in these works.

TBD

Jane Austen was born 250 years ago and remains widely read, but why? The world she inhabited and describes is very remote, so there must be something magical about how she uses words to create a fictional universe. The novel Emma (1815) will serve as our test-case as we delve into its pages to discover Austen’s world and her genius for plotting stories that involve romantic situations. We will need extra tools as well: they are provided by films (Clueless as well as Autumn de Wilde's Emma.), a few scholarly readings, and visits to our BMA museum as well as to the Morgan library. What I am aiming for in this First-Year Seminar is double: to renew or enrich your appreciation of books as long-lasting artefacts made entirely of words, and to help you enter, in your imagination, into a very different reality, which is filled however with aspirations for love and happiness that remain as true now as in her own time.Required for success in this course is a) a willingness to study pages of her text closely (as she wrote to her brother, her literary labors involved a fine brush to create their effects) and b) teamwork leading to oral presentations.

This is a First-Year Seminar about the literature and phenomena of walking: its great poets, its cultural and social meanings, and the practices that organize our attention to movement through space. How does walking relate to necessity and freedom, public and private space, the environment, and the rhythm of thinking itself? We’ll consider major writings and films on walking through urban and wild places, including H.D. Thoreau’s praise of “sauntering,” Walter Benjamin on the urban “flâneur” (stroller), Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems of Chicago streets, Agnès Varda’s documentary of the “gleaner” who makes her art from what others leave behind, Sunaura Taylor’s reflection on walking and disability, and W. G. Sebald’s knack for discovering history wherever he roamed. We will also learn how famous planners and urbanists shape the experience of walking from the Appalachian Trail to the Baltimore Inner Harbor. Most importantly, we’ll adopt these practices of attention to explore Johns Hopkins campus and Baltimore City's landscapes, environments, and geography. About half our sessions will meet outdoors for walks through the many neighborhoods surrounding Johns Hopkins and elsewhere in Baltimore, sometimes joined by a special guest, writer, or artist. Here, we’ll learn how to be something more than detached passers-by. Instead, we’ll become active investigators of the most ordinary parts of our reality and experience. Aside from reading and participating in our walks and discussion, brief exercises prompt you to move through the world and to craft compelling records of your experiences, observations, and curiosity.

This seminar traces the development of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States over the course of the 20th Century. By exploring some of the major sites of conflict, activism, protest, opposition, and resistance in modern African American History, we will begin to complicate traditional understandings of Black freedom struggles in the United States. Why and how did African Americans mobilize and organize for their rights? How did they imagine citizenship, Black freedom, and equality within the United States? How did these events impact public life and public policy? What are the legacies of the movement? Students will analyze a broad range of primary and secondary source materials, including the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and more. Additionally, students will watch a series of civil rights films related to the broad themes of the course and will visit local museums and archives as part of a larger experiential component, to better understand the significance of the modern Civil Rights Movement on contemporary American society and culture.

This First-Year Seminar examines the intersections of queer theory, performance studies, and LGBTQ history with a focus on “queer worldmaking:” the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—can establish oppositional publics and politics. We take an interdisciplinary approach to historical research, considering embodied memory, gesture, and ritual as methods for learning, preserving, and transmitting cultural knowledge. Case studies include the ballroom and voguing scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, drag performance, and queer nightlife.

"What is it with the French and snails? Did you know they have a specific word for eating badly? (“la malbouffe”) Where did restaurants come from? This First-Year Seminar will explore the rich and diverse culinary traditions of France, from production to creation, presentation, and consumption. How are food practices informed by historical, political, and cultural factors? To what extent do they contribute to our values and worldview? Students will delve into perceptions of food and eating, shopping habits, the art of meal preparation, the importance of local ingredients and regional dishes, the role of food in French social life, as well as the politics of food and the environment. We will read and discuss materials from a broad range of sources, from scholarly journals and book excerpts to the popular press; examine paintings and archival documents; listen to songs; watch and analyze films; and of course, taste a wide variety of French foods.

This First-year Seminar offers students the opportunity to better understand current debates through the lens of key documents and controversies that illustrate shared interests and disagreements between the US and Europe since the pivotal year 1979. Topics include but are not limited to: NATO, arms limitations and reduction, the Polish Crisis, Chernobyl, Gorbachev, German unification, collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11 and the GWOT, the financial crisis of 2008-2012, Ukraine, the EU, the rise of China and climate change. The seminar includes a visit to the Delegation of the European Union in DC and other conversations with experts.

This First-Year Seminar introduces acting as a rigorous practice of attention, interpretation, and collaboration. Working as an ensemble, students explore foundational approaches to voice, movement, listening, and improvisation as tools for understanding how meaning is created and communicated—on stage and beyond it.Through close reading of selected plays and embodied studio work, students investigate how stories are shaped by text, context, and performance choices. The course emphasizes interpretive thinking, expressive clarity, and responsiveness to others, culminating in scene and monologue work that integrates analysis with performance.No previous acting experience is required. This class welcomes students from all academic interests and offers preparation for acting and performance courses while cultivating presence, collaboration, and expressive confidence—skills that strengthen communication and creative thinking in any field.

What is play? How does play form part of our social being and innermost sense of self? What importance do particular games hold not only in players’ intimate lives but also in social formations, from quirky subcultures to nations and empires? Historians of play contend that games precede formal philosophy and religion and are arguably the forgotten basis on which societies took shape. As a way of being in the world, play may be understood as a mode of symbolic action and of engagement with the object world. But playfulness is also something more than behavior and meaning alone; it is also that tacit context surrounding activity and signaling “this is play.” When we play today, we may be training or distracting our minds, creating or destroying entire worlds, teaching or transgressing ways of being in the world. Anytime we play a game we enter into it by free volition, yet we surrender our autonomy to its rules and constraints. Play is deeply paradoxical and paradoxically deep! This First_year Seminar will explore the bounding of time and space, the shaping of identities, the cultivation of skill, and the construction of social reality through play. Through ethnographic studies of virtual worlds, simulations, casinos, sports, and war games we will encounter new approaches to understanding imagination, labor, competition, hierarchy, and other key cultural ideas. In addition to outings to observe leisure spaces and film screenings, we will also play selected games, examine their mechanics, and reflect on their worlds of possibility. Finally, you will draw on course materials to design a game of your own and play-test it with classmates.

Using multiple disciplinary perspectives, this First-Year Seminar asks us to think about why Baltimore is the way it is, and how we might understand the potential for change. We begin with some history and geography, looking at the impact of the port and of the Jones Falls on the development of the city and its social geography. Through an examination of redlining and housing policy, we then investigate the question of how both geography and policy decisions have lasting repercussions on opportunities for different groups of people. Core questions include, what determines the trajectory of cities and the people within them? How do natural, political, and social factors interact to explain the outcomes of different urban populations? What are the levers available to both policy-makers and activists to change these outcomes? Key texts include David Harvey's A View from Federal Hill, Antero Pietila's Not in My Neighborhood, and Stefanie DeLuca's Coming of Age in the Other America. The course incorporates field trips to see different geographical features, historical sites, and current neighborhoods firsthand, as well as interactions with community members through community-based learning.

Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, with almost 7 million tonnes grown, harvested, processed, and packaged annually. Whether you use loose leaf or tea bags, drink green tea or black, add sugar or cream, use it to stay awake or go to sleep, or consume it in solitude or with friends to share gossip, you are participating in the worldwide consumption of tea, which has created economic relations (and wars), new ecosystems for plants and animals (and humans), and is culturally significant in public and private spaces. In short, tea organizes people’s homes, government meetings, economies, investment markets, and landscapes. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine the history and present-day production of tea and how it creates and recreates social relations and environments. In addition to learning about tea (and tasting different kinds), students will be exposed to research methodologies in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and communication studies. By the end of class, students will have an understanding of the different kinds of teas (and how to prepare them), the role tea plays in society, and how tea functions within ecosystems.

This First-Year Seminar explores the history of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the first American detective firm and a major force in American politics from the 1850s through the 1930s. We will follow the Pinkertons from Civil War battlefields to the bloody fights over the American West, as they chase train robbers, break strikes, and create a trail of enemies along the way. Over the course of the semester, we will visit the B&O Railroad Museum and also investigate representations of the Pinkertons in popular culture, including the video game Red Dead Redemption 2.

"This First-Year Seminar is an introduction to the field of biological anthropology, which is broadly a mixture of social studies and biological studies that focus on human evolution and human biosocial variation. We will explore evolutionary theory and mechanisms of inheritance, the diversity of living primates, the fossil record, human evolution, and modern human biological variation. We will begin the semester by learning the basic principles of evolution and natural selection as proposed by Charles Darwin. We will then move on to consider the primate condition across species and through time. This involves examining the taxonomy of extant monkeys and apes as well as the fossil and archaeological record of our hominin ancestors that begins some 7 million years ago. This will involve excursions to local zoos and museums, as well as visits to labs right here at Hopkins. Following a survey of human biocultural evolution, we will consider how this history has influenced contemporary human biological variation.

In this First-Year Seminar, we’ll gather high-level hoopheads to study the National Basketball Association (the coolest professional sports league in the world). Our key questions will be why is the NBA so dope and how did it get to be so dope? Said another way, we’ll use the methods of humanistic, linguistic, and rhetorical visual analysis to study the culture, language, and iconography of the NBA. No zone defenses here: we’re bringing a full-court press to cultural artifacts like the dunk contest, the euro-step, Allen Iverson’s hip-hop fashion (and David Stern’s short-lived player dress code), why some folks say they like the college game better than the pro game, uniform/court/mascot designs, how advanced statistical analytics have the changed the game (deep breath), and much, much more. We’ll read texts like David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game (about the 1978 Portland Trailblazers) and the posts from the now defunct but very influential FreeDarko blog. We’ll watch videos like the 1990s Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance, Hustle, and Hoop Dreams. Oh, and if you’re into experiential learning, we’ll probably check out a Wizards game in D.C. and play a little pick up at the gym. I hope my knees hold up. See you at the rim.

Knowing where your food comes from is important for various environmental, health, ethical, and aesthetic reasons. Stable isotopes – forms of the same element with different masses – can be used to verify the origin of food. In this First-Year Seminar, we will discuss motivations for determining food sources including questions of the environmental cost of different modes of production, the different environmental factors that impact nutrient levels in food, how regional laws affect food production practices, and how protected designation of origin labels impact how food is made and distributed. We will also discuss how stable isotope signatures can be used to identify food origin and how we assess confidence in stable isotope-based identifications. Have no doubt: in-class food tastings will most definitely be used to guide the discussion of aesthetic motivations for knowing where food comes from.

This First-Year Seminar combines ecology and art, allowing students to create art inspired by observations of the natural environment. Taken together, these dual methodologies of scientific observation and artistic production will encourage students to explore core questions about human creativity as influenced by nature. The course also examines how different cultures interpret and represent the natural world, introducing anthropological perspectives on environment, symbolism, and human expression. The course invites participants to consider their sensory experiences about the poetics and intricacies of the natural world. Together we will focus on ecological details, observing natural patterns and exploring their symbolic meanings. We will also learn to appreciate the visual language of fine art by taking a broader view of landscapes. Through museum visits, recording sounds in nature, and creating visual representations such as drawings, photographs, and video, students will develop various art techniques, culminating in a multimedia art form.

“Why poetry?,” you might ask. At first glance, science and poetry seem like unlikely companions, yet this course will explore the ways in which they can complement each other. Poetry encourages us to slow down, reflect, and engage with big ideas. We will read a diverse selection of poems from various languages and cultures that explore questions of scientific discovery, space, the environment, biology, aging, and medicine. We will examine how these poems grapple with scientific concepts, the natural world, and the human experience. Students will also be invited to discover and share poems that speak to their scientific and intellectual interests. Throughout the course, we will approach poetry not as an intimidating art form to be decoded, but as a space for reflection, playful exploration of ideas, and deeper thinking. Readings are in English and English translation ranging from Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Jane Hirshfield, Scott Momaday, David Ignatow to German writer Johann Wolfang von Goethe, French poet Jacques Prévert, Swedish author Harry Martinson and Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.

The process of developing new medicines for humans involves tremendous effort across many scientific disciplines. Science has been the driving force behind numerous groundbreaking medicines discovered over the past century. Equally fascinating are the ongoing debates about the true value of medicines in relation to patients' quality of life. This First-Year seminar explores both the scientific and non-scientific aspects behind our medicines through a discussion-driven format. Some of the key questions to be addressed in this course include: How are medicines discovered and developed? How has science influenced the discovery of new treatments? Why does it take so much time and money to bring a new medicine to market? Who decides the price of a drug? Who actually pays for your medicines? Are new medicines really as expensive as they seem? By examining multiple sources of information and engaging in thoughtful discussions, students will develop their own informed opinions on these issues, rather than simply accepting what they see in the media at face value.

Over the past century, we have increased life expectancy, reduced poverty, and expanded access to education and healthcare, but these achievements now face growing threats from environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. The emerging field of Planetary Health recognizes that human well-being is inseparable from the health of Earth’s natural systems, which are under unprecedented strain. Healthcare is both a driver of these challenges and a sector uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. From interdisciplinary discussions to off-campus experiences, this First-Year Seminar will challenge students to rethink medical practice—not as an isolated pursuit, but as part of an interconnected system. As we enter the Anthropocene—an era in which human activity is the dominant force shaping the planet—clinicians must confront the responsibility of navigating a world at a crossroads: one where we can either build on our progress or risk backsliding on the very health gains that define modern medicine. To meet this challenge, we will explore not only scientific and technological solutions but also the wisdom embedded in the arts, faith-based traditions, and indigenous knowledge—recognizing that healing has always been a profoundly human endeavor. Engaging with the legacy of innovation at Johns Hopkins Medicine, we will ask ourselves and each other: How must we redefine the role of medicine to meet the challenges of this new era?

Any list of human accomplishments will include natural language. While every human society has a language, no other animal has a communication system with this scope and complexity. How do languages emerge and evolve, and how are they learned? What happens when a child is born into an environment with no accessible language (e.g., deaf children who are born to hearing parents who do not know a sign language)?In this seminar, we’ll explore how children acquire – or even create – language in different environments. Case studies include international adoptees, blind children, deaf children, and autistic children. We’ll also examine real-world cases like homesign systems, pidgins and creoles, and Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (also known as Nicaraguan Sign Language). We’ll also discuss languages which have been consciously and painstakingly designed (Game of Thrones, Avatar, etc.), constructed international systems (Esperanto, International Sign), and large language models (e.g., ChatGPT4). This course invites students to think critically about what language is, where it comes from, and variation in human experiences.

In a 2012 New York Times interview critic Steven Greenblatt referred to literature as “the most astonishing technological means that human beings have created, and now practiced for thousands of years, to capture experience.” In contrast, focusing on his own specific literary practice, W.H. Auden famously said “poetry makes nothing happen.” So which one has it right? In this class we’ll focus on whether poetry serves any purpose in society, and if so what, and why. As a means of helping answer this question we’ll also consider whether there’s such a thing as a poetry community, and who belongs to it, as well as how the enjoyment of poetry through close reading might help us decide whether poetry has any bearing on people’s lives. We’ll attend and review a poetry reading, interview local poets, look at books and magazines where poetry appears, engage with critics, write compose various responses that help fellow readers appreciate poems we find striking, and in the process gain a deeper and richer understanding of what this art form is all about. Members of the class must be able to attend one local live poetry reading outside of class.

This First-Year Seminar will follow the history of the gene and molecular biology, taking as our central text the excellent and accessible book "The Gene: An Intimate History" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. In addition to the book, we will read and discuss primary literature pertaining to key experiments. Student discussion and presentations will be a key feature of the course.

How can we “read” historical contexts through fashion? How fashion reveals what a society values, fears, or seeks to control? This three-credit course explores Italian style as a lens to examine how the body has been freed, constricted, and understood across historical moments, art movements, and political transformations. Rather than a chronological history of fashion, this course focuses on clothing and style as critical tools for analyzing power, identity, and cultural change in Italy from the Renaissance to the present. Throughout the semester we will examine how the fashioned body intersects with social forces. Among them: the sumptuary laws of the Renaissance, the reimagined silhouette of 1930s the “new woman” with the whimsical Elsa Schiaparelli and Surrealism, the Futurist Manifestoes, the body under Fascism, the postwar Made in Italy and the "Hollywood effect", to the analysis of iconic Italian fashion houses juxtaposed to feminist theory and gender studies to interrogate how fashion constructs, constrains and reimagines bodies. The seminar will also take place in the museums (BMA,Walters) exploring the collections and the archives in collaboration with the curators, as well as in conversation with visiting experts in the field of museum and fashion studies.

Many of us live across multiple cultures, but those real, visceral experiences often go unrecognized or even suppressed in our everyday lives. Whether stemming from migration, relocation, family backgrounds, or even the global ubiquity of social media and pop culture content, more people are living cross-cultural lives than ever before. And yet, the existing vocabularies appear quite inadequate to grasp the nuances, challenges, and complexities of those lives. Going beyond overused notions like cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and cultural hybridity, we explore in this First-Year Seminar what it means for us as individuals to live and exist across multiple cultures and consider the roles reading and writing play in making sense of such lives. What happens to us when we cross a cultural boundary? How have cross-cultural experiences been written about and conceptualized in different civilizations and periods of human history? How do economic and political circumstances influence those experiences? How do the transformation of information and media technologies shape them? We examine literary, philosophical, ethnographic, cinematic, and other artistic works from different civilizations and historical periods that engage with cross-cultural lives. Based on discussions of those texts, students are invited to explore their own cross-cultural experiences through writing and other creative media.

This First-Year Seminar explores how pattern recognition can lead to economic ideas and theories. We begin by looking for patterns in unexpected places. The film Good Will Hunting has much to say about careers versus caring. A film made a half century earlier, On the Waterfront, seems to be about completely different things. Together we investigate the notion that Good Will Hunting may be understood as a remake of On the Waterfront, and consider what this comparison reveals about values, incentives, and decision-making.Adam Smith coined the phrase “invisible hand,” suggesting that individuals, each pursuing their own agenda, nonetheless deliver for society. Smith also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. We will read selections from this book and work together to consider Smith’s sense of how one might act as an agent seeking to do good.Wall Street and the world of finance provide the lifeblood for capitalist economies. Despite pervasive uncertainty, decision-makers direct funds toward enterprises they believe will be profitable. We will examine elements of conventional finance theory to understand how Wall Street succeeds, and also look at renegade thinkers, including Hyman Minsky, to consider why financial systems sometimes fail.Finally, we step outside strictly economic framings to ask broader questions about altruism, environmental awareness, job satisfaction, and the role of government. Through short readings, films, and discussion, students will reflect on how economic thinking shapes our understanding of citizenship and life in society.

This First-Year Seminar examines how our understanding of cancer has evolved over the fifty years since Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, often described as a declaration of a “war on cancer.” How has our understanding of what cancer is changed over time? What are the implications of these changes for how we understand its causes, prevention, and control?Students will consider how scientific discoveries translate into public health strategies, and how evolving knowledge shapes approaches to prevention, screening, and treatment. Through discussion, reflection, and analysis, the seminar invites students to think broadly about what it means to “control” cancer in the 21st century and how scientific, social, and policy perspectives intersect in this ongoing effort.

Scientific understandings of the world have changed radically over time. This First-Year Seminar will explore how people from antiquity to the Middle Ages thought that the universe worked. We will look at both the theories people used to capture and model the world around them, as well as what they took to be the facts of the world they were modelling. We will explore how these (often very foreign) facts and theories interweave to create sophisticated and nuanced ways of understanding nature that are nevertheless very different from our own--and often very strange looking--and ask probing questions about what it means for people to 'know' things about the world differently than we do today. In addition to a fascinating collection of texts in translation, this seminar will also engage with the material objects of premodern science and medicine held in local museums and in Hopkins’ fantastic rare books library.

Can a government control what people believe? Who gets to decide what counts as “truth”—and how is it made to stick? This First-Year Seminar traces a century of information, communication, and warfare in Russia, from Lenin’s revolutionary use of radio to Putin’s troll farms and deepfakes. Along the way, we will grapple with questions that remain urgent today: What is propaganda, and how can we recognize it? Can the press respond to peoples’ concerns under an authoritarian regime, or does power inevitably shape the narrative? And in an age of algorithms and viral misinformation, are citizens of democracies any better at resisting manipulation than those living under dictatorships?We’ll dig into the technologies themselves—print, radio, television, and digital networks—to understand how each new medium created fresh possibilities for persuasion, resistance, and control. And we’ll get hands-on: working with rare propaganda posters, samizdat publications, and archival materials in JHU’s special collections, you’ll encounter the physical artifacts of ideological warfare—the paper, ink, and design choices that shaped how messages landed. By the end of our seminar, you’ll never watch the news (or scroll your feed) the same way again.

What does a circuit-board have in common with a composer? If you bend one, what happens to the other? The progression of electronic music throughout the last century is best defined by a series of creative triumphs over technical limitations. Pioneers like Wendy Carlos and Rebecca Heineman flourished within the rigid constraints of both the technology and culture of their time, creating sounds and forging identities that established them as influential figures as the MOOG synthesizer and home gaming consoles became staples of pop-culture.Carlos and Heineman find their contemporaries in modern artists such as Lena Raine, Megan McDuffee, and Paula Ruiz: video game composers whose careers and lives paint a compelling narrative of self-actualization as a critical step in discovering new frontiers for an art form. This FYS will provide students with the opportunity to examine the nature of creation and identity by deconstructing the technical aspects and the cultural relevance of the scores for video games including Wolfenstein 3D, Celeste, Kingdom Hearts, and River City Girls. Hands-on experiments with sound synthesis will illuminate the creative process of these works, and in-class discussions with living composers will provide an opportunity to speak to modern artists about the concepts discussed in class.