Summer Courses for the Class of 2028

Wesleyan is offering students in the Class of 2028 the opportunity to take a course remotely from home over the summer before matriculating in the University this fall.  The summer course curriculum includes small writing-intensive First-Year Seminars (FYS). All incoming students are encouraged to complete one FYS within their first year at Wesleyan. For more information on the FYS program, see: https://www.wesleyan.edu/admission/admittedstudents/first-year.html 

The course registration process will be open to incoming first-years over the summer via their Academic Road Map.  Every student who submits course preferences during this time period will have an equal chance of getting scheduled into a class. Students will be notified of their final course schedule by late June.

No additional charge will be incurred for incoming students who enroll in one of the courses listed below; tuition for these special courses is included in the regular academic year tuition fee. [Note that this program for the incoming class is entirely separate from Wesleyan's Summer Session, which offers courses every summer with a tuition cost.]

Summer courses for the incoming class will take place online from Monday, July 8 through Tuesday, August 13. The class meeting times listed are the hours when the entire class will meet together; while some classes have greater or fewer synchronous meeting times, all courses will require the same total amount of academic work over the five weeks.

We hope you will join us!

AMST130F: Wilderness or Paradise? The Colonial World in the Western Imagination (FYS)

What do William Shakespeare's Tempest, Karl Marx's Capital, Georgia O'Keefe's Ram's Head, Bob Marley's Redemption Song, and Sterlin Harjo's Reservation Dogs have in common? What about Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Frida Kahlo's Two Fridas, Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam, and George Lucas's Star Wars? All these works offer critical reflections on the process of European colonialization of the Americas that started in the late fifteenth century and extends to our days. They all grapple with the question of whether the New World was (and still is) an Edenic utopia or a hellish dystopia. And they all offer provocative answers and difficult new questions.

This first year seminar will explore how different thinkers and artists have imagined and reimagined colonialism in the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. We will also investigate how the representations they created have contributed to reinforcing or upending colonial relations. We will study cultural creators belonging to different groups, including indigenous peoples, enslaved and free Africans and African Americans, metropolitan and colonial elites, and Asian and European immigrants.

This course will introduce students to different forms of intellectual expression in the Western world--from philosophical treatises to movie series, passing through novels, paintings, and songs. To better understand these works, we will read academic texts and address the practical and theoretical foundations of academic thinking. As we engage with primary and secondary sources on colonialism, the students will also learn practical skills ranging from formatting texts and citations to finding books in the library and articles on the internet to making a compelling argument in an essay or a research paper.

Instructor: Roberto Saba

Meeting Days/Times: Tuesday, Thursday/4:30pm - 6:30pm

CJST114F: Netflix and Shul: Jews on TV (FYS)

Jews have always been an inseparable part of the small screen--first, mainly (but not only) as writers and producers, and gradually as characters and protagonists. Today, American television is more Jewish than ever. Jews changed TV. But did it also change them?

This course will study the long history of Jews and Jewishness in American Television. Each class will revolve around one episode of a show and discuss how it reflects on different aspects of Jewish life--Jewish humor, Jewish crime, Jewish Upward mobility, Jewish guilt, the Jewish mother, Jewishness and whiteness, antisemitism, and more. In keeping with the Jewish tradition, we will obviously ask many questions, including the most complex one: What does "Jewish" mean?

Instructor: Avner Shavit

Meeting Days/Times: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday/6:00pm - 7:00pm

DANC102F: Perspectives: Dance as Cultural Knowledge (FYS)

Instructor: Patricia Beaman

Meeting Days/Times: TBD

GOVT102F: Politics: Fundamental Concepts (FYS)

This First Year Seminar introduces students to the concepts that remain central to political life: capitalism, class, race, gender, state, citizenship, power, civil society, democracy, anarchy, populism, and fascism, to name a few.

Instructor: Basak Kus

Meeting Days/Times: Tuesday, Thursday/1:00pm - 3:00pm

MUSC119F: Jazz in the 1960s (FYS)

The 1960s were a turbulent but stimulating time for the world of jazz. The R&B-based soul jazz movement was at its peak and often at odds with the still-developing avant-garde aesthetic. Certain other influences, such as those of Brazilian and African music, were becoming widespread in jazz for the first time. Older forms of jazz like bebop, big band music, and traditional jazz (aka "Dixieland") were struggling to remain viable and relevant. Rock music's surge in popularity was threatening the commercial solvency of jazz while acting as a musical and cultural force to which all jazz musicians had to react in some manner. Meanwhile much of this decade's jazz is inexorably linked to the political and social upheaval of the era, particularly those aspects relating to Black Americans' sense of identity and struggles for equality.

In this course, we will broadly explore the various movements that made up the jazz of this decade. We will delve more deeply into the music of some of the most important figures in jazz during this time, such as Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Stan Getz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jimmy Smith, Yusef Lateef, and Sun Ra. We will study musicians who typified a particular movement, those who assimilated several into a personal style, and those who moved freely among factions. All the while, we will be contextualizing the music within the social and political climate of the decade and the broader artistic and commercial landscape of music at the time.

Instructor: Noah Baerman

Meeting Days/Times: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday/1:00pm-3:30pm

QAC190F: Big Data, Big Promises, Big Problems? (FYS)

This seminar explores the transformation of the modern data landscape from its pre-datafication beginnings in the early 90s to the contemporary age of "big data." Throughout this transformation, various sectors of society, including healthcare, education, business, urban planning, governance, sustainability, media, science, and art, have experienced unprecedented opportunities for growth and advancement. However, alongside these opportunities, significant challenges have arisen, including privacy concerns, fairness and bias issues, data governance, and model interpretability, all of which have far-reaching implications. The seminar provides a systematic exploration of the characteristics of the "big data" landscape, its impact on the production and distribution of goods and services, and its "data ethics" implications. We will explore the promises, and problems, of our data-driven era, paving the way for informed discussions and critical thinking in our fields of study.

Instructor: Maryam Gooyabadi

Meeting Days/Times: Tuesday, Thursday, Friday/10:00am - 12:00pm

REES208F: Otherness & Belonging (FYS)

One of the many haunting utterances of Fyodor Dostoevsky's most famous antihero, the Underground Man, is "I am alone, I thought, and they are everyone." Like him, the other protagonists of this course are outcasts, dissidents, and strangers - jaded office clerks and repressed misanthropes, queer activists and "enemies of the state" - who refuse to conform to societal norms, disrupt conventions by saying the unsayable, and write and make art from the margins, the realm of undesirables. Focusing mainly on Russia and Eastern Europe, we will analyze representations of otherness and belonging in fiction, non-fiction, and film. We will explore narratives of undesirability through the thematic prisms of exile and immigration; gender and sexuality; mental illness; prison writing; ethnic difference; religion; and unrequited love. The concept of undesirability will also be our point of entry for constructing arguments about community, privilege, and a society without outsiders.

Instructor: Roman Utkin

Meeting Days/Times: Monday, Wednesday, Friday/1:00pm - 2:30pm

RELI115F: Theorizing Religion with Zombies (FYS)

This course introduces students to theories in religious studies in order to investigate the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas: the zombie and the apocalypse. We will critically trace their representations in popular culture in order to explore writings in biblical narrative, history, modernity, monster theory, alterity, gender, capitalism, race, epidemiology, film theory, and media studies. We will begin with ancient texts, move to the history of the concept of the zonbi in Haiti, and then trace the trope of this modern monster and its various meanings into the contemporary moment.

Instructor: Elizabeth McAlister

Meeting Days/Times: Tuesday,Thursday/9:00am - 10:30am

THEA145F: Clash of the Titans: Classical vs. Contemporary Voices in Theater and Film (FYS)

This course will explore how classic texts have informed and inspired contemporary writers of theater and film, and how seemingly disparate parts of the canon enrich and illuminate one another. We will dive into close readings of plays, exploration of scenes from an actor's point of view, supplemental viewings and reflections/critical analyses of films and plays, and an original adaptation. Plays by Euripides, Luis Alfaro, James Ijames, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Lucas Hnath are currently under consideration. Film viewings include Black Orpheus and Hamlet.

Instructor: Maria-Christina Oliveras

Meeting Days/Times: Tuesday, Friday/1:00pm - 4:00pm

WRCT105F: Remember Me: Literature and Memory in Contemporary Latin America (FYS)

For many Latin American authors, personal memory is also a collective memory. Delving into childhood, family secrets, or past trauma in their literary works reveals how writing may become a form of personal reparation and a way to participate in a general sentiment experienced in the social fabric. In this course, students will analyze contemporary Latin American authors in translation to compare different approaches to memory as a resource for imagination and social commentary. This class, designed as a seminar and a creative writing workshop, will encourage students to experiment with their writing and develop a conversation with Latin American authors about memory through direct experience with creativity and the crafting of a literary text. Authors include Reinaldo Arenas, Camila Villada Sosa, and Diamela Eltit, among others. Two US-based Latin American authors will visit the class at different times to discuss their work and their experience with writing and memory as source of inspiration. This course is a creative writing workshop.

Instructor: Guillermo Severiche

Meeting Days/Times: Monday, Wednesday/3:30pm-5:00pm