Summer Courses for the Class of 2029

Wesleyan is offering students in the Class of 2029 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.

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 7 through Tuesday, August 12. 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!

Course Offerings

AMST 130F: 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: Professor Roberto Saba
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Tuesday/Thursday, 4:30pm - 6:30pm

BIOL 153F: Stress: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Resilient (FYS)

Stress, what is it and what is it good for? This course will introduce students to the neurobiology of stress. We will read the foundational works that helped us understand that stress can have real, measurable, and lasting effects on the entire body and across generations. Next, we will break down major concepts in the field (including allostasis, fight or flight, tend and befriend and hyperkatifeia) that describe how the body handles acute and chronic stress. Finally, we will end the course with a focus on stress resilience. We will discuss how social interaction, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness approaches work to contribute to the remarkable resilience that has defined the success of our species. Our major sources of information will include original scientific reports, essays, magazine articles, podcasts, films, lectures and guest appearances by neuroscientists in the field.

Throughout the course, students will maintain a journal with daily entries that document their understanding of the material and its relevance to their lives. As a final project, students will be asked to work in pairs to build a digital zine for distribution to other incoming frosh to help develop their appreciation for how stress can impair cognition and emotional regulation, how stress can aid learning and memory and what tools of resilience students can lean on throughout their time at Wesleyan to temper the former and facilitate the latter.

Instructor: Professor Laverne Melon
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, 10:00am - 12:00pm

CEAS 159F: A Cultural History of Japanese Food (FYS)

This seminar explores Japanese cuisine as a historical site in which cultural values are sought, contested, and spread for national and international consumption, regurgitation, or even purging. Through an historical examination of practices, ingredients, and values, we uncover, contest, and debate the aesthetics, beliefs, politics, environmental issues, and international exchange that characterize Japanese history. We consequently ask: What is Japanese cuisine? What is Japanese culture?

Instructor: Professor Takeshi Watanabe
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 1:30pm - 2:50pm

CLST 125F: Greek History (FYS)

Using primary sources wherever possible, this course will examine the development of Greek civilization from Mycenaean times through the death of Alexander the Great. Special attention will be given to the connection between political events and cultural and intellectual trends. No prior acquaintance with ancient history is required.

Instructor: Professor Andrew Szegedy-Maszak
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 9:00am - 11:00am

DANC 104F: Introduction to Contemporary Dance from Global Perspectives (FYS)

More course information will be coming soon!

Instructor: Professor Patricia Beaman

ENGL 111F: 21st Century American Literature (FYS)

This course will explore American literature of the 21st century and in so doing, we will consider the portrayals of race, class, ethnicity, religion, trauma, citizenship, migration and sexuality. We will approach these portrayals in engaged class discussion as well as in writing, both analytical and creative. We will also discuss the ways in which these authors conceptualize and problematize American identity.

Instructor: Professor Jennifer Wood
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Monday/Wednesday, 2:00pm - 3:30pm

MUSC 119F: Jazz in the Sixties (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: Professor Noah Baerman
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Monday/Wednesday/Thursday, 12:30pm - 3:00pm

QAC 190F: 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: Professor Maryam Gooyabadi
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, 10:00am - 12:00pm

REES 208F: 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: Professor Roman Utkin
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 1:00pm - 2:30pm

RELI 115F: Theorizing Religion with Zombies

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: Professor Elizabeth McAlister
Grading Mode: Student Option (choose A-F or Cr/U)
Meeting Times: Tuesday/Thursday, 9:00am - 10:30am

All posted times are Eastern Standard Time.